Ukrainian Armor Has Breached The First of Three Russian Trenches

Ukrainian armor has broken through the outermost trench of the Russians’ three-layer defensive line—the so-called “Surovikin Line”—just west of Verbove, in southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

Videos from Russia’s 56th Air Assault Regiment, which appeared online on Wednesday, depict Ukrainian Marder and Stryker infantry fighting vehicles—almost certainly belonging to the 2,000-person 82nd Air Assault Brigade—advancing east toward Verbove, well past the first trench anchoring Russian defenses.

Russian artillery targeted the Ukrainian column, apparently damaging or destroying one of the wheeled Strykers. But the Ukrainians kept coming: armored trucks trailing behind the IFVs as the 82nd Brigade assault force reached the second trench.

It’s unclear how deeply the Ukrainian force penetrated Russian lines, and whether it stayed or retreated. But the breakthrough, even if it was brief, is bad news for Russian forces on the axis stretching from Robotyne—which the 82nd and adjacent brigades liberated in mid-August—through Tokmak toward Russian-occupied Melitopol, 50 miles to the south.

As the Ukrainians were ejecting the last Russians from Robotyne, the Kremlin in its desperation redeployed some of its last operational reserves—in the form of the 76th Guards Air Assault Division—from the east to the south. If the 76th GAAD can’t stop the Ukrainians from breaching Verbove and continuing their advance toward Tokmak and Melitopol, which unit can stop them?

The 82nd Brigade’s assault wasn’t hasty. After liberating Robotyne a month ago, the Ukrainian 9th Operational Corps—which oversees several well-equipped brigades on the Melitopol axis including the 46th and 82nd Air Assault Brigades and army’s 47th Mechanized Brigade—paused to regroup and reconsolidate its forces south of the settlement.

It was during this pause that the first Ukrainian reconnaissance teams slipped through the outer trenchline northwest of Verbove. And it was then that the Russians bagged their first ex-British Challenger 2 tank, 14 of which equip—or equipped—the 82nd Brigade’s tank company.

The brigade apparently had been keeping its Challenger 2s a mile or two behind the line of contact, using them as precise mobile fires while protecting them from drones and mines. But one of the 69-ton, four-person tanks struck a mine while shifting positions south of Verbove. Immobilized, it was an easy target for an explosives-laden drone.

If the 13 surviving Challenger 2s supported the Wednesday assault through the outermost Surovikin Line, they did so from long range. None of the tanks appears in the Russian videos.

It should come as no surprise that the 31-ton, nine-person Marders and 19-ton, 11-person Strykers led the way. The 82nd Brigade’s infantry battalions initially operated 40 of the tracked, ex-German Marders and 90 of the wheeled, ex-American Strykers.

In the 15 weeks since Ukraine launched its southern counteroffensive, the brigade has lost at least three Strykers. But the Germans and Americans helpfully have pledged plenty of replacement vehicles: an additional 60 Marders and a hundred or so Strykers. All that is to say, the IFVs are less precious than the Challenger 2s are.

And besides, Ukrainian assault doctrine is evolving to be more infantry-centric. While the Ukrainian marine corps, battling in southeastern Ukraine, favors mixed assault forces combining armored trucks with speedy T-80 tanks, army and air-assault forces in southwestern Ukraine increasingly lead with their IFVs and trucks and keep their tanks farther back for fire-support.

That helps to explain why 82nd Brigade crews have described their Challenger 2s as “snipers,” and why we’ve seen the 47th Brigade’s German-made Leopard 2A6s firing their main guns at high elevation, as though they were howitzers.

Unconventional though these methods may be, there’s no arguing with the results. Ukrainian forces are advancing, albeit slowly—and have gotten heavy equipment through the first of three main lines of Russian fortifications in the south.

Left undepicted in the videos from the Wednesday assault is the vital work that Ukrainian artillery did in the days and weeks before the attack. Ukraine’s howitzer gunners and rocket-launcher crews are the unheralded heroes of the counteroffensive. Matching accurate intelligence with far-firing Western-made guns and launchers, the artillery batteries have closed the traditional casualty gap between attackers and defenders.

Traditionally, an attacking army expects to lose three people or vehicles for everyone one person or vehicle a dug-in defender loses. But thanks in large part to their artillery, the attacking Ukrainians actually have been losing fewer people and vehicles than the defending Russians have been losing.