Russia has launched a new offensive in the Donbas region. But it probably can’t salvage a war that’s already lost.
Russia has launched a new offensive in the Donbas region. But it probably can’t salvage a war that’s already lost. This week, the new phase of Russia’s war in Ukraine has taken form. It is a war over control of the Donbas, the eastern Ukrainian region where Russia has been supporting a separatist rebellion since 2014. Whereas the war — which began with the Russian invasion on February 24 — previously spanned the country, centering on a Russian push to seize Ukraine’s capital and most populous city, Kyiv, its newest offensive is narrowly focused on a region several hundred miles to the east. “The Russian troops have begun the battle for the Donbas,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced in a Tuesday address. This is, in one sense, a smart move by the Russians. Its attempt to seize Kyiv in the war’s opening days was decisively repulsed, due not only to Russian incompetence but unusually strong Ukrainian resistance that benefited from defending in tricky urban settings. The terrain in the Donbas — fewer suburbs, more open land — affords the defenders fewer advantages. In the east, Russia can concentrate its forces and move toward battles in which their superior artillery and air force can be used to devastating effect. Territorial successes in the Donbas could blunt the narrative of Russian military incompetence and give the Kremlin a more plausible argument that its war has achieved something real. Yet Ukraine has advantages too. The forces it currently has in the Donbas are some of its most battle-hardened fighters, having spent the past eight years clashing with Russian-backed separatists. It is getting tremendous amounts of Western aid and still has superior morale and logistics — decisive factors in repulsing Russia’s advances elsewhere. It may numerically match the theoretically much larger Russian army, according to military observers. For these reasons, the outcome of the new phase is far from clear, even to leading experts on the Ukraine war. In our conversations, they suggested that possible outcomes ranged from Russia successfully seizing control of the entire Donbas to Ukraine actually clawing territory back. The fighting is likely to be long and bloody, no matter where the lines end up being drawn. But the sources I spoke with all agreed on one thing: In the big picture, the outcome in the Donbas might be less important than it may seem. That’s because Russia’s ultimate aim — regime change in Kyiv, or at least forcing Ukraine to submit to a Russian-dominated political future — has been out of reach for weeks. Russia can continue to launch missiles at Ukrainian cities in other regions, terrorizing civilians, but it cannot currently threaten to actually seize those population centers or topple President Volodymyr Zelenksyy’s government. “Politically, Russia [already] lost the war,” says Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military. “When it withdrew from the north, around Kyiv, it eliminated any impetus Ukraine might have for settlement.” Russia’s offensive in the Donbas, then, is best understood as an effort at limiting the costs of its blunder: a campaign to string together significant enough gains — like the seizure of Mariupol — to soften the blow from its overall strategic defeat. Russia is shifting to the Donbas because its initial attack failed There are good reasons for Russia to focus on the Donbas. Ukraine’s easternmost region, stretching from Luhansk down to around Mariupol in the south, the Donbas directly borders Russia and Russian-held territory in southern Ukraine. Seizing the region’s south would create a Russian-controlled corridor connecting occupied Crimea to Russia proper, a so-called “land bridge” that would make supplying Crimea somewhat easier. The Donbas’s population has long been more pro-Russian than the rest of Ukraine, though this can be overstated and may well have changed since the war began. The region has been at the center of Russia’s war propaganda, inventing claims of a “genocide” against ethnic Russians in the region to justify the invasion. It is rich in natural gas. And yet, not a single one of these reasons was sufficient to make the Donbas the center of Russia’s initial invasion. That’s because the goal at first was regime change in Kyiv — Putin’s now-infamous announcement to seek the “de-Nazification” and “de-militarization” of Ukraine. The new focus dates back to March 25, when the Russian general staff announced their intention to shift offensive combat operations to the Donbas region. At the time, Russian forces were engaged in fighting across Ukraine’s north, east, and south, as you can see on the following map from the Institute for the Study of War (a Washington-based think tank). Over the course of the next month, Russia conducted a strategic withdrawal from much of the battlefront, especially around Kyiv and Chernihiv. By April 20, the ISW map shows a shrunken Russian presence focused primarily on fighting in and around the Donbas. This shift, first and foremost, reflects the inability of Russian troops to seize Ukraine’s capital and overthrow its government in one fell swoop. “Putin has really started to rethink the strategic aims in Ukraine after the massive strategic failure in Kyiv,” says Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. Understanding the nature of this failure is vital to understanding what’s happening in the Donbas.
