Mr Lange points to Ukraine’s partial success around the village of Urozhaine in the Donetsk region, where with the help of newly-acquired cluster munitions the main Russian route of withdrawal has been turned into a deadly choke point. Alexander Khodakovsky, a Russian battalion commander in Urozhaine, complained this week via Telegram, a messaging app, that he was not getting reserve troops to stem a mounting disaster. This suggests that Russian forces in some areas are now too battered to provide reinforcements.
When Russian forces respond with counter-attacks, says Sir Lawrence, they often run out of steam. A Russian offensive near Kupiansk in which convict soldiers are bearing the brunt of the action has so far been an exception. Though Ukrainian positions appear to be holding, Russian bombing has caused great destruction, and led to a civilian evacuation on August 10th.
Meanwhile, grinding progress continues on the two southern axes towards Melitopol and Berdiansk. The big challenge is breaching some of the most heavily mined areas in the history of warfare. Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, claimed this week that in some parts of the frontline there are five mines per square metre. This is the main reason, says Mr Lange, why Ukraine has had to concentrate on a narrow front: it does not have the sappers or mine-clearing vehicles to attack multiple points along the line. According to the Guardian, a British newspaper, Ukraine’s 200 engineering brigades started the counter-offensive with about 30 troops each. But sappers, who clear mines by hand, are frequently injured or killed. An engineering brigade in one recently liberated village had only five sappers left, the paper reported.
Mr Reznikov is pleading with allies for mine-clearing equipment and training, but no army has faced such a challenge since the second world war. Experience and kit are sparse. NATO forces became adept at dealing with IEDs in Afghanistan. But the scale in Ukraine, says Mr Barry, resembles the battle of El Alamein 80 years ago, when Erwin Rommel, the German general, laid a million mines. It took ten days for the British to get through, even with a huge advantage in artillery, control of the skies and plenty of mine-clearing tanks—none of which Ukraine has.
