From midsummer 1943 to late autumn 1944, a series of offensives drove the Germans out of Ukraine and drove them back to pre-war Poland and Romania. In the north, the 900-day German siege of Leningrad also began to dissipate.
From the end of the Kursk offensive until the end of the war, in less than two years the Red Army made a massive advance and almost always won victories. In the first phase of the battle, the Soviets continued to advance along the front line, finally reaching and crossing the Dnieper River, and recapturing many major cities such as Smosk, Kiev, and Dnipropetrovsk. In the second phase, from the winter of 1943 to the early spring of 1944, attacks were launched simultaneously in the northern and southern regions. In the north, the German siege of Leningrad was finally lifted; in the south, the rest of Ukraine was occupied.
The Dnieper River
This process was preceded by a Soviet offensive on the northern salient of Kursk on July 12, 1943. By 3 August, the Soviets had launched a further offensive on the southern flank of the salient. Although the Germans made extremely clever defenses against these attacks, they had to abandon Oryol.
By the end of the 8th, the Soviet Union had launched an all-out offensive in every part of the south of Moscow, but the most successful of them was the battle west of Kursk. Knowing in advance that Italy might surrender, Hitler had already begun to reinforce its reinforcements in Italy. The Allied landings in italy in early September made the operation even more urgent. Therefore, he authorized the retreat of German troops in eastern Ukraine to the area around the Dnieper River. At the time of the retreat, they were still concentrated in different towns, and those places had bridges over the river. The Soviets advanced to these areas and at the end of the month temporarily prepared river crossing facilities in the northern part of the Kiev Resistance and the western part of Dnipropetrovsk. Kiev was only retaken in early November.
Rush to the border
By December 1943, although the Army was commanded defensively by Ehrlich von Manstein and Éwald von Kleist, there were still many weaknesses on the German front, which had been held under Hitler's orders. The Soviet offensives continued until March 1944, but these offensives were defeated by stubborn German counterattacks. Later, Manstein and Kleist were dismissed by Hitler for retreating and often disagreed with their "Führer" Hitler.
When this phase of the fighting ended in mid-April, the front line began to stretch from the Pripet marshlands, through the Carpathian Mountains, to the Black Sea coast west of Odessa.