Today the NY Times published a summary of where the fighting stands as of this week. Though battles continue to take place along the entire front, the focus for Ukraine has been in the south.

After a faltering start marked by heavy losses, Ukraine has regrouped and adjusted its tactics. Its forces have broken through what they consider to be the first line of Russian defenses along two lines of attack heading south.

One of those thrusts has retaken the village of Robotyne; though tiny, it represented the most important advance of the counteroffensive to date. Ukraine had pushed through Russia’s first major layer of defenses and set up a base for launching further advances to the south.

The Ukrainian military said on Sunday that it had reclaimed an additional 1.5 square kilometers — less than one square mile — around Robotyne. By expanding their bridgehead there, Ukrainian forces hope to reduce pressure on their logistical operations, allowing them to intensify their attacks around the village of Verbove, about nine miles to the east.

Russia has reportedly been deploying airborne assault units for defense in this area, probably because they are considered elite soldiers. Ukraine sees it as a sign that the Russian defenses are in danger of failing.

ABC News put together a story about analysts who believe the Ukrainian breakthrough of the first Russian line is potentially a big deal:

In a rare interview last week, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) Director of Analysis Trent Maul told The Economist that after reaching Russia’s second line of defenses it is a “realistic possibility” that Ukrainian troops will be able to break through all of Russia’s defensive lines in southern Ukraine by the end of 2023…

“Penetrating a prepared defensive position like this is incredibly hard and difficult even for the U.S. military,” Fred Kagan, the director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute, told ABC News.

“The Ukrainians are doing it under much more difficult circumstances than we would and this initial penetration is very important,” he added.

“You get the feeling that they’re about to really get through the main defenses, but I just can’t tell for sure, but it feels like we’re on the verge of something here in the next few weeks,” retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, formerly the top U.S. Army commander in Europe, told ABC News.

The backstory here is that US trainers had taught Ukrainian troops to make a big push in a specific area to break through the lines quickly. But Russia had spent months mining the front lines and Ukraine concluded a mass assault was too costly. So instead they moved to an approach using small groups advancing as fast as the mines would allow. The plus side is that they lost a lot fewer soldiers. The downside is that Ukraine is now running out of time. NBC News published a story emphasizing this last point.

In an interview with the BBC that aired Sunday, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said colder and wetter weather conditions will make it much harder for Ukrainian forces to maneuver, and Kyiv could have as little as a month to turn things around in a significant way on the battlefield.

“There is still a reasonable amount of time, probably about 30 to 45 days’ worth of fighting weather left, so the Ukrainians are not done,” Milley said…

Kyiv hopes that last week’s penetration of the Russian first defense line in the south around the villages of Robotyne and Verbove will turn into a major breakthrough that will allow its troops to split Russian forces in the south and threaten Moscow’s valued “land bridge” to the occupied Crimean Peninsula.

The Kremlin has already largely dismissed the Ukrainian counteroffensive as a failure.

The Kremlin was always going to say that no matter what happened. But just a week ago they announce another “strategic redeployment.”

Yevgeny Balitsky, the top Moscow-installed official in the Zaporizhzhia region, said in a television interview that the Russian army had withdrawn for what he called tactical reasons.

“The Russian army abandoned – tactically abandoned – this settlement because staying on a bare surface when there is no way to completely dig in… doesn’t generally make sense. Therefore the Russian army moved off into the hills,” news outlet RBC quoted him as saying.

The fact is that Ukraine has made progress and Russia is backpedaling despite the defensive lines they spent months preparing. That has to be making the Kremlin somewhat nervous. At this point they may just be playing for time and counting on the weather to save them from a real breakthrough.