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Almost from the moment it was liberated during the Kharkiv counteroffensive in the fall of 2022, Russia has been trying to recapture the city of Kupyansk. In August, CNN reported that evacuations were being ordered as the city became the “epicenter” of a Russian advance that included 100,000 troops. In September, The Wall Street Journal wrote about the “besieged city” being devastated by daily barrages. In October, The Washington Post reported that Kupyansk was the site of “furious attacks” and Russian artillery was “pummeling” the area.
It’s now January. Ukraine still holds Kupyansk.
Most of Russia’s efforts to take the city have come no closer than the town of Synkivka, 7 kilometers to the northeast. It’s at this location that Ukraine has repeatedly pushed back Russian attempts to advance, with a combination of artillery and drones doing to Russian convoys in this area what they’ve been doing to Russian convoys everywhere else.
But this week, Ukraine stopped just butting heads at Synkivka and hit the Russian lines at a place they haven’t visited in months.
On Thursday, Ukraine took a small area just north of the road to the Russian-occupied town of Orlianka. Within a few hours, they made a second push, extending this area to about 2 square kilometers.
In the winter of 2022, as Ukraine was still pressing forward following the rapid advance of the Kharkiv counteroffensive, it largely bypassed this area to move forces south toward Svatove. It seems unlikely that Ukraine is looking to make a serious advance in this direction now—though if it turns out to be relatively uncontested, they are very unlikely to stop. Instead, it seems likely Ukraine is taking this position to keep Russia from continuing to accumulate forces near Kupyansk. There’s a lot of line out there, and Ukraine seems pretty good at finding spots where they can, at least temporarily, advance and force Russia to shift positions.
How many forces Russia currently has near Kupyansk isn’t clear. But they seem less ready to advance on the city than they did back in August. Hopefully, this small gain by Ukraine has them scrambling.
While making this advance, Ukrainian forces reportedly repelled another six attacks from the area of Synkivka. Well to the south, Ukraine also repelled a handful of additional attacks from the area around Kreminna. The same goes for the area just south of Bakhmut, where positions around Klishchiivka seem fairly static, despite Russian efforts to retake the town.
In Avdiivka, which has now been the subject of a major Russian push for months and where estimates of the number of Russian forces killed topped 13,000 in mid-December, Russia made another attempt to cut through the salient from the north.
Russia claimed to take the village in November—and probably did—but since then Ukraine has booted them from the blasted remains and eliminated every Russian force that has crossed the rail lines in an effort to capture Stepove. The level of destruction in this single area is remarkable.
Surely, by now, any Russian soldier has to quake at the whole idea of being sent toward Stepove.
Russia continues to mass forces at Krasnohorivka, east of Stepove and then sends them across in convoys. Ukraine continues to pulverize those convoys, generating absolutely incredible casualties.
There’s no better example of the absolute disdain Russia holds for its own forces than the way they have been treated, and are still being treated, at Stepove. At this point, it’s not clear Russia would know what to do if some of their forces actually reached the village.
Finally, far to the west on the banks of the Dnipro River, heavy fighting continues in the area of Krynky.
In the past week, Ukraine has managed to scrape out a few more blocks along the main street. They’ve also held up against multiple Russian attempts to break this foothold on the left bank of the river. It hasn’t worked. Ukraine fought off eight attacks on Friday.
But any gain in this area certainly hasn’t come without a bloody cost. Look at this list of losses from earlier in the week.
This is a compilation from across Ukraine, but you can bet all those boats at the bottom are near Krynky. With Ukraine being forced to continually resupply this one area on the east side, Russian forces are pretty clear about where Ukrainian boats will be landing. And even though there have been reports that electronic warfare is interfering with Russian drone use in the area, it’s obviously not interfering enough. That list shows nine lost boats, probably in a single night, with eight of them taken out by FPV drones equipped with night vision. Each of those boats likely contained several Ukrainian soldiers, along with supplies and equipment for the Krynky bridgehead. think about those poor men in those small boats, crossing a kilometer-wide river in the darkness, and nearing their landing position only to hear the buzz of a drone coming down on them from the black sky.
It’s not known how many such drones Russia has. Let’s hope the answer is “not a lot.”
CNN reports that the United States is working with G7 countries to take frozen Russian assets and hand them over to Ukraine.
Potential numbers as high as $300 billion are being reported, but only about $5 billion is in the United States. President Joe Biden would like to transfer that money to Ukrainian accounts, but to make it happen, Congress to pass the “Repo Act,” and then Biden will need to shepherd the process past allies.
It seems like it would be hard for Republicans to defend keeping this money from Ukraine even as Russia blasts away at their country. But Republicans … always seem to find a way to be a-holes at the worst possible time.
