The luck of several western generations is that they have understood the war as something past, already chewed up and closed in a more or less linear narrative. Thus, until one comes across a conflict like the one in Ukraine and discovers that on a day-to-day, month-to-month basis, things can vary like from summer to winter and the conclusions are not so easy to draw. Someday we will know if during the month of April, Ukraine was preparing for the start of a victorious counter-offensive or if, on the contrary, the lack of resources was about to condemn it to defeat.
Because the fact is that right now both options are on the table. Ukraine continues to launch attacks on the eastern bank of the Dnieper, where it seems clear that it will try to break through enemy lines. At the bridgehead in the north of Oleshki, south of Kherson, and the bombing of Tokmak, a strategic city in southern Zaporizhia due to its condition as a nursery for Russian troops; we must add the attacks this Thursday on Nova Kajovka, just on the other side of the river, an enclave whose control would help fulfill the first Ukrainian objective: control the two river banks from east to west.
The Russians have to see it badly so thatAccording to the British Ministry of Defense, have begun to prepare the resistance at the Energodar nuclear power plant, on whose control a large part of the energy resources of both sides depend. The images are worrying, as they show the main reactor surrounded by what appear to be trenches made of sandbags.
Latest Defense Intelligence update on the situation in Ukraine – 27 April 2023.
Find out more about Defense Intelligence’s use of language: https://t.co/ipsPH8v8mx
?? #StandWithUkraine ?? pic.twitter.com/6BQqzpqrks
— Ministry of Defense ?? (@DefenceHQ) April 27, 2023
[La OTAN ha entregado a Kiev el 98% de los tanques prometidos: “Facilitarán recuperar territorio”]
Apparently, the russians are ready to fight in the immediate vicinity regardless of whether the reactor explodes or not. The irresponsibility of this maneuver is absolute, since a possible nuclear accident in Energodar would not only harm Ukraine, but the radioactive cloud would probably reach at least western Russia and, of course, Crimea.
Ammo Issues
So far the indications that the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south is imminent. It is time to attend to the back of the same letter: the president Volodymyr Zelensky It has been asking the West for months for more weapons and, above all, more ammunition. The artillery battles are devastating and there has been no rest for more than a year. To this, we must add that much of the weapons promised by the West have not yet arrived. Although this Thursday, NATO announced from Brussels that 98% of the promised battle tanks were already in Ukraine, the announcement has a trick: it refers only to those that correspond to the Alliance as such and not to those that its members, separately, have unilaterally announced.
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg during a press conference on Thursday
The German Leopards are missing, the American Abrams are missing, the Polish and Slovakian fighters are missing… It seems that the war is at that moment when the initiative is clearly on the Ukrainian sideeven the strategic opportunity -the Russian Army is exhausted, internal fights are the daily bread and the position of its troops on the ground will require very complicated movements in the event of an attack from different fronts-, pBut there are serious doubts about its effective resources.
There are because of Zelensky’s complaints, there are because of the strange documents leaked by Jack Teixeira on his Discord channel and there are some because of the sensational report he has just published chain BBC in his web page, in which the lack of ammunition in the surroundings of Bakhmut is narrated in the first person. One of the members of the 17th tank battalion acknowledges that the shortage of shells and the difficulty in finding certain spare parts is complicating the situation a lot.
[Xi Jinping llama a Zelenski por primera vez desde que empezó la guerra y le pide que negocie con Rusia]
Bakhmut, on the edge
Probably, this shortage is behind what seems, yes, the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops from the city of Bakhmut. In the last 36 hours, the Russians have advanced to the west until they have practically occupied the entire cityeven endangering the control of Khromove, the large northern suburb.
If Ukraine has ammunition problems, it is normal for it to fall back once the defense of the city has been successfully completed – the mission was to prevent Russia from focusing on a second objective and inflicting the greatest number of casualties among its men, which has been achieved to spare – and reserve that ammunition for the defense of the T0504 road leading out of Ivanivske and to allow the troops to be supplied from Chasiv Yar.
Ukrainian servicemen return from fighting near Bakhmut
Bakhmut
Faced with scarcity, Ukraine must prioritize and is doing so in Bakhmut, where his men now only control the old neighborhood of Soviet skyscrapers, from which they can still cause more casualties among the occupants… as long as they have their backs covered for the foreseeable withdrawal. Covering those backs is the most important thing right now and every effort must be reserved for that purpose.
Between theory and practice
All this, of course, does not determine the final result of the operations, although it conditions it. The southern offensive may have its own resources and they are sufficient. After all, while in Donbas they have fought against the elite troops of the Wagner Group and those of the Russian Army, there are serious doubts about the quality and preparation of those in charge of defending the left bank of the Dnieper. In addition, all the ammunition problems, which, it has already been said, go back a long way, have not prevented Ukraine from defending Bakhmut for almost a whole year, which indicates to us that the Russian Army is not in much better condition.
[Así se vive la guerra desde un T-64: Ucrania mueve ficha con sus carros de combate en Bakhmut]
In the same way, there is nothing to suggest that Bakhmut’s withdrawal will cause a collapse at that point of the front. We could have thought of it two months ago, when they insisted on the need to abandon the city, but right now the Russian Army is too decimated to think of advancing towards Kramatorsk or Sloviansk. We don’t even know how many of the men who will eventually take Bakhmut will be able to be used to defend the port of Mariupol or the city of Melitopol in case of attack.
In that tension between theory and practice, the planned and the real, we will live for the next few weeks. What we have learned from the past is that fronts tend to stabilize untilsuddenly, a huge and definitive gap opens. He happened in Sumy, he happened in Kharkov, and he happened in Kherson. Whether it will happen in Zaporizhia or not, we will know in due course, hardly before. The war does not warn.
