A small deserted village in the Donetsk region has become a real meat grinder for the Ukrainian military defending it, as well as for the Russian soldiers trying to capture it. A heavy battle is going on in and around the Sands.

Endless artillery shelling kills and maims Ukrainians and Russians alike, destroying their armored vehicles and destroying what is left of the deserted settlement and its environs.. Forbes writes about this, recalling that Sands became the site of hostilities 8 years ago, when Russia first invaded Ukraine. There have been conflicting reports in recent days about who controls the settlement.. Some reports claimed that Russian forces had captured it, while others claimed that Peski was still held by the 56th Motorized Infantry Brigade..

Since 2014, the village has fallen under the control of one side or the other many times.. And it's still going on. It is impressive that Sands is located just a few meters from the occupied part of the Donetsk region. But it was still very difficult for Russian forces to enter the village, where there had been no significant civilian population for many years..

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Forbes writes that in the sixth month of the Russian war against Ukraine, it became clear that the Ukrainian army sometimes exchanges territory for a while, turning the battle around and gradually retreating from less important towns in the Donbass in order to bleed and stop Russian forces.. If Russian troops get bogged down in bloody battles for places like Pesky, they can't be redirected to, for example, the Kherson region, where Kyiv's forces are focused on destroying enemy logistics. The depletion of the resources of the 49th United Army of the Russian Federation is a condition for any decisive counteroffensive of Ukraine in the region. Ukrainian battalions crossed the Ingulets River north of Kherson a few months ago, but so far they have not advanced more than a few kilometers from their brigades..

The Kremlin is shifting forces to the south. But he cannot send all his troops there and at the same time capture Peski. Ukrainian commanders also cannot send too many reinforcements to Pisky if they want to deploy operations near Kherson.. Therefore, the participants in the battles in the village in the Donbass are fighting with very limited resources.. Neither side has a decisive advantage over the other. The 56th Motorized Infantry Brigade's battalion of about 500 fighters for years fortified positions in Pisky, where about 2,000 people lived before the Russian invasion in 2014. Today all civilians are either gone or dead. So the Ukrainian garrison can use the entire village. When the Russian troops went on the attack in this direction at the end of July, they applied their already familiar scheme: first they fired on Peski with artillery, and only then the infantry went forward. The Ukrainians held their positions for many weeks, but at a high price..

“The battalion is just holding back the carnage with their bodies,” one Ukrainian soldier said..

The Ukrainian army has concentrated significant artillery forces in the south, where they are used to destroy bridges, roads and railway lines leading to Kherson. The liberation of the city is a priority for Kyiv at this stage of the war. And keeping Kherson is Russia's priority. That is why the Kremlin sent a dozen battalions from the east to reinforce the 49th United Army in the Kherson region.

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However, Moscow retained a sufficiently large amount of artillery in the Donbass to maintain a large advantage in the number of guns and missiles.. Ukrainian forces don't have that much artillery on their side. Therefore, the military in Peski is not always able to respond with counter-battery fire to Russian shelling. If the Russians capture the village, we can say that they managed to do it thanks to artillery.

“Without counter-battery capabilities, everything turns into a meaningless meat grinder, where an insane amount of our infantry is destroyed in a day,” wrote a soldier of the 56th motorized infantry brigade..

But it cannot be said for sure that Russian troops have already won in Pisky. Russian sources very often claimed that the village had already been captured, but the next day the fighting resumed.

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The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) cautiously supported this assessment by analyzing the geolocation of Russian artillery strikes on positions in Pisky..

“Russian forces are still hitting Ukrainian troops within the settlement, and not completely controlling it,” the institute noted..

If Ukrainian forces retreat from Pesok, they are likely to take defensive positions on the M04/E50 highway connecting the village and city of Dnipro, a large free metropolis 160 kilometers to the west. And then the "