According to the government in Kyiv, the battle that could decide the course of the Ukrainian war began in the early hours of Monday (18). “We can say that the Russian armed forces have started the battle for Donbass, for which they have been preparing for a long time,” said President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Donbass is the name of the Russianmajority region of eastern Ukraine partly held by proMoscow separatists since 2014, and one of the reasons Vladimir Putin gave for starting his war almost two months ago.
Zelenskyy drew his conclusion from the facts of the day, without any assessment from the Kremlin. According to the Defense Ministry in Moscow, Russian forces carried out one of the largest missile attacks in the conflict in the morning and morning hours, hitting 315 military targets.
The cruise missile and ballistic missile bombings took place throughout the area. Lviv, Ukraine’s socalled “Western Capital” on the Polish border, has claimed its first seven lives after surviving the conflict unscathed four Iskander ballistic missiles hit the city, three at military installations and one accidentally in one auto repair shop. .
With this, the attention of the Kiev forces had to be spread across the entire territory of the country, while two movements took place in the area that Moscow designated as its strategic target at this stage of the war: the Donbass.
There were attacks to the north, in two towns near Kharkiv, Ukraine’s secondlargest urban center, that are key to a combined pincer offensive with Russian forces to the south: Popasna and Rubizhne.
Moreover, the chances of a miraculous exit for the remaining Mariupol defenders in the south have basically disappeared. Some 1,000 soldiers have holed up in a metallurgical complex in the city and seem destined to become part of the city’s ruins, whose siege has become a symbol of the brutality of the Russian attack as they refuse to surrender.
Be that as it may, it is only a matter of time before Mariupol falls, authorities in Kyiv now admit. From there, the connection between the part of the Donbass already controlled by Russia and Crimea further southwest will be established.
This will allow such a pincer movement to encircle some 40,000 Ukrainian soldiers, who form the country’s military elite and have extensive experience in the eightyear civil war against separatists in the region.
Things will not be easy for Moscow, here too the battle portends tank maneuvers without so much urban combat in which frictions are inevitable, as the destruction of Mariupol has shown, and for which Russian tactics proved inadequate in the face of Ukrainian armed resistance has sophisticated western manportable antitank systems.
There is the problem of numbers. The US Department of Defense estimates the number of Russian tactical battalions concentrated in Donbass at 76, 11 of which have assembled in recent days. There is no fixed number of soldiers for each of these units, but it is around 1,000, 1,500 men.
As a result, Moscow has twice as many troops as Kyiv for combat, contradicting military manuals which predict a 3 to 1 ratio for a successful attack on welldefended positions.
The point is how well armed the Ukrainians are: the Polish tanks and tanks sent to support the effort don’t seem to make a difference. The United States said Monday that Ukrainians already have American 155mm howitzers at their disposal and that a package of 200 infantry fighting vehicles and other weapons is at the country’s border.
There are intangible issues like morality. Ukraine is in good shape after the Russians withdrew from the capital and surrounding towns in the northwest of the country. It just sank or saw the incompetence of the Russian Navy make a mistake Moscow’s most important battleship in the Black Sea.
It is estimated that the Russians started the war on February 24 with 125 of their 170 tactical battalions. According to experts, they lost 30 of them in equipment, not necessarily associated personnel. It’s a bloody number, the highest number of dead and wounded since World War II.
However, Putin still has time. According to the Pentagon, 22 more groups of tactical battalions are being prepared for deployment in areas north of the Donbass. And in theory, all armed forces are now under coordinated action by General Alexander Dvornikov, who earned a reputation as a ruthless Russian commander in the 201516 Syrian civil war.
Zelensky said in a Sunday night interview with CNN that what is happening in Donbass could determine the fate of the war. This time he didn’t exaggerate, as he is used to.
In short, the action could result in Russia’s failure and untold pressure on Putin, leading observers to fear a desperate move (chemical weapons, tactical nuclear weapons) to maintain his position of power.
Or it could end in a Russian victory, as Kyiv seems to fear in its statements. It remains to be seen whether it will be an overwhelming victory with Ukraine’s destruction or surrender, or a partial victory with Zelenskyy’s forces fleeing to the region near the capital.
There the conditions of a possible armistice must be discussed. Russia says it wants to exclude Ukraine from NATO (which seems guaranteed in practice), demilitarize the country (which it does with its missiles) and keep Donbass independent (also doable, even more so with the corridor to Crimea).
Kyiv rightly refuses to openly accept the terms under fire, fearing that Russia will be in a position of military power to attempt to terminate the service. With all the pressure of Western sanctions on its economy and the expense of keeping the war machine running, it seems unlikely, but so was its attack.
There, May 9, which many see as a symbolic end desired by Putin since it is the day of victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, could only be the beginning of a new phase in the conflict.