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Day after day, Russia hits ukraine’s Donbass region with incessant air and artillery strikes, slowly advancing to capture its neighbor’s commercial center.
With the clash now in its fourth month, this is a high-stakes crusade that can dictate the course of the entire war.
If Russia wins the Battle of Donbass, it will mean that Ukraine will lose not only territory, but also most of its armed forces with maximum capability, paving the way for Moscow to capture more territory and dictate its terms to Kiev. to lay the groundwork for a Ukrainian counteroffensive and, in all likelihood, to provoke political turmoil in the Kremlin.
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After the invasion’s first failed attempts to capture the largest city of kyiv and Kharkiv without making plans or coordination, Russia turned its attention to Donbass, a region of mines and factories where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014.
Learning from its previous missteps, Russia is moving more cautiously there, relying on longer-range bombing to melt Ukrainian defenses.
It turns out that it works: the best-equipped Russian forces have made progress in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions that make up Donbass, controlling more than 95% of the former and about a portion of the latter.
Ukraine is wasting between a hundred and two hundred troops a day, presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak told the BBC because Russia has “thrown almost everything that is not nuclear on the front. “President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had in the past estimated the death toll at one. hundred.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov described the scenario of the struggle as “extremely difficult,” referring to an ancient sacrificial deity who said, “The Russian Moloch has many tactics to consume human lives to satisfy its imperial ego. “
When the war was over Russia, many thought that President Vladimir Putin can claim victory after some advances in the Donbass and then emerge from a confrontation that severely damaged the economy and depleted its resources. But the Kremlin has made it clear that it expects Ukraine to recognize all the gains Russia has made since the invasion began, which Kyiv has ruled out.
Russian forces along the coast of the Sea of Azov, adding the strategic port of Mariupol, the entire Kherson region, a key gateway to Crimea, and much of the Zaporizhzhia region that may contribute to a deeper new momentum in Ukraine. and few expect Putin to stop.
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On Thursday, he drew parallels between the Ukrainian confrontation and the eighteenth-century wars with Sweden led by Peter the Great. Today, as in the Tsarist era, “our destiny is to recover and consolidate” historic Russian lands, Putin said. Moscow Ukraine has plenty of time to be an integral part of its sphere of influence.
Unlike past messes on the battlefield, Russia turns out to be more conservative tactics. Many expected him to try to encircle the Ukrainian forces with a large movement of pincers from the north and south, but instead used a series of smaller movements to force. a withdrawal and not to expand its lines of origin.
Keir Giles, a Russian expert at London’s Chatham House think tank, said Russia “concentrated all its artillery on a single segment of the front line to break through and crush everything in its path. “
Western officials still praise the ability of Ukrainian forces to protect their country, taking fierce retaliation and also relying on artillery and fleeing to some sections while launching common counterattacks.
“Ukraine has pursued a flexible defense policy, ceding ground where it makes sense instead of clinging to every square inch of territory,” Giles said.
A senior Western official who spoke on condition of anonymity because it is not legal to speak about the sensitivity factor in public said the Russian crusade “remains deeply concerned at all levels,” noting that Moscow’s forces take “weeks to achieve even modest tactical objectives. “like taking individual villages.
Last month, the Russians lost almost an entire battalion in a failed attempt to cross the Siverskyi Donets River and find a bridgehead. Hundreds of people were killed and dozens of armored vehicles were destroyed.
“There is a sense of strategic improvisation or confusion,” the official said, predicting that during the summer the Russian military could succeed at a “point where it will no longer be good to generate offensive combat power. “
Russia has a merit of transparent artillery in the Battle of Donbass, thanks to heavier howitzers and rocket launchers and abundant ammunition. The Ukrainians had to be economical in using their artillery, with the Russians aiming at their lines of origin.
Ukraine has begun receiving heavier weapons from Western allies, who have provided dozens of howitzers and now plan to start delivering several rocket launchers.
Putin warned that if the West gave Kyiv longer-range rockets that could hit Russian territory, Moscow could hit targets in Ukraine that it has failed to achieve so far. buffer zone for those weapons.
Moscow’s previous territorial gains in the south, adding the Kherson region and much of the neighboring Zaporizhzhia region, have led Russian officials and their local delegates to reflect on plans to integrate those spaces into Russia or claim them independent, such as the so-called “people’s kingdom. “republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Ukrainian officials and Western analysts have expressed fears that Moscow may try to boost its offensive in the heavily populated and industrialized Dnipro region further north, a move that could also split Ukraine in two and pose a new risk to Kyiv.
“Russian targets in the context of this war evolve according to the terrain,” said Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti, an analyst at the Milan-based Italian Institute for International Political Studies.
“Their targets are flexible enough to adapt to the context on the ground,” he said, noting that Russia could try to damage the Ukrainian economy by seizing the entire sea coast to deny access to shipping.
A senior Russian general has already spoken of his goal of isolating Ukraine from the Black Sea through the seizure of the Mykolaiv and Odessa regions on the border with Romania, a move that would also allow Moscow to build territory in the Moldovan separatist region of Transnistria. that is the home of a Russian army base.
Also read: War in Ukraine: Russia destroyed dozens of U. S. -supplied weapons, Putin claims | five points
All these ambitions count on the good fortune of Moscow in the east. A defeat at Donbass would put Kyiv in a precarious position, with new recruits losing the skills of experienced infantrymen fighting lately in the east and inadequate supplies of Western weapons to repel a potentially deeper Russian. push.
Ukrainian officials dismissed those fears and expressed confidence that their military can resist to stop Russian advances and even launch a counterattack.
“Ukraine’s plan is clear: Kyiv is exhausting the Russian military, to buy time for more deliveries of Western weapons, adding air defense systems, in the hope of launching an effective counteroffensive,” said analyst Mykola Sunhurovsky of the Razumkov Center, a Kyiv-based center. expert group
Philip Breedlove, a retired U. S. Air Force officerThe U. S. navy, who served as NATO’s commander-in-chief from 2013 to 2016, warned that he opposes any ceasefire that codifies Russia’s gains on the battlefield.
“It’s like raising a 2-year-old,” she said. “If you allow bad habits to continue, or worse, if you praise bad habits, you’ll have more bad habits. “
When Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, Washington’s reaction was inadequate, and when Moscow seized Crimea in 2014, “the reaction from the West and the United States was inadequate,” Breedlove added.
Now that Russia has returned for more, the West has a chance to respond. “How we end this war will decide, in my opinion, whether we will see more in the future,” he added.
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