The move took Ukraine and its Western allies by surprise. While Russia's military was thought to be on the back foot all along the 745-mile front line, it has for several days been carrying out a major counter-attack on Avdiivka, an industrial town in the Donbas region located nine miles north of Donetsk, in the eastern part of the country.

"Our troops are improving their position in almost all of this space, which is quite vast," Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed in a televised interview broadcast on Sunday, October 15, even though the advance of his military seems laborious.

According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US think-tank that monitors developments in the conflict on a day-to-day basis, Moscow's latest offensive began on October 10 and saw "Russian forces simultaneously attacking the northwest, west and south of Avdiivka using armored assault groups, rotary wing aircraft and concentrated artillery," a joint forces maneuver previously rarely used by Russia because it had been poorly executed. "It is likely to be the most significant offensive operation undertaken by Russia since at least January 2023," confirmed the British Ministry of Defence in a note published on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, October 17.

To carry out this operation, Russia would have committed over a thousand men, as well as a large amount of equipment, including some of the most modern in its arsenal – the BMPT Terminator armored fighting vehicle, the TOS-1 rocket launcher, and so on.

Analysts are puzzled by the sheer size of the attack, given that Moscow has so far seemed to be concentrating its efforts on defending the front in southern Ukraine, where Kyiv's troops have been engaged in a vast counter-offensive since June. "This attack shows that the Russians have succeeded in replenishing some of their offensive reserves," observed Léo Péria-Peigné, a researcher at the French Institute of International Relations.

According to analysts, this maneuver is intended to enable Russia to regain the initiative, at a time when the Ukrainian counter-offensive is stalling and the conflict has been underway for over 600 days. It could also have a political aim: to show the Russian population that the conquest of Donbas, Moscow's main objective since the end of the battle for Kyiv, is still possible.

Avdiivka, with a pre-war population of 35,000, has been disputed for almost a decade. In 2014, pro-Russian militias from the Donetsk People's Republic had even occupied it for a few months. "It's a position that has been heavily fortified and will be difficult to take," Péria-Peigné assured.

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