In recent days, Russian forces fighting in northern Ukraine around the capital Kyiv and the city of Chernihiv have begun an orderly retreat, moving to the northern border to return to Belarus. According to the Institute for the Study of War, a U.S. study center highly regarded for its military analysis, the withdrawal would be the start of a shift in strategy by the Russian government, which would have taken note of the failures achieved to date and would have significantly scaled back its targets in Ukraine : Now she wants to focus almost exclusively on the Donbass region, where a civil war has been waged since 2014, sparked by separatist militias funded and armed by Russia.
This shift in strategy, say several military analysts, appears capable of transforming the conflict, prolonging it over time while shrinking the battlefield.
It is difficult to obtain independent confirmation of the information released by the Ukrainian government, but several cities in the north have reportedly come back under Ukrainian control in recent days. Videos are circulating on social networks showing, for example, the deserted streets in Bucha, which is about 60 kilometers west of Kyiv and was one of the most contentious cities in the region for both sides. In the satellite images provided by the US company Maxar Technologies, we can also see the Russians dismantling their military posts from Hostomel Airport, also near the capital, where an important battle was fought at the beginning of the invasion.
In recent days, Ukrainian forces have launched counterattacks in other areas around Kyiv and Chernihiv (150 kilometers further north) in an attempt to force or hasten the Russian withdrawal. Fighting is still going on in some areas, but the impression is that these are mostly clashes with the most advanced Russian line tasked with protecting the bulk of the forces moving towards the border with Belarus. During the retreat, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the Russians laid mines everywhere, including in houses and on bodies left in the streets.
According to the Institute for the Study of War, this largescale withdrawal from the north will only be decided in the last few days.
Putin’s original plan was to wage a “lightning war” that should have allowed Russian forces to capture key Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, in a matter of days, trusting that the Ukrainians would conquer the Russian would support the invasion. The government would soon disintegrate. In midMarch it became clear that the plan had failed. However, Russia would try not to give it up entirely, sending reinforcements around Kyiv in northeastern and southern Ukraine to exploit its military superiority and stop Ukrainian resistance. At the end of March, argues the Institute for the Study of War, Russia finally accepted the impossibility of conquering all of Ukraine according to the originally planned military plan and decided to further expand its control over the Donbass.
That the Russian offensive is heading towards the Donbass is not just an intuition of military research centers and analysts. A week ago, it was the Russian government itself that announced the new plan, but few believed it, also because since the war began and on many other occasions in the past, Russia had tried to take advantage of the ceasefire and suspensions to stop the fighting to carry out attacks or to reorganize militarily.
Journalist Yaroslav Trofimov, who has proven to be one of the best informed on the war so far, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that at first it appeared that Russia wanted to keep enough military forces around Kyiv to both threaten and avoid the capital. that Ukraine was sending key reinforcements to the Donbass: “But a threatened encirclement by Russian forces northwest or northeast of Kyiv accelerated the retreat towards the Belarusian border, often under enemy fire.”
The withdrawn forces that are still combatcapable could then be diverted to the Donbass to try to weaken Ukrainian resistance, as well as join Russian forces from the north and then, after weeks of fighting, from the newly captured city of Izyum Coming from the southeast, from the part of the Luhansk region under Russian control. Although in this area it has managed to advance quite quickly in rural areas, in fact Russia has not managed to capture the cities of Kramatorsk, Sloviansk and Severodonetsk (where the Ukrainian Luhansk regional government is located): by taking control it would be possible to precisely unite its troops and isolate the remaining Ukrainian forces in the region.
The Russian goal would therefore be complete control of the Donbass, going beyond the two republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, whose autonomy Putin recognized before the invasion, and even beyond the territories conquered since the beginning of the war.
That control then passes from the capture of Mariupol, the Ukrainian city most plagued by Russian bombing and mostly already razed to the ground. Mariupol is Ukraine’s tenth largest city, but its strategic location on the north shore of the Sea of Azov makes it a key destination for Russia. Efforts by the International Red Cross to evacuate civilians who may still be in the city, which could be as many as 160,000, have intensified in recent days, but so far with little success. Military analysts believe Russia’s takeover of Mariupol is a matter of days.
According to the Institute for the Study of War, Russian forces are unlikely to try to launch new major offensives from the southern front: they will try to defend Kherson, the only Ukrainian provincial capital they have captured so far, but they will it will hardly push back west (Mykolayiv) and north (Zaporizhia and Kryvyi Rih), at least for the time being.
Likewise, it is difficult to imagine that Putin will agree to serious negotiations before he has conquered the entire Donbass, which at this point can be considered the minimum goal of the Russian invasion. Achieving some important military victories could improve Russia’s negotiating position, which currently looks very weak given the failures of the past few weeks.
However, a long war is expected that could last for months, maybe years. Reducing the battlefield will prompt both Russia and Ukraine to increase their respective troops in Donbass, and their belief in winning the war is likely to prompt the two governments to refrain from making major concessions during peace negotiations.
On the other hand, it remains very difficult to say what Putin’s political goal is today. The original idea of turning Ukraine into a Belaruslike “vassal” country by quickly sacking the Zelenskyi government and installing a proRussian “puppet” government has become impractical, and not just for the unexpectedly stubborn Ukrainian military Resistance, but also because of Russia’s inability to govern Ukrainian cities without the threat or use of force (as also illustrated by the case of Kherson, where protest rallies against the Russian occupying power are frequent).
At the very least, conquering Donbass might allow Putin to “save face” since one of his unfounded justifications for the invasion was that Russia should protect the populations of the selfproclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk from Ukrainian attacks. Today, the Kremlin has changed its war rhetoric, claiming that the offensive in northeastern Ukraine (which failed) was launched only to weaken Ukrainian forces before they achieved their “main objective” of capturing Ukraine’s Donbass.