Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
Behind the daily map updates of the eastern front, one of Moscow’s biggest strategic bets of the year has quietly collapsed.
For more than a year, Russian forces have been trying to open a road around the string of fortified cities that anchor Ukraine’s defense of the Donbas.
On Thursday, September 17, the Ukrainian general in charge of the counterattack said one half of that plan is finished.
Brigadier General Andrii Biletskyi, commander of Ukraine’s 3rd Army Corps, told Ukrinform that the northern arm of Russia’s planned encirclement of the Donetsk fortress belt “has effectively been defeated and destroyed.”
A two-pincer plan meant to close at Barvinkove
Biletskyi laid out the Russian design in unusual detail. Moscow’s intent, he said, was to avoid a bloody frontal assault on the industrial cities of Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka by squeezing them from both sides.
One prong was to push north through Dobropillia; another was to drive south from the Lyman area through Sviatohirsk.
The two forces were meant to link up at the town of Barvinkove and cut the fortress belt off from its rear.
The northern prong is the one Biletskyi says has now failed. If Russian forces cannot restore the encirclement threat, he said, they will be forced to attack the fortress cities directly, an operation he described as far more painful and costly than taking them “without a fight.”
Analysts agree: Pincer movement stopped
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) assesses in the thinktank’s September 15 update on the war, that Biletskyi is correct when he claims the Russian pincer movement has been stopped.
According to the analysts, even the pro-Kremlin milblogger Rybar is saying that even though the Ukrainian counter attack has not yet inflicted a strategic defeat on the Russian forces in the area, it will “delay the assault,” noting that part of the northern flank of the “South” group is now left uncovered in case of further Ukrainian attacks.
He also warns that the Ukrainian drone operators will be able to cut off communication lines to the front line as well.
What made it possible: Operation Vivaldi
The rout of the northern arm is the strategic payoff of a months-long Ukrainian counterattack in the Lyman area that the 3rd Corps only publicly acknowledged this week.
In an announcement on September 15, Biletskyi named the effort Operation Vivaldi and said it had cleared roughly 75 square kilometers of Russian infiltrators and liberated another 10, striking Russia’s 20th and 25th Combined Arms Armies.
The counterattack had been running under an information blackout for months before the corps went public. Biletskyi has said the operation has “four seasons” and this was only the first.
The southern front is not over
Biletskyi was careful not to declare victory in the wider battle. The southern prong toward Dobropillia has been checked, he said, but conditions there remain difficult.
Ukrainian and independent monitors describe continued Russian pressure on the Dobropillia axis into mid-September, with a spike in small assault groups trying to infiltrate Ukrainian lines.
The commander’s stated next task is to keep the northern arm from being rebuilt: to “paralyze logistics, paralyze the rear, and prevent the Russians from renewing this offensive,” as he put it according to Ukrinform.
