- Russian forces are steadily advancing toward Pokrovske in southern Donetsk
- The Russians have more troops—and the powerful 90th Tank Division
- The Ukrainians have prioritized the defense of Pokrovsk, 80 km to the northeast
- There just aren't enough Ukrainian brigades to hold the line everywhere
A powerful Russian force, anchored by the Russian army's biggest tank division, continues to advance in southern Donetsk Oblast and neighboring Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.
The creeping occupation exposes Ukraine's core strategic dilemma: there simply aren't enough brigades to hold everywhere. Ukrainian commanders concentrated forces around Pokrovsk, 80 km northeast, to block 150,000 Russian troops from reaching Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. That decision saved one front but opened another—and Russia's largest tank division exploited the gap.
Shrugging off massive casualties that would cripple many other armies, the Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces and its most important unit, the 90th Tank Division, is pushing west toward the region's most defensible rivers and, beyond those natural obstacles, a series of Ukrainian fortifications between the current front line and the town of Pokrovske.
Beyond that strongpoint lies Zaporizhzhia Oblast—including Zaporizhzhia city with its pre-war population of 700,000.
Russia’s biggest tank division is heading straight for Zaporizhzhia and its 700,000 residents
Russian forces breach Ukrainian defensive lines in southern Donetsk
"The situation is much worse for the Ukrainians than what's shown on public maps, and even pro-Russian ones," one analyst and mapper claimed.
According to mapper Playfra, Russian forces control Novohryhorivka at the border of Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts, as well as a trench system south of Novohryhorivka that was supposed to help slow the Russians—but is now serving as a staging base for the attacking Russians.
Most alarmingly for the outnumbered Ukrainian troops in the sector, the Russians are already in the village of Uspenivka, Playfra claimed. Capturing Uspenivka would put the Russians in a position to flank Ukrainian battalions dug in along the Yanchur River.
Rivers can serve as natural defenses, of course. But the Russian army is adept at crossing rivers with cheap, easy-to-replace pontoon bridges. The Ukrainian air force routinely bombs Russian pontoons—but not always fast enough or frequently enough to prevent Russian forces from gaining a toehold on the far side of any particular river.
All that is to say, the Russians are winning in southern Donetsk. Not quickly. And not cheaply. But winning nonetheless.
Ukraine's Pokrovsk gamble: Saving one front, sacrificing another
The Russians' manpower and firepower advantage in southern Donetsk may have been inevitable once the Ukrainian general staff made the understandable decision to concentrate Ukraine's best brigades in and around Pokrovsk, 80 km northeast of Pokrovske.
The heavily fortified Pokrovsk is one of the last urban strongpoints between the Russian Center Grouping of Forces and its 150,000 troops and the twin cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk in western Donetsk Oblast. When a Russian motor rifle brigade marched past undermanned Ukrainian trenches in August and punched a 40-square-km salient north of Pokrovsk, the Ukrainian command went all in on the defense of the city.
The entire 1st Azov Corps and several brigades and battalions rushed to Pokrovsk. They halted and partially reversed the Russian gains in mid-August. Nearly two months later, the salient is the scene of bloody chaos as Russian and Ukrainian units intermingle under a sky buzzing with lethal drones.
High Russian casualties fail to slow southern advance
Inflicting thousands of casualties on the Russians, the Ukrainians are holding on around Pokrovsk. But this maximal effort has robbed other sectors of the forces they need to hold on. The Russian 90th Tank Division has, on paper, 25,000 troops and hundreds of tanks.
The main Ukrainian unit defending against the division just north of Uspenivka, the 110th Mechanized Brigade, is a battle-hardened formation. But it's no more than one-fifth the size of the 90th Tank Division.
The Ukrainians are falling back in southern Donetsk a few kilometers at a time, ceding control of several hundred square kilometers of the oblast since 1 January. It has cost the Russians nearly 38,000 casualties, including nearly 11,000 killed in just nine months, according to one alleged leaked official document.
That's a lot of dead Russians. But not enough dead Russians to forestall a Russian advance in the area. If the Ukrainians in southern Donetsk are lucky, the Russians may over-extend themselves. Aiming to straighten the front line, the 90th Tank Division and adjacent units "will be forced to stretch," the Ukrainian Center for Defense Strategies pointed out.
But that over-extension, if it happens, will only happen if the Russian capture more of southern Donetsk.