In this paper we study the asymptotics of the Korteweg--de Vries (KdV) equation with steplike initial data, which leads to shock waves, in the middle region between the dispersive tail and the soliton region, as $t rightarrow infty$. In our previous work we have dealt with this question, but failed to obtain uniform estimates in $x$ and $t$ because of the previously unknown singular behaviour of the matrix model solution. The main goal of this paper is to close this gap. We present an alternative approach to the usual argument involving a small norm Riemann--Hilbert (R-H) problem, which is based instead on Fredholm index theory for singular integral operators. In particular, we avoid the construction of a global model matrix solution, which would be singular for arbitrary large $x$ and $t$, and utilize only the symmetric model vector solution, which always exists and is unique.
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