You may remember that I posted this map a week and a half ago:
Incredible shrinking of Russia’s goals in Eastern Ukraine since the start of the war pic.twitter.com/2IwWiAqXTd
— Igor Schatz (@Copernicus2013) May 14, 2022
It is beginning to look like the Russians may have broken through where the innermost pincers are marked. The ones labelled “June 2022?”. (Centered around Lyman to the North and Popasna to the South.)
In terms of area, the pocket looks like maybe 20 miles by 20 miles.
The Ukrainian military had approximately 4 Brigades in that area. (~5000 soldiers. Maybe less.) However they had been taking hundreds of casualties over the past few weeks. And there is no word whether the Ukrainians will keep their troops in the ‘kessel’ or withdraw them while they still can. If they do attempt to withdraw, there are only a couple of good roads available. And those roads are likely to be under Russian artillery fire soon.
The pincers are to just to the West of where the Russians made several failed attempts to cross the Siversky-Donets Rivers. There are a number of towns along that part of the river and their situation is also not clear.
Russian casualties have also been high and while their performance has improved over the past month, it is still not that good.
A lot has happened today around Popasna and the Severodonetsk kessel. @emilkastehelmi talked about it in finnish, and now I’ll do it in english.
It’s time for another look at topographic maps, this time at the entire Kramatorsk - Severodonetsk bulge.
A thread 1/? pic.twitter.com/cIjmXCQTf5— John Helin (@J_JHelin) May 24, 2022
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Very quick discussion of what we have seen in the battle of the Donbas over the past 17 days. With the withdrawal of some Ukrainian forces from the southwest of Popasna, here is the assumed sitmap today and on May 7 @TheStudyofWar pic.twitter.com/fnYScVhf1O
— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) May 25, 2022
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We see Russian advances from Popasna and other places of 25 kilometres at most, that’s approx 17 miles. Around Lyman and SDonetsk it’s fewer. These remain slow, incremental advances. Seem to be town to town, village to village. Equal to a mile a day.
— Phillips P. OBrien (@PhillipsPOBrien) May 25, 2022