Ukrainian soldiers stand on their armored personnel carriers (APC), not far from the front line with Russian troops, in Izyum district, Kharkov region, on April 18, 2022. Anatolii Stepanov | Afp | Getty Images
Russia’s new offensive in the Donbas region could prove to be extremely significant and decisive in the war, analysts warn, and could determine what the country’s territorial borders look like in the coming weeks and years. “The Russian war machine from the east could quickly prove to be a very painful threat to Ukraine,” Maximilian Hess, a colleague at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, told CNBC on Tuesday. “It is quite clear that Russia’s war objectives remain quite extensive,” Hess added, adding that the way the battle for the Donbas is unfolding “will determine how far from Ukraine east of Nipro (a river that crosses Ukraine) it is sculpted by [Russian President Vladimir] Putin. “I think it’s quite clear that annexation is Putin’s long-term goal, how much annexation is the question,” Hess added. Russian officials said their main goals in this new phase of the war were But most analysts believe that the vast Donbas region, an industrial area rich in coal reserves, will be annexed by Russia.
Moscow has boosted separatist sentiment in the region over the past eight years since it annexed Crimea in 2014, though it denies supporting the region’s rebels.
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Russia’s long-awaited offensive in the east seemed to begin in earnest on Monday, with its military forces launching attacks on several areas, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky saying the “battle for the Donbas” has begun. As of Tuesday morning, the Russian Defense Ministry claimed to have hit more than 1,200 targets in Ukraine overnight, and later that day, there were numerous reports of intensified missile and artillery fire in eastern Ukraine. Officials said Russian forces had taken control of the Kremlin, a city in the Luhansk region where street fighting took place. On Wednesday morning, the UK Ministry of Defense said in an update to the intelligence services that Ukrainian forces were rejecting Russia’s “numerous advance attempts” in the eastern Donbas region. The reorientation of eastern Ukraine comes after Russia withdrew many of its troops from areas around the capital Kyiv and other northern parts of the country, after failing to gain military gains there. The Pentagon believes that Russia has significantly increased its fighting power in eastern and southern Ukraine now, however, with several battalion battlegroups moved to the area last weekend.
Exhausted weapons
Allied world leaders on Tuesday discussed the new phase of Russia’s invasion in a video call with a number of countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, promising to send more artillery systems to Ukraine, while others, such as Germany promised more money to help Ukraine buy more. weapons. How quickly any new weapons will arrive in Ukraine is a debatable point, with concerns that the war-torn country could struggle to rearm quickly in the east, especially if Russia increases the frequency of attacks on its ammunition depots. Sam Cranny-Evans, a research analyst at the British think tank RUSI, told CNBC on Tuesday that there was much uncertainty about how the battle for Donbas would progress and that while both sides would exhausted that material (military materials and equipment) in the last two months, Ukraine could be in a more vulnerable position. “The only thing I’m comfortable with is that I think [the battle] is going to take a very long time,” both sides said. “There are some questions about the availability of ammunition for Ukrainians and that can become a key issue, especially in the opening phases of mass artillery barracks and air strikes. If you do not have the ammunition to turn the fire against these things. then they have a dramatic psychological effect and a physical effect and they obviously destroy things. ” However, he noted that Russia was also “probably on a rather limited clock in terms of what it can do with its personnel and material capabilities.” “The Russians have spent a lot of missiles in this war so far, which will be quite difficult to replace … and there are additional questions about how much wear and tear the Ukrainians will cause in the Donbas,” he said.
Tanks of pro-Russian troops lead on a road during the conflict between Ukraine