War Notes

Friday, Aug. 4, 2023.

This is the first episode of the second series of War Notes — a Kyiv Independent newsletter presenting you with an overview of the main developments of the war in Ukraine. The first was written by our former reporter Illia Ponomarenko. This new series will be presented by the Kyiv Independent’s war reporters, and will often be coming straight from the front lines. 

Hello my friends, and welcome to the new series of War Notes from your favorite scrappy news startup. 

Illia’s departure made for a bittersweet blend of being excited for his book and sad to see him go. The shoes combat boots he left behind will be tough to fill but in journalism, as in war, they gotta be filled somehow. 

As I recover from a back injury I somehow picked up poking around the Kupiansk axis this week, I want to touch on the biggest military topics going — Ukraine committing to its main push on the ground and the long-range exchanges in the skies above. 

There’s a lot to get through, so this one’s gonna have to be a bit of quick-fire. 

The counteroffensive’s main effort seems to be driving south through Zaporizhzhia Oblast, like everyone expected. We’re bringing up reserves to turn up the pressure on Russia’s first defensive line south of Orikhiv. 

When there’s news like “Ukraine commits main force,” people tend to expect things to start happening quickly. The heap of these expectations has been steadily growing since the spring. Of 2022.

But now, these expectations are being put to bed, tucked under a blanket of sober analytical pieces about how this will be a slow battle of attrition for the Ukrainians.

A Ukrainian soldier is seen in a camouflaged tank on the Bakhmut front line on July 24, 2023. (Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Ukraine’s counteroffensive lurches forward: Key moment looms as more forces committed

Fresh videos of Western-made armor rolling across open fields, a new settlement liberated, and a lot of noise on Russian military blogger Telegram channels heralded to the world on July 28 that the Ukrainian summer counteroffensive had upped its gear.

Let me paint you a picture: Weeds and shrubs choke the fallow farms of no man’s land in the soupy summer air. They camouflage the Russian positions shooting at you from up ahead. And underneath them, there are the mines. Like, a lot of mines.

Like, three to five mines per square meter.

You have to clear the mines to get to the Russian trenches to empty them out. But you’ve got very little air support and with the sharkish Kamov attack helicopters hanging about, you have to be very sparing with the fancy Western vehicles it took you more than a year to start getting.

In that time, Russia prepared a defense in depth across dozens of kilometers, guaranteeing that the counteroffensive will be longer, bloodier, and require bigger sacrifices of men, machines, and munitions. Ukraine said there are 150,000 Russians along that part of the front and so far, they haven’t broken.

Even in the face of all this, Ukrainian units are making progress. They approached the village of Robotyne in the southern Zaporizhzhia Oblast, setting up to the east of it. They’ll need Robotyne to liberate Tokmak, which they’ll need to move on Melitopol. 

They also liberated the village of Staromaiorske, near Donetsk Oblast’s border with Zaporizhzhia Oblast, causing a few tantrums among the Russian military bloggers. 

Even further east, the area around Bakhmut looks to be where Ukrainian forces are kicking the most ass. The Eastern Grouping says it’s advancing hundreds of meters per day, with the biggest progress seen south of the city. 

(Let’s not forget that as of May, Russian fortifications were a lot less robust behind Bakhmut than they are elsewhere.)

Ukrainians even claimed they kicked the Russians out from positions near Avdiivka, the town on the edge of Donetsk. 

Their movement can be a bit stop-and-start, but the experienced veterans in these brigades are making quicker progress than some of their comrades on other axes. Many of them have been at it well before the counteroffensive even started. 

Words like “advancing” and “progress” are maybe a bit too positive to accurately describe the brutality of the fighting in the area. 

I was smoking a cigarette with a group of soldiers who just came from there. A guy with a livid purple scar running all the way down the center of his stomach, described trying to recover the mess that had once been his commanding officer. When I asked about Russia’s supposed shell famine, his buddy just laughed. 

Desperate to slow them down, Russian forces are striking towards Svatove, Lyman, and Kupiansk. Attacks against Kreminna are “endless,” as our reporter in the area was told. 

The military said last month that Russia has an assault force of over 100,000 troops in the Lyman-Kupiansk direction, with over 900 tanks and hundreds of artillery and missile launchers.

Some of the guys on the ground in Kupiansk think the number is bullshit. A Ukrainian officer there told me that if the Russians shoved 100,000 men into that area, their logistics would quickly collapse. 

But the fighting is intense. Soldiers told me that two weeks ago, the intensity was verging on ludicrous before slowing down for a bit. But there are indications from this week’s reports that it’s picked up again. Russia has made incremental gains towards Kupiansk, which sits close to the borders with Luhansk Oblast and Russia.

Even worse, soldiers and civilians alike complained how many people in the area are covertly or overtly pro-Russian. Trying to defend someone who’s reporting your coordinates to the enemy weighs heavily on morale. Look for my article about it soon.

Ukrainian artillerymen load the rockets into a “Grad” multiple rocket launcher near Orikhiv on June 27, 2023, in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine. (Photo by Serhii Mykhalchuk/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)

Finally, I can’t let you go without talking about all the drone and missile strikes.

The past few weeks have brought back fond memories of 2022, when the air raid sirens were a daily occurrence and the Kremlin decided that it enjoys splattering Ukraine’s civilians much more than it likes defeating its military.

Between attacks on Odesa and Kryvyi Rih and scaling up the theft of Ukrainian children, Moscow’s committed to its speedrun to try to become the war crime champion of the world. 

But Ukraine’s been spreading the love, with multiple successful drone strikes on the center of Moscow, breaking another section of the Crimean Bridge and blowing up military installations in Crimea. Five HIMARS strikes hit multiple units of infantry on a beach in Kherson Oblast, killing at least dozens. Some sources reported 200 Russian casualties.

I reported on Ukraine’s long range strike capabilities last year, writing that Russia’s size and limited air defenses gives Ukrainian drones free reign to mosey in and light shit up. The tech and the engineering is there. The limiting factor is the ability to produce them on an industrial scale.

Well, as it happens, I’ve recently attended the one-year anniversary of the Army of Drones program, which has approved 40 Ukrainian designs for mass production, from quadcopters, to the kamikaze drones that hit Moscow, to the speedboat-looking bombs that damaged the Crimean Bridge. All of them are being made by Ukrainian manufacturers, with profits reinvested in production.

I’m not at liberty to say how many they’re producing but it’s way more than I expected. And given Russia’s spotty ability to defend against them, we should be in for a good show. 

Stay safe,

Igor Kossov