Battle for the Donbas

In early 2022, the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, unleashed an attack on Ukraine that developed into the most significant conflict in Europe since the Second World War. In The Battle for the Donbas, the authors detail the bitter fighting of what is effectively the third phase of the Russo-Ukrainian war, this being the period from April to August 2022.After the Russians had failed to take Kyiv and bring down the Ukrainian government, they withdrew their forces from the north-east parts of Ukraine. These units were then brought together in the Donbas region. It was there that they launched their summer offensive, this being aimed at taking the four Ukrainian cities of Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. In effect, the Russians were looking to seize all of the Luhansk and Donetsk provinces as part of their so-called annexation efforts.This was the first extended Russian offensive and the fighting went on for months; it included an extended urban battle in Severodonetsk. It was also in this period that the American, British and other international volunteers began to show up on the front lines in greater numbers and when the critical amounts of aid from the US, UK and Europe began to stiffen up Ukraine’s defense.However, any war that lasts for longer than six weeks has a very real chance of turning into a war of attrition. This was the case during the fighting in the Donbas, which, as the authors show, shifted the war from the rapid advances of the first six weeks of the war to the extended force-on-force combat that would characterize the whole conflict from this point on. Therefore, Izyum and the subsequent battles for the Donbas, became the primary Russian offensive operations of this war. This story dominated the war for the next five months of the conflict.