WION ‘Game Plan’: Russians use Soviet gas pipelines to infiltrate Kupyansk / 700 Ukrainian forces trapped

Uncategorized 2 Minutes

With over 10 million subscribers worldwide, WION is by far India’s biggest and most authoritative English-language broadcaster.  It is an honor to be called upon by them periodically to comment on major Russia-related developments. My last time with them on air was a month ago.

This 9-minute interview taken this morning focuses on the ongoing Russian capture of the city of Kupyansk in northeast Ukraine. The novel and most newsworthy aspect of this conquest has been the use by the Russians of Soviet era gas pipelines to move their troops into the city stealthily and take the Ukrainian defenders by surprise, killing about one third of the garrison outright and trapping the rest.

With regard to those ‘rest,’ it is noteworthy that among them are units from the so-called Russian Volunteer Corps that staged a terrorist incursion in the RF border region of Belgorod a year ago. Destroying these murderers was certainly one key objective of the Russian forces entering Kupyansk now.

Taking the city of Kharkov by knocking out fortified towns in the vicinity and surrounding the metropolis is surely on the Russian game plan for ending the war, although in fact this is a secondary front while the center of Russian attention continues to be in the Donetsk region, where the main fighting is around another logistics hub, Pokrovsky, known in Russian as Krasnoarmeysk. That is also proceeding well for the Russians as they move ever closer to the city’s outlying districts.

Taking Pokrovsk will open the way for the Russians to take the last two heavily defended cities in central Donetsk, Kramatorsk and Slavyansk, after which they have a clear path to the Dnieper river that divides Ukraine in two. It is worth noting, when speaking of the changing Russian military objectives, that there is talk on Russian state television now of the importance of taking Odessa to ensure the safety of the Crimea. The distance by sea from Odessa to Crimea is rather short and the city’s port is viewed by the French and British as a desirable base for their own anti-Russian operations when the war ends.  If Odessa is excised from the rump Ukraine, the country will lose much of its attraction to these Western allies of Zelensky.

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Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow's latest book, "War Diaries. The Russia-Ukraine War, 2022-2023" is a unique contribution to literature on the war thanks to the author's reports on the Russian home front written during his periodic visits to St Petersburg at a time when Russia no longer issued visas and nearly all Western journalists had left the country. Doctorow's two-volume "Memoirs of a Russianist" published in 2020 also constitutes a category of its own, consisting largely of diary entries rather than reminiscences written decades later.. Volume 2 focuses on the community of 50,000 expatriate managers working and living in Moscow during the 1990s, about which none of his peers has yet to write. Gilbert Doctorow is a professional Russia watcher and actor in Russian affairs going back to 1965. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College (1967), a past Fulbright scholar, and holder of a Ph.D. with honors in history from Columbia University (1975). After completing his studies, Mr. Doctorow pursued a business career focused on the USSR and Eastern Europe. For twenty-five years he worked for US and European multinationals in marketing and general management with regional responsibility. From 1998-2002, Doctorow served as the Chairman of the Russian Booker Literary Prize in Moscow. During the 2010-2011 academic year, he was a Visiting scholar of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University. Mr. Doctorow is a long-time resident of Brussels.

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