Despite the Kremlin’s new methodical approach focusing on eastern Ukraine, the Russian military still faces some of the same problems that hampered it after the war began.
Russia plunged into a new chapter of the Ukraine war on Tuesday, intent on capturing the eastern part of the country and crushing Ukrainian defenses without the same blunders that badly damaged Russian forces in the conflict’s initial weeks. “Another phase of this operation is starting now,” Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia said, as the Russian Defense Ministry announced that its missile and artillery forces had struck hundreds of Ukrainian military targets overnight. The strikes mainly hit the eastern region known as Donbas, Ukraine’s industrial heartland, where pro-Moscow separatists have battled Ukrainian forces since Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014. The Donbas has now become the stated territorial objective of Russia’s redeployed invasion force along a front that stretches roughly 300 miles, from an area near the northern city of Kharkiv to the besieged southern port of Mariupol, where die-hard Ukrainian defenders ensconced in a sprawling steel plant have repeatedly defied Russian demands to surrender. Ukraine’s military said that its forces had repulsed seven different Russian thrusts along the front on Tuesday, destroying 10 tanks and 18 armored units in the battles. The claims of both militaries could not be independently verified. Despite Russian warnings, Ukraine’s Western supporters, led by the United States, are now rushing to send longer-range weapons including howitzers, antiaircraft systems, anti-ship missiles, armed drones and even tanks — arms that American officials said were designed to thwart the Russian offensive. Western military experts said the offensive promised to be much more methodical than the blitz-like operation the Kremlin launched Feb.24 to subjugate Ukraine, which was marked by rapid and ultimately unsuccessful advances of tanks and helicopter assaults deep inside the former Soviet republic. That miscalculation was compounded by flawed logistics, poor soldier morale, an unexpectedly tenacious Ukrainian resistance and Western-supplied weapons used to devastating effect on Russian armored vehicles, upending Russia’s hopes for a quick victory and forcing its military to retreat and regroup. Now, instead of lightning attacks from the Russian front lines, Moscow’s forces, focusing on taking the Donbas, have increased their long-range artillery barrages and sent small detachments of troops to probe Ukrainian defenders, many entrenched in earthworks established during the Moscow-backed insurgency in the eastern region that began eight years ago. The Pentagon estimated that Russia now has about 75 battalion tactical groups in Ukraine, each with roughly 1,000 troops. It also has tens of thousands more troops in reserve north of Ukraine who are being resupplied and readied to join the fight, U.S.
