🇷🇺🇺🇦 At Zolotyi Kolodyaz', Russia had first contact with Ukraine's New Donbas Line, and its DRGs broke through it for the first time, with the Ukrainians suffering from catastrophic manpower shortages.

In the long term, this might endanger all of Ukrainian-controlled Donbas. A damage assessment and technical strategical overview of the situation:

The story starts on July 21th, when, according to DeepState, Russian DRGs were recorded east of Nove Shakhove. As of the evening of August 6th, local channels finally reported shooting battles in Zolotyi Kolodyaz, 7km from the last known Russian position.

Let's break down the confusion on what exactly causes these breakthroughs. I identified 4 reasons:

1. Catastrophic manpower shortage in the Ukrainian ranks in this sector, initiating a loop of disorganized retreat ---> Russian breakthroughs ---> lengthening of the front ---> manpower shortage ---> disorganized retreat.

In this specific case we can name Koptieve, settlement from which the Ukrainians retreated in terrible order in mid-June. From there, the Russians exploited a hole that formed in Razine behind the Kazenyi Torets river, and continued without much resistance all the way until the doors of Rodynske, where at the time of writing they have been effectively stopped.

2. Command incapacity. In this sector the Ukrainian command is reportedly "living on another world", and is very likely not giving orders, or sending Ukrainian forces into hopeless counterattacks with no planning whatsoever.

3. Extremely large amount of Russian resources committed to this direction, with rumours talking of about 100,000 troops just on the Pokrovsk sector. Most of these resources are currently attacking 24/7, which eventually exhausts Ukrainian drone crews, forcing them to temporarily give in and give ground to the attackers Notice how I replaced "defenders" with "drone crews" specifically: there is simply nobody in the positions.

4. New Russian tactics. For about a month now, the Russians have been massively increasing DRG usage. These very small groups of 2-3 people are sent along very well planned routes with the hope of simply bypassing Ukrainian positions (which do not constitute a line, but rather "bubbles" on a map because of resource and personnel shortage), getting in their rear and sewing as much chaos as possible, harassing logistics and, something that is very often overlooked but is the one reason of many Russian breakthroughs recently, distracting Ukrainian UAV crews from the front and Russian pilots, which in turn get total operational freedom and can suppress Ukrainian "bubbles" easily.

These small DRG groups are almost always noticed on approach to the PVD (accumulation point), and they're hit both in that phase and when moving from the PVD to their objective. Even if these efforts render a DRG troop's survival chance very low, the sheer amount of forces committed that we just talked about give considerable results.

A possible breakthrough at Zolotyi Kolodyaz opens the opportunity to encircle and conquer the remaining Ukrainian strongholds in the Donbas.

In general, I think the Russians will make attempts to attack Dobropillia and Bilozerske from the east, if not to create a pincer from the northern side of these two cities, but if they will encounter resistance, they will have to stop.

Rather, I think they will try to advance north and south of Dobropillia to wedge between it and Bilozerske, while also using the railway to their advantage to create the northern pincer of Bilozerske.

Further south it seems logical, since they encountered resistance at Rodynske, to attack Bilytske from the north, and then descend all the way to Hryshyne, last retreat route for Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad.

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