The Iran war has pushed itself to the forefront of news coverage for the past few weeks, which happened to coincide with a relative dead period in Ukraine which somewhat excuses the lack of reporting on that conflict.
However, it’s time we take a brief look at Ukraine again, particularly since some new developments are beginning to sprout with the spring thaws.
First to deal with the elephant in the room. Pro-Western Ukraine reporting has recently revolved entirely around some ‘mega-successes’ of the Ukrainian army, wherein they have reportedly caused major collapses of Russian defenses and have taken back the most territory since 2023. This in conjunction with Russia’s own lackluster advances of late has merged into a kind of critical-mass info campaign meant to characterize Russia’s military efforts as deteriorative and exhausted.
In particular, it has been augmented by new PR drone strikes on Moscow, which too have been deftly weaved into an overriding narrative of “Putin’s regime on its last legs”, with scuttlebutt about various coup plots and an atmosphere of tension in Russia fabricated out of whole cloth.
It’s true that Ukraine launched a series of large-scale drone attacks on Moscow precisely to energize these recent information campaigns. It’s true internet has been squelched in parts of Moscow during the attacks in order to neutralize the various networks Ukrainian drones have used for communications. And it’s true that given the large scale of the attacks, the ‘optics’ created by Russian anti-drone gunners placed around the Kremlin—a fashionable but empty PR target for Zelensky—have strengthened the tenor of this ongoing narrative.
Furthermore, it is true that over the past month or two, Ukraine had been launching a series of hard-fought counter-attacks on the Zaporozhye access in order to staunch Russia’s advances there. The popular animation being shared amongst pro-Western networks shows the scale of the advances on the northern edge of the Russian bulge:
This corresponds to the area seen here on Suriyak’s map:
The problem with this “offensive” is two-fold. Firstly, as you can see in the above, the white circled areas depict alleged Ukrainian ‘breakthroughs’, but most competent mappers are leaving them shaded ‘gray’ because they represent areas where small groups of soldiers—in some cases single two or three-man teams—were spotted, but they were subsequently eliminated and the area simply fell into a no man’s land surrounded by sparsely distributed Russian defenses.
Note Danilovka circled in yellow above. Here a top Ukrainian account admits there is no way Ukrainian forces can push into or past Danilovka, as it essentially represents the end of their capability:
The second much bigger problem regarding this widely-hailed offensive is that the maps of the offensive are deliberately cut off just at the southern portion to prevent showing that the ongoing Russian advances westward have again accelerated irrespective to Ukraine’s temporary flare up to the north.
From Suriyak:
You can see the two pronged salients bursting through Ukrainian defenses towards and even past the center—on the northern prong—of the rectangular operations zone that lies between opposing defensive lines. Particularly note the northern prong at Rizdvyanka, though some other cartographers have this area more gray-zoned with the explanation being that only Russian “DRGs” activity has been present there; but to me, Suriyak has been the most consistently accurate gold standard thus far, so I go with his interpretation.
On the western side of the Zaporozhye region, Russian forces have likewise broken out into a deeper salient out of the Stepnogorsk area:
What you can see is that this is creating a massive ‘bowl’ of entrapment that will play a major role in the coming offensives, as per Ukrainian analysts, which we will get to a little later.
Like I said, keep that in mind for later, as we will return to this.
Elsewhere, Russian forces have likewise begun to pick up a bit of movement. Today Russian mappers reported the capture of Kaleniki on the Seversk-Slavyansk axis:
The Russian army liberated Kaleniki, advancing towards Slavyansk, - Ministry of Defense
▪️Units of the “Southern” group of troops, as a result of active actions, liberated the populated area of Kaleniki on the Slavyansk direction in the Donetsk People’s Republic.
Last time we left off with Riznykivka only about half-captured. Now you can see Russian forces fully captured it and have advanced further west to reportedly capture Kaleniki today:
That being said, it’s true that beyond these axes, Russian advances have been uncommonly slow, with many people blaming the uncommonly harsh winter and rasputitsa season.
Of course, the Ukrainian side puts the blame squarely on ‘growing Russian losses’ and the exhaustion of the Russian army. I’m not here to proselytize so I don’t seek to implant one view or the other into my readers’ brains per se, but rather present as impartial a picture as possible using hygienic data sources to underwrite it all.
But what we do know is that for the past week or so, the Ukrainian side has suddenly been trumpeting some large-scale Russian offensive they claim is being built up on the Zaporozhye axis. Syrsky himself cited the mass buildup of Russian equipment being staged in the zone:
