Russia eyes Ukraine's ‘fortress belt' after fall of Chasiv Yar

Al Jazeera

5 days ago

During a difficult week in Ukraine's ground war, Russian troops completed their conquest of Chasiv Yar, a high ground in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region, and claimed to have breached the outskirts of Kupiansk, a city with a pre-war population of more than 26,000, in Ukraine's northern Kharkiv region.
Both conquests are the result of months-long efforts and have cost the Russians dearly in blood and weapons.
At the same time, Russian forces pushed into Dnipropetrovsk, a Ukrainian region whose borders they first breached over the weekend of June 7-8, capturing the village of Sichneve, which Russians call Yanvarskoye. It was the third claimed conquest in Dnipropetrovsk. Earlier, Russia captured Dachnoye and Malynivka.
Russia also began to launch jet-powered unmanned aerial vehicles to deadly effect, killing 31 people in Kyiv on July 31.
Ukraine responded with deep strikes on Russian transport networks and energy hubs.
Chasiv Yar and the 'fortress belt'
Russia's Ministry of Defence said its paratroopers overran Chasiv Yar on July 31.
Moscow's forces began to besiege the city in March 2024, about a month after the fall of Avdiivka, 30km (20 miles) to the south freed up offensive troops.
Russia prioritised this line of attack after conquering the city of Bakhmut in May 2023, following months of battles led by Wagner Group mercenaries.
Since Bakhmut fell, Russian forces have conquered a salient running 27km (17 miles) west of it. Chasiv Yar presented a challenge and a prize – a challenge because it sat astride a canal that formed a natural defensive barrier, and a prize because it is a vantage point from which Russia can survey the remaining free areas of Donetsk.
'Chasiv Yar is a key height in terms of adjusting observation and conducting combat operations,' military expert Vitaly Kiselyov told the Soloviev Live television network in Russia.
'To all appearances, we will be outflanking from the south and the north, gradually puncturing the enemy forces and edging them out, all the more so as we now hold an advantageous height relative to all other settlements,' said Kiselyov.
Another Russian military expert said the capture of Chasiv Yar enabled Russian forces to advance towards the so-called 'fortress belt' of heavily defended Ukrainian cities in Donetsk.
'Chasiv Yar is situated on a hilltop, and beyond it, there are very vast expanses of flat terrain. The nearest agglomeration – Kramatorsk, Druzhkivka and Kostiantynivka – is well fortified,' Andrey Marochko told the Russian newswire TASS.
Chasiv Yar sits at the northern end of an attempted Russian encirclement of Konstiantynivka, and on Saturday, the Russian Defence Ministry claimed its forces had captured Aleksandro-Kalinovo, on the southern end of the crab's claw enclosing Konstiantynivka.
Some analysts disagreed that the fall of Chasiv Yar was as important as Russian analysts made it sound.
'Tactical Russian advances westward in Chasiv Yar do not constitute an operationally significant development in this area,' said the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington-based think tank.
'Russian forces have held most of northern and central Chasiv Yar since late January 2025 and began advancing in southwestern Chasiv Yar in mid-June 2025,' the ISW said.
It added that Ukrainian lines of communication were not further threatened, since 'Russian forces have been within tube artillery range of Ukraine's main logistics route through the fortress belt since late January 2025 and have held positions along the T-0504 Bakhmut-Kostyantynivka highway for several months, and have yet to significantly threaten Ukrainian positions in Kostiantynivka.'
The situation was different in Pokrovsk, some 35km (22 miles) southwest of Chasiv Yar, which Russia has also besieged.
Denis Pushilin, the head of the pro-Russian, self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, said Ukrainian lines of communication into Pokrovsk had been impaired.
'The enemy has been largely denied the possibility to deliver ammunition and carry out troop rotation,' Pushilin said.
Ukrainian commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskii said on Telegram, 'The most difficult situation now is in the Pokrovsk, Dobropillia, and Novopavlivka directions,' naming two more settlements that lie behind Pokrovsk in unoccupied Donetsk.
'The enemy is increasing efforts to capture our key agglomerations, looking for vulnerable spots in our defence, and conducting active combat operations simultaneously on several fronts,' he said.
He said Russian forces were forming sabotage groups in the Ukrainian rear in an attempt at 'total infiltration', and that Ukraine was 'using anti-sabotage reserves, whose task is to search for and destroy enemy sabotage groups'.
