Russian infighting may have led to Ukraine retaking a key town in its counteroffensive: report

• A Russian mercenary group refused to fight in Ukraine, reports say.
• It may have enabled Ukraine to seize back control of the village of Robotyne.

A Russian mercenary group's decision to stop fighting in protest at the Kremlin's lack of action to save their leader may have helped Ukraine achieve an important breakthrough on the front line.

Ukraine on Sunday said its forces had liberated the village of Robotyne, which is on a network of roads leading to Melitopol, the occupied south Ukrainian city.

In messages on the Telegram app the week before Ukraine took back control of the village, the Russian neo-Nazi mercenary outfit, 'Rusich,' said they were laying down their arms in protest at the Kremlin's refusal to do more to stop the arrest and possible extradition of one of their leaders from Finland to Ukraine, reports said.

"Rusich stops performing any combat missions," it said on its Telegram channel in messages reported by The Telegraph. "If a country cannot protect its citizens, then why should citizens defend the country?"

Samuel Ramani, a Russian security expert at Oxford University, on Twitter said that the detention of the leader, Yan Petrovsky, had also been widely protested by channels connected with Wagner, the Rusich-affiliated mercenary group behind the short-lived June uprising against the Kremlin.

Jeff Hawn, a non-resident fellow at the Washington, DC-based think-tank New Lines Institute, told France 24 "there's a very strong possibility" the decision by the mercenary group to lay down its arms contributed to the fall of Robotyne.

Analysts said it was likely that the Rusich group's fighters had been positioned in Robotyne, leaning credibility to the claim that the protest may have destabilized Russia's defences.

"The Rusich Group accused the Russian government of not meeting its obligations to protect Russians abroad by not securing Petrovsky's release earlier, and asked why Rusich personnel should protect Russia if the Russian government will not protect Russians," the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington, DC, based think tank, said in its daily briefing on the conflict on August 28.

"The Rusich Group indicated that it is likely operating on the Robotyne-Verbove line in western Zaporizhia Oblast, a critical area of the frontline where the Russian military command likely cannot afford for any units to rebel and refuse to conduct combat missions."

The liberation of Robotyne, which is around 35 miles from the city of Zaporizhzhia, has been among the most notable breakthroughs of Ukraine's counteroffensive so far.

Having got through the first line of Russia's defences, Ukrainian forces are seeking to reinforce their positions to try and push through and break Russia's second and third lines of defence.

Analysts say that Russian forces are suffering from low morale and internal divisions, with the Wagner group launching its rebellion in June in protest at what it claimed was the Kremlin's mishandling of the invasion.

Its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in a plane explosion near Moscow in late August.

The Rusich was formed in 2014, and has fought in Syria, in conflicts in Africa, and in Ukraine. It has been implicated in the torture and abuse of Ukrainian prisoners, said open source intelligence group Molfar, and one its leaders, Alexsey Milkachov, filmed himself killing a puppy and biting its head off in 2014.