Et lasted until Saturday afternoon before the Russian Ministry of Defense presented its own version of withdrawing from large parts of the north-eastern Ukrainian Kharkiv region. As recently as Friday, Moscow’s military had released pictures that were supposed to show how reinforcements were being sent there.
Now the message was quite different: the Ministry of Defense actually admitted the loss of the conquered territory, but presented it as an “operation to reduce and organize the movement of troops from the area around the towns of Balakliya and Izyum, carried out over the course of three days”. Troops would be transferred to the territory of the “People’s Republic” of Donetsk.
This entity, established in 2014 and recognized as a “state” by President Vladimir Putin in February shortly before the attack, is far from being fully conquered, despite great Russian efforts; it is also likely to be more difficult for Russia now, after the loss of territory, to push forward to the city of Slavjansk, for example. The “regrouping” serves the purpose of the “special operation” to “liberate the Donbass” and “increase efforts in the Donetsk direction,” the Defense Ministry said.
This was reminiscent of the formulas that the military had found for earlier setbacks: when the withdrawal from the Kyiv and Chernihiv areas had to be declared at the end of March, it was considered a “reduction in military activity”; in June, when the occupiers had to leave Snake Island in the Black Sea, as a “step of good will”. Now the Ministry of Defense was also anxious to report successes from the newly lost areas: “More than 2,000 Ukrainian and foreign fighters were destroyed” in three days.
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Yevgeny Poddubny, a state media war correspondent who has been tried and tested on many fronts and whose arrival in Donbass in February heralded the impending raid, said the withdrawal had “successfully” avoided encirclement of the troops, broadcasting on his Telegram channel with more than 670,000 subscribers reported a very high number of Ukrainian casualties and invoked the power of Russian artillery: “Work, brothers!”
But other commentators were outraged by the withdrawal, so much so that the Defense Ministry turned off the comment function on its posts on all social networks. A number of the war supporters’ Telegram channels were about “treason”, the search for culprits and historical parallels for the defeat, also with mutual accusations. Blogger Roman Saponkov wrote that Russia’s defense ministry “tricked our president on all fronts”; If “those responsible for the collapse of the front were not arrested for treason before the eyes of the whole country,” it would look like a “plan” that would endanger the goals of the “special operation.”
His colleague Roman Romanov wrote that after the loss of the Kharkiv region, the only thing that could prevent losing half of the Luhansk “People’s Republic” (an entity also established in 2014 and recognized as a “state” by Putin in February) were massive ones Attacks on Kyiv and “tactical nuclear strikes on the western regions of Ukraine”; for a “surrender” “four to five” should suffice. Igor Girkin, known as “Strelkov”, who was involved in the conquests of 2014 and, according to the prosecution in the MH17 trial in the Netherlands, also in the downing of the passenger plane, spoke of an “extremely sharp operational crisis on a broad section of the front, which has already led to a major one defeat increases”.