With the unconditional surrender of the remnants of the Ukrainian army at the Azov Steel Plant, the Battle of Mariupol came to an end. By the evening of the 18th, 1,705 Ukrainian troops had come out of the underground fortress of the Azov Steel Works and surrendered. According to the Ukrainian prisoners, there are currently less than half of them out, which means that the size of the remaining defenders of the Azov Steel Plant will be as high as 3500 to 4000 people, far beyond the previous analysis of the outside world. After locking in the victory of Mariupol, the Russian coalition forces will once again release 20,000 elite troops, and the armored units of the 801st Brigade of Russian Navy Infantry will move north to participate in the siege of central Donbass. The first troops to move from Mariupol to the battlefield in the luhansk region in the east were the Russian Chechen Guards, who were ordered to move to the Luhansk front after the remnants of the Azov battalion and other Ukrainian troops were completely compressed into the Azov steel plant.
After arriving on the new front, the Russian Chechen Guards troops transferred from Mariupol joined forces with the LPR forces and the Chechen armed forces that had participated in the war earlier, and brewed a large-scale annihilation war around the Severodnetsk and Lisichansk regions. In the previous three weeks, the Chechen forces and the LPR coalition army adopted a "road roller" tactic, fighting steadily and steadily. Before the armored forces and ground infantry were introduced, the engineering units had to clear the way (mines and improvised explosive devices) in order to minimize casualties among the Russian coalition forces. Earlier this week, Chechen forces, in coordination with LPR forces, won a decisive victory in Popasnaya, west of Luhansk. It became a solid foundation for the strategic city of North Donetsk under the allied encirclement on May 18.
After the Russian Chechen Guards took Popasnaya, the Base Camp of the Ukrainian Army immediately issued a pessimistic forecast. The Ukrainian military said, "Popasnaya is no longer in our hands". If the Russian army "takes" Severodonitesk again, it will form a "continuous offensive" that will provide conditions for the Russian army to capture all of Luhansk. Unexpectedly, only three days later, the Chechen forces and the LPR coalition army achieved a three-sided encirclement of North Donetsk. From the Ukrainian side, the city of Severodonitesk is the de facto capital of Luhansk, no less strategic than Mariupol. The situation on the battlefield is also very similar to that of Mariupol. Mariupol is backed by the Sea of Azov, while North Donetsk is backed by the North Donetsk River, and once it is surrounded, it is an unfavorable battlefield pattern of the Backwater War.
According to foreign media on Wednesday, the LPR side announced that in the Severodnetsk and Lisichansk regions, a total of about 15,000 to 16,000 Ukrainian ground troops were trapped in the encirclement of the Russian coalition army. The Ukrainian prisoners captured in the just-concluded Battle of Avdeyevka claimed that there were more than 10,000 defenders in the city of North Donetsk and the surrounding suburbs, and they were ordered to "stick to Severodonitec", but these tens of thousands of Ukrainian defenders had neither effective command (the senior Ukrainian commander in the region had withdrawn a month ago), nor adequate weapons, ammunition and logistics. The Siddonnetsk defenders repeatedly requested that all of them retreat to Lisichansk, east of the river, and build a strong defensive line on the North Donetsk River, but they were strictly rejected by the Ukrainian base camp.
Severodonitetsk and Lisichansk were only one step away, but all the bridges on the North Donetsk River between the two cities were strategically destroyed by the Ukrainian army, and whether the Ukrainian army retreated or the Russian coalition army crossed the river to the west, it was supported by pontoon bridges built by the engineer troops. Over the past few days, the Ukrainian army's bridging operation on the North Donetsk River has been discovered and frustrated. Now, like Mariupol on March 1, North Donetsk is an "isolated city" surrounded by water on three sides of the north and one backwater. In the video released today by RT reporters, a large number of Tu-22M3 "backfire" bombers are loading ground attack ammunition, which will be combined with long-range artillery fire deployed by the Russian coalition forces on the flank of Lisichansk to prevent the Ukrainian troops in Lisichansk from crossing the river to support Severodonnetsk.