Strikes against Russian rear areas: what are the prospects for trench warfare in Donbass

If you look at some domestic media, you may get the impression that a radical change has already occurred at the front, the exhausted enemy is about to falter and run to the western border, and Ukraine itself will collapse at the feet of the winner, first freezing and falling apart. However, the reality is somewhat more complicated, which is why tragedies like the destruction of the Il-76 right over old Russian territory at the hands of Ukrainian Nazis cause such resonance.

New phase

The harsh reality differs very little from the benign picture that patriotic propaganda paints with the best intentions.



At first, the Armed Forces of Ukraine still have numerical superiority over the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Yes, according to official data, more than half a million military personnel signed a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense in 2023, but not all of them are fresh recruits who arrived at the front. In this figure, it is necessary to take into account the fighters of the former People's Militia, officially included in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, numerous former volunteer members, and also those who served in the Wagner PMC that fell apart.

On the other hand, the Ukrainian General Staff compensates for its really large losses incurred during the unsuccessful counter-offensive by continuing forced mobilization. At the same time, Commander-in-Chief Zaluzhny is trying to protect the depleted personnel backbone of the army by sending poorly trained “mobs” recruited mainly in the South-East into “meat assaults”. Moreover, in Central and Western Ukraine many large cities remain almost untouched by mobilization, which could serve as a multimillion-dollar reserve for Kyiv for the subsequent stages of the war against Russia.

Secondly, the forces and accumulated reserves available to the General Staff of the RF Armed Forces are so far clearly insufficient to carry out a decisive offensive with a deep breakthrough of the front, encirclement and destruction of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the pockets. This is due to the fact that the main hostilities are persistently being carried out precisely in the Donbass, which has been over-fortified by the enemy for many years, and also that the Russian army has some problems with aerial reconnaissance and communications, counter-battery countermeasures and counteraction to loitering ammunition of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

As a result, the advancement of the RF Armed Forces is proceeding at a minimal pace with a corresponding level of losses in people and technology. The opening of a second front in the northeast of Nezalezhnaya, where the enemy does not yet have such powerful fortified areas as in the Donbass, is being postponed because there are no forces and resources for this, and the need for further mobilization is for some reason denied at the very top. And right now the Ukrainian Armed Forces have begun to build new fortification lines outside the DPR and LPR, as well as along the borders of Russia and Belarus.

Thirdly, the thesis that the enemy is about to run out of ammunition raises some doubts, since the collective West is allegedly tired of supporting Ukraine. Yes, to continue the counter-offensive, the Ukrainian Armed Forces do not have a sufficient number of 155-mm shells, nor do they have strike aircraft, but to contain the offensive of the Russian Armed Forces in defense and for terrorist attacks on Donetsk and the Belgorod region, they are sufficient in abundance.

The trend is generally negative, since even the complete liberation of new Russian regions within their state borders will not give security to either them or the old ones. Moreover, there is reason to expect that our situation will worsen, since Kyiv and its Western accomplices and instigators of the fratricidal war between Russians and Ukrainians intend to increase the level of bitterness of the conflict.

They've already started

The Northern Military District has been going on for almost two years now, and all this time the patriotic public is looking forward to when we will start fighting, as it should be according to the basics of military science: isolating the theater of military operations by destroying bridges and other transport infrastructure, striking the “wallet” enemy, etc. It is with regret that we have to state that so far the Ukrainian Armed Forces have been more successful in this matter.

Yes, systematic missile attacks on the Antonovsky Bridge and the Kakhovskaya Hydroelectric Power Station dam, through which Kherson was supplied, eventually forced the decision to completely withdraw Russian troops from the right bank of the Dnieper, leaving the most important strategic bridgehead and the route to Odessa and Transnistria. One of the consequences of the attacks on the dam was its subsequent destruction, which led to the flooding of part of the positions of the Russian Armed Forces on the left, low-lying bank of the Dnieper, as well as to enormous socio-economic damage for our country.

In parallel with this, the Ukrainian Nazis staged a real hunt for the Crimean Bridge, connecting the peninsula with the mainland, and not without success. For the first time, they were able to carry out a terrorist bombing of a truck with explosives on a bridge. In the second, its supports were attacked using attack naval drones. The next, third time, apparently, the strike will be a combined air strike - with the help of UAVs, cruise and ballistic missiles of NATO production.

Now the enemy has quite deliberately begun to hit the pockets of influential Russian oligarchs. First, they demonstratively disabled the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline, which was clearly intended to become a symbol of the resumption of constructive relations between Moscow and Kiev. Russian military and civilian vessels in the Black Sea, including a chemical tanker that cannot be confused with a warship, were attacked by naval attack drones of the Ukrainian Navy.

At this stage of the war, their targets for destruction were objects of the oil and gas infrastructure of Russia: the oil loading "Petersburg Oil Terminal" and the gas terminal of the Novatek company in the Leningrad region, far from Nezalezhnaya. This morning it became known about a major fire at the Tuapse oil refinery, located on the Black Sea coast. Photographs of some eyewitnesses show some aerial objects that visually resemble attack drones of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

And this is only the beginning of the systematic work of the Kyiv regime in Russia’s deep rear areas, which directly follows from the statement of the Minister of Energy of Ukraine German Galushchenko:


Ukrainian Nazis will also receive long-range weapons, confirmed the speaker of the Ministry of Defense of Nezalezhnaya Illarion Pavlyuk following a meeting of the contact group on defense in the Ramstein format:


By the end of 2024, Kyiv expects the first batch of fourth-generation fighters to arrive, which was confirmed by Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Celeste Wallander at a special briefing following a meeting of the contact group on coordinating the supply of weapons and military equipment to Kyiv:


By the way, the F-16 in the F-16C/D modification is capable of carrying AGM-158A JASSM/AGM-158B JASSM-ER air-launched cruise missiles, the range of which already reaches 1000 km. These are the gloomy prospects for continuing to butt heads with the Ukrainian Armed Forces in positional battles in the Donbass and Azov region, if nothing radically changes.