The Ukrainian army, which continues its offensive in Russia’s Kursk region, could double its gains on Russian territory after destroying or at least severely damaging three strategically important bridges.
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“Thousands of Russians will be surrounded and they will surrender,” notes Xavier Tiedelman, a former military pilot and aeronautics expert for Air et Cosmos magazine. “A pioneerThere will be a pocket with Russians who can no longer get supplies or leave.
In an interview at LCI, the analyst notes that solutions for these Russian troops, now stuck between the Seïm River and the Ukrainian border.
“[Les Russes] They will be forced to build temporary floating bridges, which means they will have to abandon their heavy equipment, and in any case, their logistics will no longer function properly, as happened in Kherson. [dans le sud de l’Ukraine] “They had to abandon the region by the end of 2022,” explains Mr. Tiedelman.
The successes associated with this Ukrainian incursion have surprised the world, and have not yet surprised Russia in particular, which has not yet been able to stop the Ukrainian push, says someone who returned from a visit to Ukraine to observe the situation on the ground.
“The failure of Russian intelligence is again dramatic – we don’t understand how that’s possible – a tactical failure in the sense that they didn’t have the men on the ground to prevent the Ukrainians from pushing in. There’s a failure to manage the situation because they couldn’t secure all three bridges, so the Ukrainians have hundreds of square kilometers of pockets with thousands of prisoners at their fingertips. Can connect,” added the guest.
Potential to almost double winnings
According to many estimates, the area that ends up in Ukrainian hands is closer to 700 square kilometers.
Last Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed to have captured 1,150 square kilometers of Russian territory after a 10-day offensive, but the claims coming out of Kyiv may be exaggerated.
However, as Cyril Amorsky, an independent French war correspondent based in Ukraine, put forward, the sector controlled by the Ukrainian army “will now be more or less 1000 km.2 1700 km away2», which will almost double Ukraine’s conquests on Russian territory.
Three bridges were damaged
Ukrainian Air Force Commander Mykola Oleshchuk released two videos in recent days showing attacks on bridges crossing the Seam River in Russia.
In the first article published on August 16, we can observe the strike that brutally hit the road section connecting the two banks of the Seïm river.
Reuters was able to confirm the location of this first video using satellite images.
Also, the same images released by Planet Labs show that the bridge has been completely cut off and is no longer in use.
A second video released on August 18 shows another high-intensity strike on the second bridge.
Reuters again geolocated the attack, noting that it also took place in the Kursk region, connecting the village of Zvannoe to the northern bank of the Seim River.
The strike heavily damaged the bridge, but did not destroy it. The images show that the strike left a gap in the middle of the infrastructure.
A third bridge crossing the Seam River in Kursk Oblast has finally been hit by another Ukrainian attack, the European News Agency reported on Monday, according to a Russian investigator.
French newspaper L’Actualité on Tuesday highlighted the comments of a Russian investigator who said Ukraine had “totally destroyed” one bridge and damaged two others.
“As a result of targeted shelling using rockets and artillery against residential buildings and civilian infrastructure in the village of Kharij…the third bridge over the Seim River was damaged,” the French press noted, following reports by Anonymous. The video posted on the Telegram channel of Vladimir Solovyov, a representative of the Russian intelligence service, a presenter and propagandist on the state television channel Rossiya 1.
