Russia is retaking part of the country that Ukraine heavily captured during a counter-offensive
Russian troops have retaken the land that Ukrainian forces had heavily captured at the height of their summer counteroffensive in the south, just as Washington announced it would release the last remaining congressionally approved package of military aid for Kiev.
The two developments highlight the latest reality of the war: With their counter-offensive stalled, Ukrainian forces are now taking a back seat, struggling to hold off Russian attacks along the entire front line with dwindling resources.
The recent Russian advance around the southern village of Robotyne illustrates these changing fortunes. Ukrainian brigades trained and equipped by the West recaptured the village in August after weeks of fighting. But Russian forces, now attacking the area from the west and east, have reclaimed some land on its flanks, further undoing Ukraine’s gains.
“Now we are losing some areas, but if US aid is delayed, we will start losing cities,” Yehor Chernev, the deputy chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s committee on national security, defense and intelligence, said last week in an interview. . “Without American ammunition, we will begin to lose ground that we gained heavily this summer.”
For weeks, Republican lawmakers in Congress’ reluctance to support aid to Ukraine as the war stretches into a new year has thwarted Washington’s plans to send Kiev more military aid. Congress last week again refused to approve a $50 billion security package for Ukraine, pushing back negotiations until next year.
While some military aid could still come from a separate program overseen by the Pentagon, the Biden administration is now tapping into the last remaining funds already approved by Congress. a Package worth $250 million was announced on Wednesday — which includes air defense equipment, artillery shells and more than 15 million small arms ammunition — is likely the last tranche of available funding, according to U.S. officials.
“Once that is done,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters last week, “we will no longer have any additional authority available to us.”
The situation around the village of Robotyne, in the southern Zaporizhia region, can be an example of this. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group, said Wednesday that Russian forces had recaptured positions captured by Ukraine during the counteroffensive, “probably after Ukrainian forces withdrew to more defensible positions near Robotyne for the winter.”
Russian forces have recently advanced from the southwest and east, from Verbove, a nearby village that Ukrainian forces tried unsuccessfully to capture this summer to expand the bulge they had created in Russia’s defenses, the ISW said and open source maps of the battlefield.
Russian progress has been limited so far: The open-source battlefield maps showing that his forces have barely recaptured a few square kilometers of territory on Robotyne’s flanks. But Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, the head of the Ukrainian armed forces in the south, recognized by the BBC Wednesday that “the situation in our sector is extremely difficult.”
Yevgeny Balitsky, the Russian-appointed head of the part of the Zaporizhia region that Russia claimed to have annexed last year, told Russian television this week that he hoped that Russian forces would soon recapture Robotyne and reach the starting line of Ukraine’s counteroffensive.