Ukraine narrowly won the battle of Irpin in the war's earliest days. That's the conclusion of American and British experts who examined the fighting along the Irpin River northwest of Kyiv. "The Battle of Irpin River was a close-run thing," wrote Richard Sladden, Liam Collins and Alfred Connable in an article in British Army Review, a British military magazine. An attack in the east and south of Ukraine was the most likely course of action, therefore Ukrainian forces were primarily arrayed against this." Russian forces weren't prepared to rapidly deploy pontoon bridges to replace those across the Irpin River that Ukrainian troops had blown up.

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Persons: —, Richard Sladden, Liam Collins, Alfred Connable, Oleksandr Syrskyi, Collins, weren't, Oleksii Chumachenko, Carl von Clausewitz, Michael Peck Organizations: Service, British Army, Paratroopers, Hostomel Airport, Ukrainian 72nd Mechanized Brigade, Kyiv, Airport, 5th Company, 72nd Brigade, Hostomel, US Army Special Forces, Getty, 72nd Mechanized Brigade, Defense, Foreign Policy, Rutgers Univ, Twitter, LinkedIn Locations: Ukraine, Irpin, Kyiv, Russia, Ukrainian, —, British, Russian, Belarus, Dnipro, Hostomel, city's, Holland, Germany, Forbes