You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy defense and foreign affairs my name is

Ryan Evans I'm the founder of war in the rocks I'm sitting here with Mike

Kaufman and we're going to be reflecting on the state of the war in Ukraine on

this second anniversary week of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Mike, thanks for coming back on the show.

Yeah, good to be back on it.

The big news now is the fall of Adevka.

This is a battle that began some months ago as Ukraine's own

offensive had sort of effectively petered out. Talk about how we got to this, the fall

of really Russia's biggest military victory in months on the

battlefield at least. Let's be honest in terms of the the scale of fighting it

it's not that big of a victory when we look at the city taken, but the battle is significant

nonetheless. So last October, Russian forces began an attempt to double envelopment of DFK.

If DFK was a pocket, it was essentially salient of Ukrainian troops,

position not far from the city of Denisk.

The Russian military tried a fairly large-scale attack, at least for them,

and they were operating something around at the battalion size level with a big armored push.

The initial attempt to encircle Ukrainian positions at a Diocafil, and so then they began just a standard

grinding assault with dismounted infantry and artillery support.

And the fighting went on like that from October to November to December.

Russian forces lost a lot of armored fighting vehicles and initial assault.

Okay if DFKO was holding.

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