Here's a bit of more positive news. Russia has assembled 50,000 troops to retake Kupyansk, and over the course of a year, they've accomplished...nothing.
It's quite telling that the Russians can't get their thumbs out sufficiently to organize an offensive with that many troops. I'm also somewhat astonished that a Russian officer was told that the Americans had occupied Ukraine and that he believed what he was told. Officers can't lead if they are blind to the reality of the situation.
Russia’s Offensive to Reverse Ukraine’s Gains Is Stalling - With 50,000 Russians deployed to retake the city of Kupyansk, Ukrainians hold their ground and seek a semblance of normal life
Updated Sept. 13, 2023 12:01 am ET
KUPYANSK, Ukraine—Sitting under a tree on a bluff overlooking the Oskil River, two Ukrainian soldiers watched as several plumes from Russian airstrikes rose up along the front line, roughly 6 miles away.
The Russians tried to break through Ukrainian lines once again that day, and once again failed to make headway, one of the troopers said. His radio crackled with updates as the other soldier scanned the skies for Russian aircraft.
An urban area of 50,000 people before the war, Kupyansk was captured by Russia without a fight in February 2022, becoming the capital of the occupied part of eastern Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. Ukrainian forces reclaimed the city in a lightning offensive a year ago, a swift maneuver that ousted Russia from nearly all of Kharkiv and parts of nearby Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Now, Moscow wants it back. For the past year, Russian troops have remained within artillery range of Kupyansk, devastating the city with nearly daily barrages. In the past several weeks, as Ukrainian forces launched a push in the south of the country, Russia unleashed its own offensive toward Kupyansk, deploying more than 50,000 troops to attempt to retake the city.
Despite triumphant reports in Russian state media of Kupyansk’s imminent fall, the Russians have had little success.
“The result of their offensive has been an increase of the no-man’s-land, of the number of settlements where active combat is under way,” said Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the Ukrainian military administration for the Kharkiv region. “But the Russians haven’t been able to occupy a single new village here since last September, and they keep sustaining heavy losses in personnel and equipment.”
Villages on approaches to Kupyansk have turned into rubble, with almost all residents gone. In Kupyansk itself, fewer than one-fifth of the prewar population remains. Ukrainian authorities declared a mandatory evacuation last month for the city’s civilians because of frequent shelling and attacks by guided bombs, one of which recently targeted the only pontoon crossing between the two banks of the Oskil River, which bisects the city. Ukrainian legislation, however, doesn’t permit forcibly evicting residents from their homes, and only a fraction of the remaining residents heeded the call to evacuate.
Because of losses sustained in recent weeks, the Russians are now regrouping, forming new storm units and filling the ranks with parts of the recently created 25th Combined Arms Army, according to Ukrainian military commanders. “The Russians haven’t changed their plans. They will continue trying to move ahead,” said Ukraine’s deputy minister of defense, Hanna Malyar. “They seek a revanche, to regain in Kharkiv the lands that we liberated last fall.”
An additional Russian objective, she added, is to force the Ukrainian military to pull into the Kupyansk area the forces that are committed to offensive operations elsewhere.
Ukrainian forces fired at Russian positions near Kupyansk, Ukraine, after retaking the city from the invading forces last year.
Russia is using Storm Z penal units—made up of prisoner recruits—at the Kupyansk front, according to Ukrainian commanders. Some of the units were so poorly equipped that only one out of three soldiers carried a rifle, with others expected to pick up the weapons of fallen comrades or to capture them, said a Ukrainian battalion commander on the Kupyansk front who goes by the call sign Phoenix.
“They keep trying to take Kupyansk, from the right, from the left, attack in large numbers, die by the stacks, and still don’t give up,” he said.
The Russian attackers appear motivated, he added: One of the recently taken Russian prisoners was convinced that he was fighting against the U.S. to liberate Ukraine from what he believed to be American occupation, he said.
In Kupyansk itself, despite widespread devastation, a semblance of normal life goes on. While the main market square by the bridge linking the two banks of the Oskil has been turned into a jumble of twisted metal and crumbling brick buildings, another improvised market, with dozens of stalls and a few grocery stores, has sprung up in a less-affected part of the city. Shawarma outlets, coffee shops and hair salons operate around Kupyansk, serving civilians and soldiers.
“The boys stand firm on the front line, and we are here behind them. Who’s going to feed them if we leave?” said one of the merchants, Nina Levchenko.
Grocery assistant Vita Haraz, who lived in a village right on the front line, moved to the city after her father was injured by Russian shelling last month. She pulled out her phone to read a poem that one of the Ukrainian soldiers had written for her. “The enemy kept pushing more and more, but one woman there was like a mama to us,” it went. “Please, God, give us the fortune to live long enough to see victory.”
A grocery store operates in Kupyansk for soldiers and residents who have remained in the city.
On Kupyansk’s main square, as sounds of explosions rang out on a recent day, municipal workers were putting up a poster that said “Independence — We Prove It Daily” on the shell of the municipality building that once housed the Russian occupation administration. Behind the building, other crews were mowing the lawn and picking up leaves and wilted grass.
“War or not war, it’s our city and it’s got to be clean,” said one of the workers, Natalia Trotsenko.
The building of the Kupyansk electric utility was hit twice in recent weeks, with the latest strike destroying part of the roof. Only one-third of the utility’s prewar staff of more than 60 people remain in the city. “Everywhere, once there is a lull, we restore the lines,” said one of the remaining employees, Anatoliy Zahrebelny, as he showed how the roof had been repaired. “If we had abandoned this building, with the roof gone, it would have been gutted once the rains began.”
The utility’s acting head, Volodymyr Kopatienko, said that many locals are afraid of a Russian comeback. “Now they have jobs, they get salaries, they get pensions,” he said. “Nobody wants to live on buckwheat handouts again.”
Municipal workers tended to the park behind the destroyed Kupyansk town hall last week.
During the occupation, a significant number of people in Kupyansk collaborated with the Russians. Most of these collaborators and their families fled last fall to Russia, where a Russian-created “interim administration of the Kharkiv region” continues to operate. In social-media groups, they identify Kupyansk’s openly pro-Ukrainian residents, going as far as publishing GPS coordinates of their homes.
On the eastern bank of the Oskil, which is much closer to Russian lines, residents usually band together and send one vehicle on the risky trip across the river to collect food supplies provided by humanitarian organizations. With the factories in eastern Kupyansk’s industrial zone closed, a skeleton staff remains to guard properties from looters.
One of these guards, Dmitri Zimin, originally from Russia, moved to Kupyansk in 1999. “I speak only Russian, but I really hope the Russians don’t come back,” he said. “When they were here it was as if some man had taken over your house, settled into your room, and started telling you how to live.”
Oleksandr Shpakovsky, a grocery owner, said that few in the city now believe that Russia possesses the strength to recapture Kupyansk. “In February last year, the Muscovites didn’t pay a drop of blood to take Kupyansk. It was cost-free for them,” he said. “Now, when they have to pay, they are irrigating with blood every hundred meters of their advance. It won’t be easy for them.”
Small, secret boat raids along the Dnipro River are playing an outsize role in Ukraine’s counteroffensive strategy—revealing cracks in Russia’s southern front and creating tough choices for Russian commanders. Photo illustration: Jeremy Shuback