Summary/Overview
- Ukraine says an offensive in the Kherson region has begun – with some initial successes. Russia agrees and says offensive actions have been beaten back and substantial losses in men and materiel have been inflicted. Thick fog of war, thicker of propaganda.
- The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) mission to investigate the situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant complex, will reach the city of Ernegodar on August 31 after a stopover in Kiev. Artillery shelling of the six-reactor area in Russian-controlled territory south of the Dnepr River continued on August 30.
- Natural gas pumping over the Nord Stream 1 pipeline will be halted from August 31 through September 3 for repairs, according to Russian operator Gazprom.
- Russian forces continued their slow grind toward Sloviansk and into Bakhmut at the mouth of the Donbas salient and moved slowly west from locations opposite and south of the city of Donetsk.
South
The south, notably the Kherson region, is not necessarily where the action was, but certainly the area that caught most of the public attention after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address on Monday (August 29) that a Ukrainian offensive had begun and that the Ukrainian troops would chase the Russian army “to the border.” He warned: “If they want to survive, it’s time for the Russian military to run away.”
Zelensky’s senior advisor Oleksy Arestovych commented that Russian defenses in the Kherson region had been “broken through in a few hours.”
Meanwhile, the Russian Ministry of Defense said the Ukrainian offensive operations in the Nikolaev-Krivoi Rog (Mikolaiv-Kryvyi Rih) area resulted in the “rout of the Ukrainian forces.”
Ministry spokesman Lieutenant General Igor Konashenkov reported: “In the past 24 hours, in their effective operations the Russian forces eliminated 48 tanks, 46 infantry fighting vehicles, 37 other combat armored vehicles, 8 pickup vehicles with large-caliber machine-guns and over 1,200 Ukrainian servicemen.”
We are facing a thick fog of – if not actual, then at any rate propaganda – war. MODUK, Britain’s ministry of Defense, usually not shy about touting Ukrainian successes, made a surprisingly subdued comment saying it was “not yet possible to confirm the extent of Ukrainian advances but its [Ukraine’s] army had increased artillery fire in front line sectors across southern Ukraine.”
What is known from direct observations reported by NATO military sources, which report its observations of Russian but not of Ukrainian moves, is that Russian forces probed against the town of Potomkyne some 35 kilometers south of the city of Kryvyi Rih. They also have increased artillery fire directly into the city of Mikolaiv.
Perhaps the more important action in the South is the visit of the IAEA’s 14-member mission to the town of Ernegodar in the Russian-occupied area south of the Dnepr River where Europe’s largest nuclear power complex is located.
Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of shelling the area near and at the Zaporizhzhia power plant over the past several months, which clearly has created the danger of a nuclear disaster.
It can only be hoped that the IAEA mission can get to the truth of what’s been happening there and get both sides to stop.
On the face of it, for Russia to direct artillery fire at a power plant that they control and at which they have stationed some 500 of their soldiers appears to be an absurdity. The Ukrainians, though, are blaming the Russians for mounting “false flag” operations and for shooting at themselves.
The Americans say maybe the Ukrainians did some of the shelling because the Russians were shooting at the fairly large city of Nikopol, on the Ukrainian side, from the area of the power plant.
Take a look at the picture at the top of this story of the six reactors as seen from the Ukrainian-controlled north side of the Dnepr River. Certainly nice big easy targets.
East/Center
East of Siversk, a town by now largely destroyed, Russian forces conducted ground operations against the village of Ivano Darivka and gained some new ground.
Farther south, around Bakhmut, fighting continues in Kodema and near Zaitseve. Fighting in and around Soledar seems to have subsided and most of the town is now in Russian hands. Still, Bakhmut is holding out and does not appear to be an immediate Russian priority.
The Donetsk City area and places farther south have seen much heavier fighting and there is no doubt that Russian forces will keep up the threat of a breakout into the western part of the Donetsk Oblast – in particular, if a more threatening situation develops around Kherson and it becomes a necessity to tie down Ukrainian forces that might otherwise be moved to the southern theater.
Assessment
Ever since late April and certainly since late July, the great Ukrainian counteroffensive starting with the liberation of Kherson City has been repeatedly announced. On Monday night, President Zelensky and his spokesman and since then several other Ukrainian government officials have said that this time it’s for real.
Talk alone, of course, doesn’t make it so. Launching a major offensive without significant air cover amounts to an astonishing undertaking not many military strategists would dare. By all accounts, the Ukrainian air force is lucky if it can mount some 10 sorties a day.
So why throw all caution to the wind and try a counteroffensive anyway?
The answer clearly cannot be found in military logic. Instead, it lies almost certainly in what Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told the French newspaper Le Figaro on Monday after he met with French President Macron: that there is a growing divide within the EU on the Ukraine conflict and that “certain member states” would prefer to seek peace rather than sticking with Kiev until it prevails. “So yes, a certain threat of implosion [of the EU bloc] exists,” he said.
President Zelensky and his closest EU and NATO supporters may well have concluded that even a failing offensive would be preferable to the current slow grind and might reinvigorate flagging support.
Rallying NATO’s troops could likewise explain why Oleksandr Tkachenko, the Ukrainian minister of culture and information policy, recently told the major German newspaper Die Welt that Putin will attack Poland and then march to Berlin.
Follow Uwe Parpart on Twitter at @uwe_parpart