In a strong sign that Vladimir Putin’s renewed assault on Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region is by no means a guaranteed success, Ukrainian forces destroyed a makeshift pontoon bridge over the Siverskyi Donets river, taking out most of a Russian battalion along with it. Some of the heaviest fighting of the war to date saw Moscow lose a staggering number of tanks — as many as 70 — and armored fighting vehicles to highly targeted Ukrainian fire. The Times of London reported that possibly 1,000 Russian soldiers were killed in a single set of strikes by Ukrainian forces.There has been no mention of the losses in Russian state media, but the scope of the defeat was corroborated by the British defense intelligence and the message to Moscow was clear: Get out of Ukraine. The dramatic action appears to have taken place at some point during the day on Wednesday, when artillerymen of Ukraine’s 17th tank brigade “opened the holiday season for the Russians,” according to a tongue-in-cheek tweet from Ukraine’s defense forces that also included aerial photos of the destroyed bridge. The strategic river starts in Russia and flows south for 650 miles through the Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv and Luhansk, making it a natural barrier against Russian attempts to solidify territorial gains. If indeed more than a thousand Russian troops were killed in the Ukrainian counter-attack, it would be the biggest daily casualty count among Vladimir Putin’s forces since the Russian invasion started in late February. On social media, a Ukrainian soldier using only the name Maxim said that Ukrainian forces waited until the pontoon bridge was almost complete and Russian vehicles were moving along it before pounding the area with artillery and drone strikes. A report in London’s Telegraph said that a Ukrainian river boat squad — possibly a special forces team — had been able to identify when the Russians began building the pontoon and that visibility was almost nonexistent because Russian troops had thrown smoke grenades and set nearby trees on fire. After the pounding, the Russian troops that had managed to cross the river were left stranded and open to massacre. The failure of Russian troops to cross the Donets in the Luhansk, seen by some as a slam-dunk in Mr. Putin’s eastern Ukraine land grab, will not be lost on the tyrant. “These reports are consistent with other evidence of Russian military performance from fighting in Kyiv and Kharkiv,” a retired brigadier and former director of British Army staff at the British defense ministry, Ben Barry, told the Telegraph. “Doing a river crossing is one of the most difficult things to do in warfare.”What Russia can do quite capably, as the world has seen at Mariupol, is launch indiscriminate artillery and mortar attacks on civilian targets with a certain diabolical fervor, and now Ukrainian settlements in the Chernihiv region are in their sights. According to a Facebook post from the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine today, Russian forces were sending additional artillery units to the border areas of the Bryansk region “to increase the provocative shelling of settlements in the Chernihiv region, located near the state border of Ukraine.” Chernihiv is much closer to the capital, Kyiv, than either the Donbas region or Kharkiv. Overnight the head of Chernihiv’s regional military administration, Vyacheslav Chaus, posted on Telegram that “the Muscovite bastards launched several airstrikes on critical infrastructure facilities of Novhorod-Siversky town,” inflicting an unspecified number of casualties, presumably on civilians. Russia Gets ‘Snake Bitten’ in Black SeaVladimir Putin also has his tunnel vision set squarely on Snake Island, the minuscule but strategic island in the Black Sea close to the Danube river delta. Overnight Thursday a spokesman for the Odessa’s regional military administration, Serhiy Bratchuk, said that a Ukrainian strike on the Vsevolod Bobrov support ship, said to be one of the newest in the Russian fleet, set the vessel on fire and “sent it limping toward Sevastopol” in Russian-occupied Crimea. While details were sketchy, Mr. Bratchuk wrote convincingly of the “snake bite” inflicted on the Russian navy. Ukrinform reports that Ukraine has “lined up or destroyed half a dozen warships and cutters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet, including the flagship cruiser Moskva” in recent weeks. Snake Island itself is still hotly contested and the reason is that owing to its location the island itself functions as a kind of aircraft carrier. A Ukrainian military analyst, Oleh Zhdanov, told the BBC that if Russian forces can manage to take control of Snake Island, then they will be able to deploy long-range anti-aircraft systems there, thus gaining a significant advantage for dominance in the Black Sea and all across Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. In fact an advisor to the Ukrainian president, Oleksiy Arestovych, said late Thursday that the Vsevolod Bobrov logistics ship was struck as it was trying to deliver just such an anti-aircraft system to Snake Island.The British defense ministry said this week that Ukraine has been targeting Russian air defenses and supply vessels on Snake Island in a bid to disrupt Moscow’s efforts to expand its control over the Black Sea coastline. More battles may not be long in coming.
