With the Ukrainians running short of guns and ammunition, and pressures growing on Western governments, Moscow’s fortunes may be rising.
A war in Ukraine that began with a Russian debacle as its forces tried and failed to take Kyiv has seemingly begun to turn, with Russia now picking off regional targets, Ukraine lacking the weaponry it needs and Western support for the war effort fraying in the face of rising gas prices and galloping inflation. On the 108th day of President Vladimir V. Putin’s unprovoked war, driven by his conviction that Ukraine is territory unjustly taken from the Russian Empire, Russia appeared no closer to victory. But its forces did appear to be making slow, methodical and bloody progress toward control of eastern Ukraine. On Saturday, Ukraine’s agile president, Volodymyr Zelensky, once again promised victory. “We are definitely going to prevail in this war that Russia has started,” he told a conference in Singapore in a video appearance. “It is on the battlefields in Ukraine that the future rules of this world are being decided.”
Yet, the heady early days of the war — when the Ukrainian underdog held off a deluded and inept aggressor and Mr. Putin’s indiscriminate bombardment united the West in outrage — have begun to fade. In their place is a war that is evolving into what analysts increasingly say will be a long slog, placing growing pressure on the governments and economies of Western countries and others throughout the world. Nowhere is that slog more evident than in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. Despite urgent pleas to the West for more heavy weapons, Ukrainian forces appear to lack what it takes to confront Russian use of artillery for scorched-earth shelling of towns and villages. While Ukraine is holding Russia back in the major regional city of Sievierodonetsk, it is suffering heavy losses — at least 100 fatalities a day, though their full extent is not yet known — and desperately needs more weapons and ammunition. Russia also appears to be making headway in establishing control in towns it has captured, including the leveled Black Sea port of Mariupol. It has set out to convince and coerce the remaining population that its future lies in what Mr. Putin views as his restored empire. Citizens there and in cities like Kherson and Melitopol face a bleak choice: If they want to work, they must first obtain a Russian passport, a blandishment offered to secure a semblance of loyalty to Moscow.