Kupiansk and the 'buffer zone'
At the northern end of the front, Russia claimed to have entered Kupiansk in Kharkiv on Tuesday.
Russian troops were fighting street battles in Kupiansk, Russian military expert Andrey Marochko told TASS. He said troops were deploying small, mobile groups targeting Ukrainian positions with precise strikes.
Russia's forays into Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv lie beyond Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson, the four regions Russia formally annexed in September 2022.
Russia claims to be creating a buffer zone to protect those regions, but Ukraine believes that claim to be an excuse for further occupation.
Russian low-level officials have suggested that the buffer zone should be at least 30km (20 miles) deep, but the Russian leadership has placed no such limit.
Moscow also continued its long-range strikes against Ukraine.
An overnight drone attack on July 31 killed 31 people in Kyiv. The Ukrainian Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said Russia used jet-powered Shahed drones, which travel much faster than the propeller-driven kind, and are difficult to intercept.
The Ukrainian Air Force reported that Russian forces launched eight Iskander-K cruise missiles from Kursk city and 309 Shahed-type and decoy drones. United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer called it 'an absolutely vile, brutal strike'.
The war of words
Even as he pressed on with these offensives, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that Ukraine was not ready for peace talks.
During a news conference with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Friday, Putin said, 'In principle, we can wait if the Ukrainian leadership believes that now is not the time,' adding that 'all disappointments arise from excessive expectations.'
He was referring to the fact that three rounds of direct negotiations have yielded no ceasefire.
United States President Donald Trump repeated last week that he was 'disappointed' in Putin, and has in recent weeks allowed US weapons to flow to Ukraine.
On Friday, the US Pentagon said it would sell Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air (AMRAAM) missiles to Ukraine.
Trump also got into a social media spat with Dmitry Medvedev, the deputy head of Russia's National Security Council, after Medvedev objected to Trump's August 9 deadline for Russia to seal a ceasefire deal.
On Saturday, Trump wrote on his TruthSocial service that he had 'ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that'.
On the same day, Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on India for buying Russian oil. On Tuesday, he told CNBC, 'I'm going to raise that very substantially over the next 24 hours, because they're buying Russian oil, they're fuelling the war machine, and if they're going to do that, I'm not going to be happy.'
Ukraine's strikes
Meanwhile, Ukraine stepped up its interdiction campaign against Russian energy and transport infrastructure.
On July 31, Russia said it shot down 32 Ukrainian long-range UAVs in its western border regions. As a result of the Ukrainian attack, it said rail services in the Volgograd region were delayed.
Ukraine has been attacking the Russian railways connecting defence factories to the front, said open-source intelligence gatherer Frontelligence Insight.
Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine's Center for Countering Disinformation, said a radio factory in Penza, Russia was attacked, which made mobile command complexes and automated combat control systems.
On Saturday, Ukraine unleashed a wide-ranging set of strikes.
Kovalenko said the Radio Plant in Penza was attacked a second time, along with Electropribor, a manufacturer of encryptors, secure modems and switches for military and intelligence agencies.
Ukraine also hit a storage and launch site for Shahed drones at the Primorsko-Akhtarsk military airfield in Krasnodar.
But its biggest hits were against oil refineries.
Ukraine attacked the Ryazan Oil Refinery, one of Russia's four largest, responsible for more than 6 percent of all refining in Russia, causing a fire. Also hit was the Novokuybyshevsk Oil Refinery near Samara city, where explosions were filmed. Ukraine also struck the Annanafteproduct oil depot in the Voronezh region, setting it alight, and on Sunday, a Ukrainian long-range strike hit an oil depot in Sochi on the Black Sea.
Ukrainian media reported that explosions damaged the main Russian gas pipeline carrying gas from Turkmenistan to Russia, shutting it down indefinitely. The media outlets said it supplied military industries, including the Demikhov Machine-Building Plant, the MiG aircraft company, and the Magnum-K ammunition plant.