FLASH
Shkruar nga Pamfleti
The battle that could decide the outcome of the conflict in Ukraine has been going on since Friday...
A dozen men jump to the ground without parachutes. A Black Hawk drops them on the battlefield as dust covers their descent and the helicopter pilot looks at them, perhaps for the last time. A few kilometers away, locked in a bunker, the commander of the HUR, military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, the man responsible for special operations on Russian soil, and Chief of Staff Oleksander Syrskyi, the hero of the Kiev resistance, watch and hold their breath.
The battle of battles in the Ukrainian conflict began on Friday afternoon, the one that could decide the outcome of the war after one of the longest sieges, which Putin wants to win at all costs in an attempt to overturn the negotiating table and take all of Donbas without sealing off the Donetsk belt stretching from Sloviansk to Pokrovsk. From the gateway city of Donetsk, not a sound has come for weeks; the silence of any decisive battle has fallen over the ruins. The few civilians, mostly elderly, are trapped in basements. Even the most senior commanders are careful not to reveal their details and speak only on condition of strict anonymity. It is not known whether the men of the 7th Air Assault Corps are still alive or dead, as the Russians claim. “What we know for sure is that they are heroes,” military intelligence sources tell us.
And not only that. “They carried out a unique operation: a parachute drop.” Putin pushes, insisting that the Ukrainians are surrounded. He believes what General Valery Gerasimov told him last week: the Ukrainians are surrounded, they can’t make it. The Tsar even invited journalists to see it up close. But Russian bloggers themselves accuse Gerasimov of lying so as not to upset their leader. Russian propaganda shows videos of Ukrainian prisoners claiming to be stranded without water. In reality, Kiev’s special operation was launched in Pokrovsk precisely to prevent the supply line from Myrnohrad from being cut off, after days of torrential rain that allowed the Russians to increase their infiltration and claim unverifiable gains. But there has also been controversy on the Kiev front. Poor rotations and delayed decisions may have made the fall of Pokrovsk inevitable, and Budanov and Syrskyi's operation, rather than a counterattack, would have been a move to allow the Ukrainian army to evacuate before it was too late.
DeepState, a Ukrainian open-source monitoring group, estimates that about half of Pokrovsk is a “gray zone” over which neither side has full control. A military source confirms that Ukrainian forces are not surrounded, but that their supply lines remain under fire from Russian troops. “The situation in the city has changed so much that Syrskyi is now sending elite units into the city to stabilize it,” he explains.
Among them, special forces and military intelligence strike units. "Fighting is continuing for the train station and the industrial area in the west. The increasingly intense clashes have forced us to avoid logistical movements by vehicle, relying only on foot."
The result is that "the Ukrainian armed forces are not in a situation of physical encirclement, but operational: this means that all logistics have become impossible". Translated, this means that in recent days, supplies, resupply and evacuation of the wounded were no longer possible. This view is confirmed by ISW, the Institute for the Study of War, which bases its reports on Western intelligence information.
From the fog of battle, a result will emerge in a moment. But Pokrovsk has been dormant since August 2024, when on the same station platform near which the fighting is taking place, we greeted convoys of women and children, while loudspeakers warned civilians to leave the city and mortars roared. Army forces failed to break through at that time, despite the trenches outside the city remaining empty. In the same weeks, Kiev had entered Kursk, leaving the east undefended. A calculated risk, according to many analysts, that allowed Ukrainian forces to take prisoners in exchange while saving men.
“Pokrovsk is not Bakhmut’s meat grinder,” a commander of a tank unit stationed in both Kherson and Donbas repeatedly told us. Whether Pokrovsk was a threat from Zelensky or a deception from Putin, the battlefield will tell.
What is certain is that another dead city. For a whole year, Russia tried to conquer a city with a pre-war population of just 60,000. In the attempt, it lost some 120,000 soldiers to capture only half that number. And the children will not return to its streets to run and laugh for a long time. /Adapted from Corriere/
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