Russian and Ukrainian forces are converging in the eastern part of the country as thousands of civilians have fled the region ahead of what threatens to be the war’s next big battle.
The fighting could look substantially different from the battle for Ukraine’s capital, in which Russian forces were pushed out of areas around kyiv, leaving smoking tanks and bombed-out suburban homes in their wake.
After withdrawing from areas around kyiv, Russian forces are repositioning for a new offensive in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
They will be operating in familiar territory there, given Russia’s invasion in 2014, and with shorter supply lines, analysts say. The Russians will also be able to rely on a vast network of trains to resupply their army; no such rail network existed for them north of kyiv.
Ukraine’s leaders say they are also preparing for a big showdown. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba urged NATO leaders last week to send reinforcements. Western weapons have arrived in Ukraine in recent days, but Kuleba said more were needed, and quickly. The battle for eastern Ukraine “will remind you of World War II,” he warned.
The center of gravity appears to be near the eastern town of Izium, which Russian units seized last week as they tried to link up with other forces in the Donbas region, the southeastern part of Ukraine. The Russians are also trying to consolidate a land corridor between Donbas and the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, which Russia invaded and annexed in 2014.
There are other signs that the two armies are preparing for a big fight. Newly released satellite images showed a Russian convoy of hundreds of vehicles moving south through the Ukrainian city of Velykyi Burluk, east of Kharkiv and north of Izium, according to Maxar Technologies, which published the images on Sunday.
“This will be a large-scale battle with hundreds of tanks and fighting vehicles, it will be extremely brutal,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a research fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “The scope of the military operations is going to be substantially different from anything the region has seen before.”
Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Moscow has backed separatist uprisings in two eastern Donbas provinces, Donetsk and Luhansk. The conflict has killed more than 14,000 people in the last eight years.
“Russia is operating on terrain that is very familiar,” said Keir Giles of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Britain. Moscow’s forces “will have learned from their mistakes in the early days of the campaign against Ukraine,” he added.
There is also the added benefit to Russia of railways in the east, Giles said, explaining that networks there are dense and run through territories already under Russian control.
Still, for all the supposed Russian advantages in the east, some analysts doubt the military is any more effective in eastern Ukraine than it was north of kyiv. The Russian forces that attacked the Ukrainian capital were so battered that many of the units are too exhausted to start fighting again, according to Western officials and analysts. They also say that many Russian units appear to be suffering from low morale, with some soldiers refusing to fight.
“Normally, a serious military would take months to rebuild, but the Russians seem to be throwing them into this fight,” said Frederick W. Kagan, director of the Critical Threats project at the American Enterprise Institute, which has partnered with the Institute. for the Study of the War to trace the war in Ukraine. “The forces they are deploying are badly hit and their morale appears to be low.”
Mr. Kagan said that in the east, Russian forces may encounter some of the same mobility problems that they suffered in their invasion of northern Ukraine. The Russian forces were largely confined to the country’s roads, as they were unable to traverse the terrain. That left Russian armored vehicles and trucks vulnerable to attack by Ukrainian forces, which, using Western-supplied anti-tank missiles, destroyed hundreds of Russian vehicles.
For the Russians, transportation problems are likely to get worse. Spring rains will turn much of the terrain into mud, making mobility even more difficult.
Mr. Kagan noted that Russian forces are “remarkably constrained by roads, which could actually make the east more challenging because the road network is so much worse than the network around kyiv.”
Ultimately, Kagan said, both militaries face great challenges.
“The Russians have a lot of weight to wield, but they have a lot of problems,” Kagan said. “Ukrainians have high morale, high motivation. And a lot of determination. But they are outnumbered and they don’t have the infrastructure of a militarized state to support them.”
“In my mind, it’s a jolt.”
Reference-www.nytimes.com