"Robotyne has been liberated!" Ukraine's usually reserved deputy defense minister, Hanna Maliar, sounded victorious on Monday, August 28, during her daily update on current military operations. More than two and a half months after the start of the Ukrainian counter-offensive, Kyiv's army has broken through Russia's first line of defense, considered by analysts to be the most densely fortified since the Second World War.

On the face of it, the conquest appears modest. Located in the Zaporizhzhia oblast in the south of the country, Robotyne is a village lost in the middle of the fields, devoid of strategic facilities. Before the war, it had fewer than 500 inhabitants. But the village is located along the T0408 road, which leads to Tokmak, a town 20 kilometers to the south and considered to be a gateway to Melitopol and Berdiansk, two large cities close to the Sea of Azov in the occupied zone.

Above all, Robotyne lies at the heart of the first of three Russian defensive lines, made up of thousands of trenches, minefields and anti-tank devices. "The capture of the village indicates that the Ukrainians have succeeded in overcoming this obstacle and can now exploit the breakthrough," said Thibault Fouillet, scientific director of the Institute for Strategy and Defense Studies. On August 29, the Ukrainian army announced that it had gained ground in the direction of Novoprokopivka and Verbove, two localities to the south and southeast of Robotyne, a sign that its troops were continuing to advance.

Beyond the tactical gain it represents, the capture of Robotyne is the first step in what appears to be one of the objectives, if not the main one, of the Ukrainian counter-offensive launched on June 4: to cut the land bridge linking Russia to Crimea, and therefore suffocate Moscow's forces in the south of the country, in the Zaporizhzhia oblast, and also in the peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, which the Ukrainians have not given up on recapturing.

At present, some 80-90 kilometers separate the front line from the shores of the Sea of Azov. If the Ukrainians manage to break through from Robotyne, the whole southern battlefield could be turned upside down. "The land bridge is the ideal place to break through. Creating a corridor there would enable Ukrainian forces to isolate the left bank of the Dnipro River and strangle the entire south of the Russian conquest, taking enemy logistical lines under fire," said Isabelle Dufour, director of strategic studies at Eurocrise. It was by acting in this way that the Ukrainians succeeded, in November 2022, in dislodging the Russians from the right bank of the Dnipro and from the town of Kherson, which became untenable under Kyiv's artillery fire.

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