The first critical moment came when the soldiers of the AFU(Armed Forces of Ukraine) 25th airborne brigade and Nationalist Guard units broke into Shakhtersk. The DPR in those days was literally hanging by a thread, junta got extremely close to a strategic victory. But the few militiamen that were fighting for the city held their ground until the reinforcements arrived, which saved Novorossia from being split into 2 parts. In subsequent battles the junta breakthrough in this location was stopped, and, after suffering heavy casualties in people and vehicles, the junta suffered a defeat there.

The second critical moment came when an attack was performed from Debalcevo through Faschevka, to meet the 24th Mechanized Brigade which was breaking out of the southern encirclement. It was an ambitious plan, the enemy tried to bisect Novorossiya by using the seemingly written off units as a strike group. This joint strike on Miusinsk and Krasnyi Luch triggered a severe crisis in Novorossiya - there were very few troops in this area. Miusinsk, which the mechanized convoys of the junta slipped through, was hardly defended at all, and some of the militia cossacks abandoned their positions in Krasnyi Luch. A real threat emerged of Novorossiya being split in two, and of the destruction of the militia forces in the area of Torez-Snezhnoye-Saur-Mogila. But again, the courage of ordinary soldiers who clung to the towns allowed to hold out until the reserves came, which cleared the enemy out of Miusinsk and held Krasnyi Luch. After overcoming the crisis, the militia was able to win the decisive battles here, which had far-reaching consequences.

Because the offensive on Yasinovataya failed, a breakthrough to Verkhnyaya Krynka and Zhdanovka with the goal of cutting Gorlovka off was stopped, and the junta failed to make any progress at all towards Yenakievo - in the second half of August the junta offensive started to run out of steam and the militia gradually began to gain offensive momentum.



Objectively, the situation demanded that the junta stop the offensive, regroup, pull up reserves, create stores of fuel and ammunition, and then continue the offensive by assembling new strike groups. Nevertheless, political considerations required a continuation of the offensive by the same depleted battlegroups. Because the front in the LPR has stabilized as a whole, the south encirclement was routed, and the offensive to the north of Donetsk has been stopped, the junta tried to gain further PR victories by continuing its offensive in the south, trying to take Ilovaysk and Mospino head-on despite the serious operational risk. And as junta got more and more embroiled in these urban battles, the front of the offensive got narrower and narrower - it began in early August on a broad front, but already by August 20th it effectively boiled down to a single point.