To exploit this victory, the Soviet general staff planned an ambitious offensive with Rostov-on-Don as the ultimate objective, codenamed "Saturn".

Both sides suffered enormous casualties during this battle, but, most importantly for the outcome, the Germans severely depleted their forces, made them strip their flanks ever increasingly, leaving these in the hands of overstretched and poorly equipped Italian and Romanian allies.

Operation Winter Storm (Unternehmen Wintergewitter), undertaken between 12 and 23 December 1942, was the German 4th Panzer Army's attempt to relieve encircled Axis forces during the Battle of Stalingrad.

In late November, the Red Army completed Operation Uranus, which resulted in the encirclement of Axis personnel in and around the city of Stalingrad.

German forces within the Stalingrad Pocket and directly outside were reorganized under Army Group Don, under the command of Field Marshal Erich von Manstein.

The Axis troops encircled in the Stalingrad pocket should have been completely destroyed in a few days, however the plan, based on an incorrect calculation by the Soviet intelligence service about the number of enemy troops actually encircled (estimated at only 80,000 men instead of the real number of over 250,000), proved impracticable and unrealistic,[9][10] due to lack of logistics and vehicles of the Red Army.

[11] In the new scaled-down version of the operation, codenamed "Little Saturn", the Soviet offensive had still to attack the Axis troops on the Don and Chir rivers; after the destruction of the enemy forces, the mechanized forces would have to proceed quickly in two directions: west, to the communications center of Millerovo and south, to attack Tatsinskaya Airfield, from which the Luftwaffe planes departed to supply the Stalingrad pocket.

Operation Little Saturn was accompanied by another counter-offensive south of the Don which prevented further German advances to the relief of the entrapped forces at Stalingrad.

In February, the Soviet armies eventually reached and took Rostov, achieving objectives as originally planned in "Operation Saturn".