The coming weeks are likely to see the bloodiest battles since Russia first invaded Donbas in 2014
“IT CAN NOW be stated that Russian troops have begun the battle for Donbas,” pronounced Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, late on April 18th. More than three weeks have passed since Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, abandoned hisand retreated from northern Ukraine, defeated. Now Mr Putin is throwing a large portion of his weary army at eastern Ukraine in the hope of salvaging something from his war.
Notably, instead of amassing a large force and then striking, Russia has chosen to initiate the battle for Donbas even while it is scraping together extra troops and equipment. Some Western officials think that curious decision may be guided by an artificial political constraint: Mr Putin’s reported desire to see results by May 9th, Victory Day, on which Russia marks the end of the second world war in Europe.
Ukraine, not content with merely absorbing these blows, seems to have pre-emptively mounted counter-attacks. On April 17th Oleksiy Arestovych, an adviser to Mr Zelensky, described “an interesting movement around Izyum which should make any Russian attack difficult,” calling it “manoeuvring, active defence”. That appears to refer to Ukraine’s recapture of several villages south-east of Kharkiv.
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