Whatever the endgame, a military strategy that focuses on Donbas is a losing proposition
ON FEBRUARY 26TH, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, RIA Novosti, a Russian state-run news agency, accidentally published an article that had been due to run two days into what the Kremlin thought would be a quick and easy war. “Ukraine has returned to Russia,” it boasted. “Did someone in the old European capitals, in Paris and Berlin, seriously believe that Moscow would give up Kiev?” A month into its botched campaign, Russia may be doing just that.
Russia is pivoting largely because the first phase of its war has been a failure. Its pincer movement on the capital from the north-west and north-east has stalled in the face of staunch Ukrainian resistance, jammed-up supply lines and a shortage of manpower. Russia has failed to encircle the capital, let alone assault it. Nor has it taken any major city other than Kherson—and even there Russian control looks increasingly precarious.
At the same time, Russia has prioritised its offensives in the Donbas, and fighting there has intensified over the past week. Russian forces have attempted to move south from Izyum, a town 125km south-east of Kharkiv, at the same time as they advance north towards Zaporizhia, with the intention of encircling what the Ukrainians call the Joint Forces Operation —the troops fighting around Donbas—and preventing them from retreating west over the Dnieper river.
What Russia intends to do with all this territory is less clear. One option would be to use it as a bargaining chip to secure other concessions from Mr Zelensky, such as limits on Ukraine’s foreign policy and armed forces. But because Russia has already recognised the independence of the sham republics—“Ukraine does not need these territories,” declared Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and now the deputy chairman of its security council, on February 21st—this could be tricky.
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