If Moscow's forces have been advancing mainly in the Donbass in recent weeks, they are also advancing on the Kupiansk front, where two villages – Kurakhivka and Pershotravneve – are said to have fallen.
In recent weeks, Russian forces in Ukraine have mainly advanced into the large eastern region of Donbass, where they threaten the towns of Kurakhove and Pokrovsk, and have entered those of Chasiv Yar and Toretsk. But further north, on the Kupiansk front, the situation is also deteriorating for the Ukrainian army. This Saturday, the Russian Defense Ministry, cited by state news agencies, claimed responsibility for the capture of two villages, Kurakhivka and Pershotravneve.
In themselves, these two small localities are anecdotal, but these advances, confirmed at least partially by conflict cartographers, who geolocate the images available in open source, illustrate the progress of the Russian maneuver underway for months in a vast area of mounted fighting between the Kharkiv and Lugansk oblasts. In particular, the Russians are seeking to split the Ukrainian system east of the strategic Oskil River into two. The fall of Kourakhivka, which runs along the watercourse, confirms this break: from now on, in the North, the Ukrainians defending the town of Kupiansk on the left bank are separated from the Ukrainians positioned further to the South around Lyman in a large region overlooking the north of Donbass still held by kyiv.
Balcony above Donbass
The capture of Pershotravneve shows that the Russians are seeking to widen their salient towards the South to further separate the two Ukrainian pockets, the logistics of which will be increasingly a challenge. Indeed, Kourakhivka is certainly only a village, but it is at its height that the main supply route crosses the Oskil and passes from the right bank to the left bank.
In late summer 2022, the Ukrainians managed, in a successful lightning counter-offensive, to drive the Russians out of southern Kharkiv Oblast, who failed to re-establish their defensive positions along of the Oskil River and relied on the course of another river further to the East, the Zherebets. Since the summer of 2023, advancing extremely slowly, Moscow's troops have been trying to push westward by crossing from one river to another to regain lost ground. The issue is strategic because the region east of the Oskil forms a balcony which would threaten from the North the two great Ukrainian fortresses of the Donetsk oblast, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, already made vulnerable by Russian advances from the South -Donbass.
