The defeat near the estuary indicates that Russian President Vladimir Putin excludes from among the priority defense of the Luhansk region in favor of the retention of captured territories in southern Ukraine. This is stated in the daily report of the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW).
According to Ukrainian and Russian sources, Russian troops continued to strengthen their positions in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions, despite the recent collapse of the Kharkov-Izumsky Front and even that the Russian defense around the estuary collapsed.
The decision is not to strengthen the vulnerable lines of the front in the area of Kupyansk and Liman almost certainly by the decision of Putin, not the military command, say ISW experts.
“This assumes that Putin is much more concerned about holding the strategic territories of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions than about the Lugansk region,” they believe.