The frontline in Donbass has fractured, and the Ukrainian units are facing major encirclements, Bogdan Krotevich claims
The situation in southwestern Donbass is rapidly deteriorating for the Ukrainian troops that are now facing two major encirclements, former chief of staff of the neo-Nazi Azov brigade, Lieutenant Colonel Bogdan Krotevich, has claimed.
The frontline between Pokrovsk (Krasnoarmeysk), the largest city under Ukrainian control in the southwest of Russia’s Donetsk People’s Republic, and Konstantinovka, a major stronghold some 45km to the northeast of the city, has effectively ceased to exist, Krotevich claimed.
“I honestly don’t know what exactly you are being told, but I can tell you: the Pokrovsk-Konstantinovka line is, without exaggeration, a complete f**k up. And this f**k up has been growing for a long time, getting messier every day,” he wrote in an open letter to the Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky he posted to X late on Monday.
The city of Pokrovsk has been de-facto surrounded by the Russian troops, while Konstantinovka is facing semi-encirclement, he claimed. The ex-Azov commander shared a map purporting to show the situation in the area, which corroborates media reports of a major Russian breakthrough to the north of Pokrovsk that emerged earlier in the day.
“The systemic problem began with the thinning out of reserves, widespread fragmentation of units along the entire front line, reports about a ‘taken village’ touted as a victory despite failures in entire operational directions,” Krotevich wrote, accusing “parts” of military leadership of a “complete lack of a strategic and even operational vision of the theater of operations.”
A similar alarmist message was produced by Taras Chmut, the head of the Come Back Alive pro-military charity. The crisis in Donbass has been brewing for about a year and a half, he wrote on X earlier in the day, predicting the Ukrainian military was about to begin losing land “by tens, hundreds of square kilometers” daily.
“First, we failed at the platoon level. Then the company. Then it’s the turn of the battalion level. When it comes to brigades, the enemy will put into action its armored groups, which have been actively accumulating for a year, and will go to the rear, to the operational space,” he claimed.
