- A military expert mapped out his suggestion for a Ukrainian counteroffensive strike.
- Veteran Mike Martin said an advance of around 25 miles at a key stretch of the front line could do it.
A military expert outlined a plan for Ukraine to make a decisive strike at Russian forces following the apparent capture of a southern town.
Mike Martin, a veteran and visiting fellow at the Department of War Studies at King's College London, said there is a path to a potential breakthrough for Ukrainian forces in a thread on X on Monday.
The key, Martin wrote, lies in forcing Russian troops out of a large area west of Melitopol, which has been occupied since the first months of the full-scale invasion.
Melitopol, in the Zaporizhzhia region, sits at the center of a wide area of land that has been referred to as the "land bridge" that connects the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula to the rest of Ukraine.
Melitopol is a key objective in the counteroffensive — and US intelligence officials have reportedly assessed that, bluntly, Ukraine can't reach it.
But, in order to reassure its US allies, Ukraine still needs a win in the short term "that keeps the narrative alive that supplying Ukraine is the right thing to do," Martin wrote. His idea is to force a withdrawal from a wide area conceivably within Ukraine's reach.
Ukraine's rapid breakthrough last fall was achieved "not by fighting the Russians every inch of the way, but by cutting off their supply and forcing them to withdraw," he wrote.
By his analysis, Ukraine can instead seek to cut the city and a wide portion of land west of it from the rest of Russian control by targeting the strategic locations that serve them — that is, the city of Tokmak, which has a major railway junction; the two highways that link Crimea to the Ukrainian mainland; and the Kerch Bridge, which links Crimea to Russia.
—Mike Martin (@ThreshedThought) August 28, 2023
Ukraine also needs to be able to incapacitate the M14 highway that hugs the very south of the country, supplying Melitopol from the east, he said.
Thanks to the capture of Robotyne over the weekend, Tokmak is already within artillery range, Martin wrote. As for the bridging routes, Martin was "fairly confident" that Ukraine could wipe them out when it wanted.
It exacted considerable damage in its audacious October 2022 attack on the Kerch Bridge, and thanks to UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles, has been credited with other strategic bridge strikes in recent weeks.
It would remain for Ukrainian forces to be close enough to the M14 to keep that, too, within artillery range, Martin wrote. That requires advancing roughly 25 miles further than Ukrainian forces have reached in several locations.
That's not simple. The whole reason Ukraine's spring counteroffensive has been so much slower than its thrilling fall liberations in much of the east of the country is the new conditions: miles-deep fortifications laid by Russia along the 600-mile front line, guarded by artillery, helicopters, and drones.
It means slow, grinding progress, which saw Ukrainian forces retake the town of Robotyne, northwest of Melitopol, over the weekend.
"The way of these things is that nothing happens for ages and then there is a flood of activity as a sector of the line collapses or a bridge is destroyed," he wrote. "And I do think we are heading to one of those moments."
Martin is not the only observer characterizing a potential breakthrough this way.
Former General David Petraeus cautioned writing off the Ukrainian counteroffensive in an interview and a co-authored op-ed last week, saying that "defenders can hold for a long time and then suddenly break, allowing an attacker to make rapid gains before the defense solidifies further to the rear."