By the end of July, the Soviet front lost some of its units due to the critical situation of the Southern Front (the 6th and 12th armies) caused by the German 17th army. A substantial Soviet force, nearly the entire Southwestern Front, was positioned in and around Kiev, in the salient. At the same time, the 1st Panzer Army was forced to transition to defense due to a counteroffensive of the Soviet 26th Army. The advance on Kiev was halted and the main German effort then shifted towards the Korosten ukrep-raion, where the Soviet 5th Army was concentrated. The initial attempt to enter the city was thwarted by troops of the Kiev ukrep-raion (KUR, Kiev fortified district) and the counteroffensive of the Soviet 5th and 6th armies. By 11 July 1941, the Axis ground forces reached the Dnieper tributary Irpin River (15–20 km (9.3–12.4 mi) to the west of Kiev). On 7–8 July 1941, the German forces managed to break through the fortified Stalin Line, in the southeast portion of Zhytomyr Oblast, which ran along the 1939 Soviet border. Like the Western Front before it, the Southwestern Front had to be recreated almost from scratch.Īfter the rapid progress of Army Group Centre through the central sector of the Eastern Front, a huge salient developed around its junction with Army Group South by late July 1941. The 5th, 37th, 26th, 21st, and 38th armies, consisting of 43 divisions, were almost annihilated and the 40th Army suffered many losses. The Southwestern Front suffered 700,544 casualties, including 616,304 killed, captured, or missing during the battle. The encirclement trapped 452,700 soldiers, 2,642 guns and mortars, and 64 tanks, of which scarcely 15,000 had escaped from the encirclement by 2 October. The battle was an unprecedented defeat for the Red Army, exceeding even the Battle of Białystok–Minsk of June–July 1941. Kirponos was trapped behind German lines and was killed while trying to break out. Much of the Southwestern Front of the Red Army (commanded by Mikhail Kirponos) was encircled, but small groups of Red Army troops managed to escape the pocket days after the German panzers met east of the city, including the headquarters of Marshal Semyon Budyonny, Marshal Semyon Timoshenko and Commissar Nikita Khrushchev. The operation ran from 7 July to 26 September 1941, as part of Operation Barbarossa, the Axis invasion of the Soviet Union. This encirclement is considered the largest encirclement in the history of warfare (by number of troops). The First Battle of Kiev was the German name for the operation that resulted in a huge encirclement of Soviet troops in the vicinity of Kiev during World War II.
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