The Ukrainians used US-supplied rocket launchers to hit bridges and military infrastructure in the south, forcing Russia to divert its forces from Donbas to the east to deal with the new threat. With the war in Ukraine now in its sixth month, the coming weeks could prove decisive. While the bulk of Russian and Ukrainian military resources are concentrated in Donbas, the industrial region of mines and factories, both sides hope to make gains elsewhere. Ukraine has vowed to drive the Russians out of territory they have seized since the invasion began, including the southern Kherson region and part of the Zaporizhia region, while Moscow has pledged to hold on to the occupied territories and seize more territory around Country. Donbas consists of Luhansk province, now fully controlled by Russia, and Donetsk province, about half of which is in Moscow’s hands. Ukrainian military analyst Oleh Zhdanov noted that by intensifying attacks in the south, Kyiv forced Russia to expand its forces. “The Russian military command is faced with a dilemma: to try to press the offensive in the Donetsk region or to build defenses in the south,” Zhdanov said. “It will be difficult for them to perform both tasks simultaneously for a long period of time.” He noted that instead of attempting a massive, all-out counterattack, the Ukrainians sought to undermine the Russian military in the south with a series of strikes on its ammunition and fuel depots and other key locations. “It doesn’t have to be a frontal attack,” Zhdanov noted. Moscow-backed local officials in eastern and southern Ukraine have talked about holding votes on joining Russia as early as September. These plans depend on Russia’s ability to gain full control of these areas by then. “The Kremlin’s main goal is to force Kyiv to sit down for talks, secure the existing line of contact and hold referendums in the fall,” said Mykola Sunhurovsky, of the Razumkov Center, a Kyiv-based think tank. He noted that Western weapons have enhanced Ukraine’s capabilities, allowing it to hit targets far behind front lines with a high degree of accuracy. Ukraine has received about a dozen US-made HIMARS multiple rocket launchers and has used them to strike Russian ammunition depots, which are essential to maintaining Moscow’s power advantage. The HIMARS systems have a range of 80 kilometers (50 miles), allowing the Ukrainians to hit the Russians with most of the enemy’s artillery. “It’s a serious advantage,” Sunhurovsky said. “The Ukrainians have begun carrying out precision strikes on Russian warehouses, command posts, railway stations and bridges, destroying logistical chains and undermining Russian military capability.” Ukrainian strikes on munitions storage sites have caught the Russian military off guard, forcing it to move material to scattered locations farther from combat areas, lengthening supply lines, reducing Russia’s advantage in munitions power and helping to slow Russia’s offensive in the east . “They have to move everything to smaller, more dispersed stockpiles,” said Justin Crump, a former tank commander who heads Sibylline, a strategic consulting firm. “These are all really irritants that are slowing Russia down. They’ve taken a hit in the rate of artillery fire, which was really key before.” Crump said the Russian military had underestimated the threat posed by HIMARS and left its ammunition caches exposed in known locations. “They believed their air defenses would shoot down the missiles. And it really wasn’t,” he said. In a series of attacks that helped boost the country’s morale, the Ukrainians repeatedly used HIMARS to hit a key bridge over the Dnieper River in the Kherson region, cutting traffic across it and creating potential supply problems for Russian forces in the region. Zhdanov, the Ukrainian military analyst, described the bridge as the key supply link for Russian forces on the right bank of the Dnieper. Russia can still use a second Dnieper crossing to ferry supplies and reinforcements to its troops in Kherson, which lies just north of the Crimean peninsula, which Russia seized in 2014. But Ukraine’s strikes have shown its vulnerable position. of Russia and weakened its dominance in the region. “The Russians have the river on their backs. It’s not a good place to defend,” Crump said. “They can’t get supplies easily. Morale is probably pretty low at this point on that side of the river.’ He said Ukraine may eventually launch a massive counterattack involving large numbers of troops and weapons. “This is the opportunity for Ukraine, I think, to deal a more crushing blow to the Russians and push them back,” Crump said. “I think there’s a better chance of that being tested here than we’ve seen anywhere else.” Crump noted that the mere prospect of a major Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south helped Kyiv by forcing the Russians to divert some of their forces from the main battleground to the east. “This slows down the offensive in Donbass,” Crump said. “So even the threat of an attack is actually succeeding for Ukraine right now.”
Danica Kirka in London and Yuras Karmanau in Tallinn, Estonia contributed to this report.