Analysis | The Russian advance into eastern Ukraine marks a turning point

In a recent interview with a French radio station, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the current momentum is part of the Kremlin’s new goal. “Our clear goal, of course, is to withdraw the Ukrainian army and Ukrainian battalions from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions,” he said, amid Western officials’ fears that Russia would annex the lands of Donbass and Kherson. Crimea has already been annexed.

The Russian advance is characterized by the same ferocity and brutality as previous attacks. Observers say a similar tactic was used in the capture of the port city of Mariupol, dispersing urban areas with days of artillery and rockets.

“Metal is raining down on us,” a war-wounded Ukrainian soldier told my colleagues. eyewitnesses spoke of the smell of death. Keep an eye out for the roads when temperatures soar in early summer.

The Russians “will use the same tactic. “They bombed for three, four, five hours straight for several hours and then attacked,” said Serhiy Haidai, governor of the Luhansk region. He told Reuters. “The attacker dies. “Then the bombing and the attack will happen again, and so on until they occupy a place.”

Ukrainian volunteer fighters feel abandoned in the East

The constant misery of the battlefield is based on a sloping strategic landscape. The situation in the east of the country marks a transition from the early stages of the war, when strong Ukrainian defenses forced Russia to retreat widely to Kiev and other regions, building trust between Ukrainians and their Western supporters in the perspective of a global victory . “Poorly organized and well equipped Russian forces,” said my colleagues Siobhan O’Grady, Paul Son, Max Bearak and Anastasia Galuchka.

“Now, after regrouping, Russian troops are making steady but steady progress in their eastward campaign and regularly use heavy artillery and long-range artillery, the lack of Ukrainian forces leaving Kiev behind,” they wrote. . “As the Ukrainian resistance pollutes the war for Russian forces, Moscow is fighting around Russia with simpler supply lines as it approaches the largest Ukrainian strongholds in the Donbas region.”

Moscow appears to have learned from its initial mistakes. Russia’s recent successes are, at least in part, a product of Ukraine’s past success. Famous Bloomberg News. “By launching defenses so effective that Russian commanders forced the abandonment of the country’s two largest cities – Kiev and Kharkov – Ukraine forced them to abandon an overly ambitious war plan that left its troops in disarray and without logistics. The lines of life. “

It is still true that the war has greatly impoverished the Russian military and has led to a lack of equipment, manpower and morale in some areas. But as my colleague Sudarsan Raghavan reports, Ukrainian fighters in the east complain that they are unmanned and unarmed. The expansion and consolidation of Russian control in eastern Ukraine marks a new phase in the conflict that tested both Western and Ukrainian resilience during the war.

Ukraine suffers on the battlefield when the United States demands its weapons

The Ukrainian authorities presented their requests loudly and clearly. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week, members of the Kiev delegation called for more military aid and heavy weapons from the United States and Europe. They formulated ideologically the reasons for their demands: the defense of Ukraine was the defense of all liberal and democratic societies. The victory of Russia, on the other hand, means the victory of power over the right and heavy tyranny over the rule of law.

“You don’t need us to die,” Ukrainian MP Yulia Klimenko told reporters in Davos when she recently returned to Today’s WorldView. “But we’re dying for you.”

The Biden administration plans to supply Ukraine with more weapons and ammunition, which could include advanced missile systems to help Russia advance east. President Biden on Monday said he did not want to send a missile system whose range could reach the depths of Russian territory. The Kremlin has described Biden’s statements as “logical”, but the Russian line expressed by both officials and the state media continues that they are waging a war against Western puppets in Ukraine.

In Europe, despite the very noisy rhetorical unity, strong differences persist in the approach to the conflict. France and Germany, for example, recently invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet directly with his Ukrainian counterpart, President Vladimir Zelensky, to end the Black Sea blockade, which is so devastating to the global economy. This appeal was met by the cynical politicians of the Baltic states further east who wanted to deepen Russia’s isolation and decisively defeat Putin.

But as the Donbas campaign has shown, Russia is nowhere near final defeat in Ukraine.. Politicians in Kiev and most of their Western supporters have a maximalist view on how to end the conflict, capitulate to Russia and return every inch of the territory controlled by Moscow, including the Crimean peninsula.

This view of the war contradicts the growing fears of foreign policy experts about the risks of prolonging the war. In Davos, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called for urgent talks and territorial concessions from Ukraine to prevent further crises and global instability.

At the World Economic Forum Panel, Graham Tyson, a US foreign policy analyst, said the frozen conflict – along the lines that run along the disputed border as it is now – would be an ideal outcome and would eliminate the risk of Putin using tactical nuclear weapons. . “Either there will be truth about the ground that Putin can live on, or it will increase the level of destruction,” Allison said.

Lawrence Friedman, a respected British military historian and analyst who warned against creating political conditions for Ukrainians, attacked his remarks, saying that Putin, who had not yet defined the Ukrainian war as a “war”, would not be ready for it. use nuclear weapons.

“Russia is not in existential danger,” he said. “Ukraine faces an existential threat. Ukrainians will not stop fighting.