Published: · Region: Eastern Europe · Category: conflict

Grinding Ukrainian and Russian Village Gains Expose Brutal Stalemate on Southern Fronts

Ukraine and Russia each claimed control of small villages across Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts on 13 August, after battles that in some cases stretched for months over less than a square kilometer. For the few hundred people who once lived in these places, and for the brigades now rotating through them, the seesaw of village gains shows how much blood is being spent for every fragment of terrain.

Maps of Ukraine’s south and east are again being redrawn by increments measured in hamlets, not highways. On 13 August, both Ukrainian and Russian forces claimed to have retaken villages that before the war counted their populations in the dozens or low hundreds, the latest indication of a front defined by grinding attrition rather than sweeping maneuver. Ukrainian military sources reported re‑establishing control over a cluster of settlements along the Komar and Pokrovske directions. In Donetsk region’s Volnovakha district, Kyiv’s forces said they had recaptured the villages of Zirka, Myrne and Oleksandrohrad. Pre‑war, those communities held roughly 154, 587 and 115 residents respectively, strung across a combined land area of…

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