Sloviansk

Our refineries are on the fritz.

In a blunt rejection of Trump's demand to stop bombing Russian oil refineries, Ukraine attacked the Sloviansk eco oil refinery.

So there it is.

You c- you...

in the Kharkov-Zumi region, but most importantly in Donbass.

They had a setback in the northern part of the pincer against Slavyansk and Krematorsk, but in the south they're going up, also coming up on the east.

in the big crisis which i think is going to pop up in the media over the next weeks will be what's happening in zaporozhye because orejov will soon fall to the russians and at the same time they're also advancing uh up up in the north so as they start to close in on zaporozhye city I think it's going to change the war to a large extent.

And this is just the front lines.

In April of twenty fourteen, a few dozen armed men walked into a town in northern Donetsk Oblast and seized the police station.

The town was Sloviansk.

It is where this war actually started, not in twenty twenty two, but in twenty fourteen.

And for eleven years it has sat far enough behind the line that people opened cafes there, swam in the lake, and sent their children to school.

This autumn, the Russian army is getting close to it again.

Some of the Ukrainian brigade commanders defending Sloviansk today fought there in twenty fourteen.

Rob Lee put it to me in one sentence, "This coming battle of Donbas is a culmination of twelve years of fighting." Two guests have just spent a week driving that ground.

Rob Lee, Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, one of the most respected analysts in Russian military anywhere, and R- Francis Farrell of the Kyiv Independent, who gets closer to the fighting more often than any other English language speaking reporter still working in this country.

But I think the, the Russians have pretty much taken it.

Um, but it has to be said, you know, which is important, and because this is-- what it is, is like they're out essentially on the, it's the southernmost, um, part of the, the Kramatorsk or Sloviansk-Kramatorsk conurbation.

And so they'll be starting...

It's, it is the beginning.

They are moving into that.

Uh, but, but still, you know, in spite of all that, these are important advances.

You know, I, uh, and, and they're also advancing to the, um, uh, very close to Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, you know, directly, uh, from the east of them and ge-getting approaching the outskirts of these cities.

You know, they s- they still have, there's several kilometers that they have to go, but they're getting pretty close.

But despite the sheer, unfathomable stupidity of those tactics, through a horrific expenditure of human biomass and Soviet-era stockpiles, the Russian army had managed to carve out a protruding salient, pushing toward Liman by the late spring of 2025.

That was supposed to be the staging ground for a grand pincer movement, the wedge that would finally unhinge the Ukrainian defensive belt in the northern Donetsk region and threaten Slovyansk from the north.

Every square kilometer of the salient was bought with thousands of severed limbs, incinerated columns, and shattered lives.

Russian state television treated every tree line gained like the capture of the Reichstag.

Now again, if you read the Western corporate press, you'd think this plan was a massive Russian victory.

League drafts suggested that Ukraine would have to withdraw its troops from the remaining 14% of the Donbas it still holds, which is much more than, you know, actually Putin thinks they hold.

Specifically, the highly fortified Slovyansk and Kramatorsk agglomerations and, you know, freeze the conflict line.

In exchange, Russia would supposedly get sanctions relief.