The third war in Ukraine

The Russian invasion of Ukraine changed course. Faced with the resounding failure of the original plan, which was to take Kiev in a few hours, to overthrow the government of Volodymyr Zelensky and to establish a puppet government, Vladimir Putin decided to concentrate on the Dombas region in the east of the country. It is there that most of the Russian-speaking Ukrainian population is located. And he believes that it is a more realistic objective from a military and political point of view. That was the primary plan when he began to concentrate troops on the border. He was set aside to launch an offensive throughout Ukrainian territory. Now, it again became the main target of this Third Ukrainian War.

The first war took place between 2014 and 2021. It began with the invasion and annexation of Crimea and the delivery of weapons and the training of Russian officers to the separatists of the Luhansk and Donetsk enclaves on the Russian-Ukrainian border. There, in the so-called Donbas region (which encompasses the two enclaves and the provinces of the same name), a battlefield developed that left 14,000 dead in those seven years.

The second war was launched on February 24, 2022 with the invasion of Russian troops. The plan of the Kremlin generals was to surprise Ukrainians with special forces that remained hidden among the civilian population and who were required to act to ensure control of the Antonov military airport in northern Kiev. They wanted to create there a beachhead and an airlift that would guarantee the presence of thousands of soldiers at the gates of the capital. Meanwhile, the special forces were to locate and assassinate President Zelensky. In that way, they believed, they would take control of Ukraine without major costs. It failed flatly. They dismissed the defense capabilities of the Ukrainian armed forces and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who immediately joined the People's Militias. Nor did they think that the aid in weapons and intelligence information by the United States and Europe was so extensive.

They advanced from the south to secure a corridor that connects the already invaded Crimean peninsula with the separatist enclaves, and a month later they still failed to do so. They are destroying the key port of Mariupol on the Sea of Azov, which until last night was still resisting and they have in their possession only one city, Kharkov, whose population is posing heroic unarmed resistance to it. Robert Gates, former CIA director and US Secretary of Defense, said Putin “must be amazingly disappointed” by the performance of his military. “We're seeing recruits in Ukraine who don't know why they're there, who aren't very well trained and who have huge problems with command and control, and incredibly lousy tactics,” Gates commented at an OSS Society forum.

On March 25, the third war began with a narrower focus, focusing on the Donbas region, not necessarily as a final game, but as a way to recover from the first failures and use that region as a new starting point. Russian Deputy Chief of Staff Colonel General Sergei Rudskoi said his forces had largely achieved the “main objectives” of the first phase of what Moscow calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine. He added that his forces had “greatly reduced” the combat power of the Ukrainian military, and as a result Russian troops could “focus on major efforts to achieve the main objective, the liberation of Donbas.” A euphemism to say that they failed in their attempt to seize power in Kiev and that, to save their faces, they are going to stay with the East of the country.

The danger of this new approach is that Putin could in fact create two Ukraines, the West and the East, in the style of the Koreas. Try to build a “cushion” between the pro-western territory and the border of your country that guarantees you an alleged greater security. “There is reason to believe that Putin contemplates a Korean-style scenario, consisting of a dividing line between the occupied and unoccupied regions of our country,” said Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the intelligence department of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

President Zelensky insisted on his call to Russia to negotiate an end to the war, but said clearly that Ukraine would not agree to give up any of its territory. “The territorial integrity of Ukraine must be guaranteed,” he said in his nightly video address to the nation. “That is, the conditions must be fair, because the Ukrainian people will not accept them otherwise.” This Tuesday there will be a new round of talks mediated by Turkey. Russian delegates are likely to put on the table the possibility of dividing Ukrainian territory. It could be another erroneous assessment of the Russian generals.

Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, with knowledge of the Kremlin's plans, told the Al Jazeera network that the war will enter a stage of lesser intensity due to weather conditions. “The winter campaign basically ended. There will be floods and more mud. In May, everything will dry up and then the summer campaign will come, which will most likely be decisive,” he explained. “Right now there is going to be a pause with the Russian military explaining to the population that 'everything is fine, everything is under control, this is a pause'. But everything continues and the goals will finally be achieved.”

Ukrainians mock this kind of analysis and continue to show memes with photos of tractors of Ukrainian peasants dragging Russian tanks that were stuck in the mud. And they understand that the war continues with the same intensity, whether or not it is concentrated on the Donbas. Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, a study center in Washington, believes that Putin is simply recalibrating. “Moscow is looking for a way out of its quagmire in Ukraine. Focusing its military objectives on control of the Donbas could be a way to retreat without admitting defeat,” Thompson told US public radio.

An analysis released Saturday by the Institute for the Study of War in Washington says that the extent to which the Russians can push for an accelerated movement to cut Donbas “will depend in part on how soon their forces can gain full control of Mariupol and how badly they come out of that struggle.” He also noted that an interruption of the Russian offensive on Kiev could reflect “the inability of Russian forces more than any change in Russian goals or efforts at this time.”

It should be borne in mind that, while the Russian military is increasingly focusing on bleeding Ukrainian troops in the East, they continue to use their arsenal of air- and sea-launched cruise missiles to methodically attack fuel depots, military arsenals and weapons factories across the country. Philips Obrien, Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of St. Andrews described the weekend's cruise missile attacks in Lviv, near the Polish border, as part of the Russian strategy to cut off supplies to Ukrainian forces fighting in the East. “They will continue to want to interrupt, as far as possible, the flow of goods and supplies from west to east, much of which begin their journey around Lviv,” Obrien told Indian magazine Outlook.

The Third Ukrainian War began this weekend and now Putin wants to end the campaign before May 9, Victory Day in Russia, which commemorates the surrender of Nazi Germany in World War II. He plans to somehow sing victory and have a big triumphal parade on Red Square. The detail is that the forces of the Soviet Red Army were far superior to the soldiers he now has and could have to wait several more months to declare himself the winner of a pyrrhic victory.

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