Russian Plan To Create Sumy, Kharkiv Buffer Zone Has Failed

Russia's highly touted but underwhelming 2025 spring summer offensive has, for all intents and purposes, been disrupted. 

The Russians have failed to achieve any of their operational goals including the establishment of buffer zones in Sumy, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia, as well as their abject inability - yet again - to take Pokrovsk. The question is how many more failed offensives in Ukraine Russia can afford. JL

The Guardian reports:

Russian plans to create a “buffer zone” in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions , to take Pokrovsk and to capture all of Donetsk region had failed. Near Dobropillia, Ukraine had cut off Russian forces along the Kazenyi Torets river in a “trap”. Since the beginning of summer the Russians had been attacking with a high number of tiny infantry assaults but Moscow was suffering heavy losses on the battlefield. “The Russians’ spring and summer campaign has effectively been disrupted. They have been forced, year after year, to invent new reasons why the deadlines they announced keep getting pushed back.”

 

• Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and his top military commander have said Russian offensives failed to meet their goals and Moscow was suffering heavy losses on the battlefield. Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address on Friday that Ukrainian forces had inflicted heavy casualties on Russian troops in a counteroffensive near Dobropillia in the eastern Donetsk region. Military commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi told reporters that “the Russians’ spring and summer campaign has effectively been disrupted”. Zelenskyy disputed Russian president Vladimir Putin’s account that his forces were achieving their battlefield goals. “For some time they have been forced, year after year, to invent new reasons why the deadlines they announced keep getting pushed back,” he said.

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• Russian plans to create a “buffer zone” in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions in the north and north-east, to take Pokrovsk and to capture all of Donetsk region had failed. Speaking about a Russian breakthrough in August near Dobropillia, Syrskyi said Ukraine had cut off Russian forces along the Kazenyi Torets river in what he called a “trap”. He said that since the beginning of summer the Russians had been attacking with a tactic he called “a thousand cuts” – a high number of tiny infantry assaults. The active front line was now 1,250km (777 miles) long and an estimated 712,000 Russian personnel were involved in the fighting in Ukraine, he said.