Ukraine Built A Fortress In The Southeast. A Russian Field Army Is Determined To Smash It.
Shrugging off Ukraine's counteroffensive, the Russian 5th Combined Arms Army marches west from Huliaipole.
All eyes are on Ukraine’s southeastern counteroffensive just west of Pokrovske
A few kilometers to the south, the Russians are the ones attacking
Their goal: to breach the fortified settlement of Verkhnia in order to march west toward Zaporizhzhia city
Ukrainian forces may be counterattacking along the right flank of the Russian 5th Combined Arms Army in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast. But that hasn’t stopped the 5th CAA from conducting its own attacks west of the town of Huliaipole—40 of them in a single day on 2 March, more than on any other sector of the 700-mile front.
Even after losing Starlink access and front-line comms in February, Moscow is throwing everything it has at this axis. That tells you how badly it wants the road to Zaporizhzhia city.
The 5th CAA’s objective is clear. It aims to break the dense Ukrainian fortifications around the village of Verkhnia Tersa, 9 km west of Huliaipole, a critical logistics base that the Russians captured in late December. If the 5th CAA can march from Huliaipole through Verkhnia Tersa, it might have a shot at laying siege to the town of Orikhiv, 25 km west of Verkhnia.
Orikhiv is one of the most daunting Ukrainian strongpoints standing between the Russians and the free city of Zaporizhzhia, 80 km west of the southeastern gray zone.
In other words, the Russians need to crack Verkhnia Tersa in order to crack Orikhiv. They need to crack Orikhiv in order to have any chance of capturing the ultimate southern prize: Zaporizhzhia city.
It’s for this reason that the 5th CAA is so intensely focused on the first objective in this sequence, Verkhnia Tersa. The Russian field army continues to assault in the direction of Verkhnia Tersa despite the recent meltdown in Russian communications—and despite the recent Ukrainian advances to the north, which could expose the 5th CAA’s right flank to Ukrainian attacks.
