31 Mar: Ukrainians turn a nuclear bunker on a hill into impregnable fortress - Reporting from Ukraine

Day 767: Mar 31

Today, there is a lot of interesting news from the Bakhmut direction.

The most intense fighting is taking place on the northern flank of Chasiv Yar.

The situation in Bohdanivka is developing rapidly. Previously, I reported that Russian forces struggled to generate any gains in the direction of the village over the last month, making this area rather stationary. However, recently, Russian sources reported that Russian forces conducted a series of powerful assaults in and around the village. Ukrainian sources confirm that Russians used artillery support supplemented by drones to strike Ukrainian positions and undermine the overall Ukrainian defenses within the village. Ukrainian fighters reported that the Russian commanders resorted to pure infantry assaults, likely in order to preserve the future. Nonetheless, these assaults did not give the expected results, Ukrainians managed to halt Russian attacks and force them to dig in and set up positions in trenches and basements inside the small captured portion of the village. If we look at the topographic map, we can see that Ukrainians control the heights around the village, which enable them to detect and strike Russian forces in the lowlands and hamper their advances by inflicting severe losses from elevated areas at which Russians struggle to return fire. Russian sources claimed that Russian forces achieved a one-hundred-meter advance within the village. The total depth of the Russian advancement over the previous months, therefore, reached just three hundred meters in a village that stretched along a road for over three kilometers. Such a pace of advancement is clearly too slow, and it would take Russians many more months to take Bohdanivka with this costly approach.

However, a little bit to the south of Bohdanivka, the situation is very dynamic. Here, Russians tried to flank Ukrainian positions in Bohdanivka from the south along the railways and stretch Ukrainian troops along the contract line by attacking Bohdanivka from two axes of advance. The goal of this series of attacks was to force Ukrainians to pull back from the village. To achieve this, Russians first conducted heavy aerial bombardment of Ukrainian positions located to the south of Bohdanivka, close to Chasiv Yar. Russian bombardments with FAB glide bombs are extremely destructive, capable of making any targeted Ukrainian positions unsustainable for long-term defensive operations. This bombing eventually set conditions conducive for Russian assaults. The main assault started by sending a group of four Russian BMD armored personnel carriers to land their infantry at a treeline near the railway embankment. However, Ukrainian fighters spotted the first vehicle and destroyed it on the road. The second vehicle managed to unload its infantry, but it got abandoned after an artillery shell landed close to it, likely inflicting some damage. The third vehicle triggered a landmine, which immobilized the vehicle, although Russian infantry was still able to unload and proceed to secure positions in the tree line. Finally, the fourth BMD was struck by an FPV drone, although without significant damage, allowing it to unload the infantry and have the luck of being the only one in the column to drive back to a safe zone.

Now, with these new positions secured, the Russians established a one-kilometer-long bridgehead that could enable them to attack Ukrainians in two separate axes of advance: toward Chasiv Yar and toward Bohdanivka. Right now, Russian troops are around five hundred meters away from the eastern edges of the town, with a small forest separating them from the main Ukrainian positions. This gives an advantage to the Ukrainians, as Russians can't launch mechanized assaults through the area, restricting any possible Russian attacks to pure infantry assaults. Russian soldiers, therefore, have to face fortified Ukrainian positions in the town, which they can't do effectively without proper fire support from tanks and infantry fighting vehicles. That is why Russian forces will have to expand their zone of control to the south of the forest if they want to assault the town. Russian control of this area can, however, be problematic for Ukrainians in Bohdanivka because Russians can uppercut them from the south of the village with a flank attack from the forest and force them to withdraw. For this reason...