Russian forces continue attacks in southern Ukraine

Russian forces have carried out multiple attacks around the southern Ukrainian village of Robotyne in recent days, military officials and experts said, targeting land that Ukraine had heavily captured in a rare success of its counteroffensive last summer.

The Ukrainian army said it had repelled four consecutive days of attacks from Saturday to Tuesday involving armored vehicles and large numbers of troops massed in the area.

Open source Cards of the battlefield compiled by independent groups analyzing battle footage, suggest Russia has made marginal gains west and south of Robotyne. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research group, said Monday that Russian troops had advanced to the western outskirts of the village.

“Pay attention to the village of Robotyne,” Dmytro Lykhovii, a spokesman for the Ukrainian armed forces in the area, said on national television last week. “It seems that the Russians have set themselves the goal of achieving some success there” and were planning to take the village, he said.

The weekend attacks around Robotyne came as Russian troops took the frontline town of Avdiivka, about 100 miles (160 kilometers) to the east, and attacked Ukrainian positions on the east bank of the Dnipro River, more than 130 miles (210 kilometers) to the west. Military analysts say these near-simultaneous attacks are intended to put pressure across the front line to reduce Kiev's ability to withdraw and replenish depleted troops and force the country to burn through its already scarce ammunition supplies.

“They are trying in different places and testing the Ukrainian defenses,” said Pasi Paroinen of the Ukrainian government Black Bird Group, which analyzes satellite images and social media content from the battlefield. “They investigate and look for weaknesses.”

Serhii Kuzan, chairman of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Center, a non-governmental research group, said Moscow will try to build on its success on the eastern front in the coming weeks and “cut off Robotyne at all costs.” He and other analysts said Moscow had tens of thousands of troops around Robotyne, and he predicted the attacks would intensify.

Russian gains around Robotyne, a village with only a few hundred inhabitants before the war, have so far been limited. The village fell under Russian occupation shortly after Moscow invaded Ukraine in February 2022. That was also the case recaptured by Ukrainian forces in Augustafter weeks of fighting that underlined the enormous challenges Kiev faces in breaking through the dense Russian defenses erected in the area.

Today, Robotyne finds himself in a bulge carved into Russian-occupied territory and surrounded to the west, south, and east by Moscow's forces. In recent weeks, Russian forces have attacked the flanks of this area and gradually retaken small swathes of land, using what the Ukrainian military has described as small strike groups supported by armored vehicles.

“The situation there is dynamic, the enemy is conducting heavy fire,” Mr Lykhovii said on Monday.

Geolocation film material The battlefield showed Russian attack drones hitting Ukrainian-occupied trenches just a few hundred meters south of Robotyne. Rybar, a prominent Russian military blogger, said that Russian forces had gained a foothold on the southern edge of Robotyne and that fighting was now taking place in the village, which was largely reduced to rubble during last summer's fighting. His claim could not be independently confirmed.

Mr Paroinen, of the Black Bird Group, said Russia had recaptured some fortifications lost during the summer counter-offensive. He added that Robotyne is not easy to defend for Ukrainian soldiers because Russian forces control the high ground around the area.

“In general, that is a big problem for the Ukrainians there,” he said, adding that Russia had positioned three divisions around Robotyne, between 30,000 and 40,000 soldiers, including some elite paratroop units.

Mr Kuzan, of the Ukrainian Security and Cooperation Centre, said he expected some of the forces involved in the capture of Avdiivka would now be “deployed to other parts of the front line in the coming days”, possibly around Robotyne to to help with the attacking pressure there.

The Ukrainian military said on Monday its forces had taken up new defensive positions outside Avdiivka in an effort to stop further Russian advances.

Mr. Kuzan and other military analysts said delayed Western military aid had weakened Ukraine's ability to support Russian attacks along the entire front line. “The Russians have realized that we are truly 'out of shells', which means we cannot respond to all their attacks,” Mr. Kuzan said. “They will continue to put pressure on Robotyne.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine acknowledged in his late-night speech on Monday that “the situation is extremely difficult in several parts of the front line, where Russian forces have amassed maximum reserves.”

Russia, he added, “is benefiting from the delays in aid to Ukraine.”