The battle for the Donbass, the eastern region of Ukraine whose control is one of Russia’s declared goals in invading its neighbour, is at an inflection point. Contrary to what was being advertised by Kiev and the West, the moment seems to be more favorable to Vladimir Putin’s forces.
They surround the strategic Severodonetsk on three sides, a city that, despite its name, is not in the province of Donetsk, but in the province of Lugansk – both make up the Donbass and, since 2014, have been living a civil war with part of the territory occupied by separatists supported by the Kremlin.
There is intense fighting around the city, reported by Russians and Ukrainians. If it falls, an important supply route for Kiev’s forces in the region will be cut off. In Moscow, Defense Minister Sergei Choigu said on Friday that “the liberation of the Lugansk People’s Republic is nearing completion”, using the separatists’ term for the region.
On Thursday night (19), Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky signaled his agreement. He claimed that the Russians had turned Donbass into “hell” and that the situation in the region was very serious. The government of the part of Lugansk still under Ukrainian control said 11,000 buildings across the east had been destroyed in recent weeks.
“In Donbass, the occupiers are trying to increase the pressure. It’s hell, and that’s not an exaggeration,” he said in his customary nightly address.
The impatience in Kiev gives signs that triumphalism in the West over the withdrawal of Putin’s forces from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, may have been exaggerated. On the one hand, the departure explained the Russians’ difficulty in maintaining several focuses in the war, due to lack of human resources since there is no national mobilization.
That had already cost the entire region around Kiev and other areas in the northwest of the country withdrawing, in military humiliation for the Kremlin. But everything indicates that the soldiers who were in Kharkiv are now working concentrated in the Donbass, which is further south-east of that city, and that may give them a punctual victory.
If it completes the conquest of Lugansk, Moscow will have to deal with Kiev’s troops still in Donetsk, centered in the unoccupied administrative capital of Kramatorsk. The initial idea of ​​the Russians, according to military analysts, was to encircle all the forces at the same time, but the lack of soldiers prevented it, forcing the slicing of the offensive.
According to a Moscow military analyst, who asked not to be named due to the repressive climate in Russia, this advance could help Putin have a victory speech at hand, albeit partial as the initial draft of the invasion seemed to presuppose the total overthrow of the government. of Zelensky.
He said, however, that this is not guaranteed, as Kiev’s military might in Donetsk is greater than in Lugansk. Furthermore, no one has any idea what Putin really wants: if he grabs the Donbass, he will have territory linking the region to Crimea, annexed without a shot in 2014, under his control. The end of symbolic resistance in Mariupol this week crystallized the design.
It is not known whether he would stop there or move forward to try to take the coast of the Black Sea, and also nothing guarantees the end of the war that is almost completing its third month. Kiev also says it will not accept a status quo with loss of territory, which could lead to a freezing of conflict along the lines of what has happened in Donbass over the past eight years.
Meanwhile, signs of Ukrainian nervousness go beyond Zelensky’s speech. Also on Thursday, at a virtual fundraising event, Foreign Minister Dmitro Kuleba again criticized NATO, the US-led military alliance that has been vital to Kiev’s resistance by providing weapons and intelligence.
“Can you cite at least one consensus decision taken by NATO in the last three months that has helped Ukraine? NATO, as an institution, has done nothing during that period,” he said. As this was said the night the US approved a mega-package of US$ 40 billion (almost R$ 200 billion) in aid to Kiev, Kuleba still tried to sugarcoat the pill by saying that he was not talking about individual countries.
But he went on to criticize, comparing NATO to the European Union, both structures whose Ukrainian desire to integrate was central to Putin’s aggression, which does not condone the idea of ​​having Western forces along its longest western border. “The European Union has proven itself to be an organization capable of acting as a united front and of taking powerful, important and difficult positions — unlike NATO.”
Russia says one of the conditions for ending the war is Kiev’s neutrality towards both institutions. This week, Putin reaped the opposite in Sweden and Finland, which are already EU members and have asked to join NATO, although there is resistance from Turkey, which is a member of the alliance but maintains good relations with the Kremlin.
