Putin makes Ukraine’s east Russia’s top priority

As Kyiv raced reinforcements to eastern Ukraine to try to stabilize its buckling defensive lines there, President Vladimir Putin of Russia amplified his threats against the region Thursday, calling Moscow’s offensive in the area his military’s “first-priority goal.”

Putin, speaking at an international conference in Vladivostok, sought to portray his army’s grueling advance in the eastern Donbas region as evidence of a failed Ukrainian military strategy. He largely dismissed Ukraine’s capture of hundreds of square miles of Russian territory in the Kursk region as little more than a distraction that would be dealt with over time.

Ukraine made a mistake, he said, in deploying “fairly large and well-trained units” to the Kursk offensive.

“The enemy’s goal was to make us nervous and worry and to transfer troops from one sector to another and stop our offensive in key areas, primarily in the Donbas,” Putin said at the conference. “Did it work or no? No.”

Analysts have said that diverting troops was not the only goal of Ukraine’s incursion into Russia, noting that it provided a morale boost and created a buffer zone that Ukraine might leverage in future cease-fire negotiations. It also punctured the notion that Russia was immune from troops invading and capturing its territory.

Putin, though, declared that “the enemy weakened itself in key areas, and our troops accelerated offensive operations.”

“Most importantly, no actions are taking place to contain our offensive,” he added.

The situation in the Donbas has become increasingly difficult for Ukraine over the past month, particularly in the besieged city of Pokrovsk. The last evacuation train packed with families fleeing the fighting left the city this week, and authorities announced Thursday that service would be suspended indefinitely amid ferocious Russian shelling.

More than 26,000 civilians, including more than 1,000 children, will now be forced to evacuate by car, bus and foot, military administrators said.

Russian forces have sought to seize the whole of the Donbas since 2014, when it led a previous incursion. Thirty months after launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and deploying nearly every conventional weapon in its arsenal to seize the territory, the Kremlin has yet to take control of some of the most important cities in the region.

Since last fall, Russia has been waging relentless assaults up and down the eastern front, making only marginal gains while sometimes losing as many as 1,000 soldiers a day, according to Ukrainian and Western estimates.

Long before Ukraine launched its Kursk operation last month, the Russians were making significant progress in the direction of Pokrovsk, a vital logistics hub for Ukraine’s forces.

After more than six months of brutal battles, Russian forces have been able to create a large bulge that extends about 20 miles deep through the center of Ukraine’s defenses in the region, ending about 5 miles from Pokrovsk.

This push has created new dangers that Ukraine is struggling to address.

To the north of the bulge, the Ukrainians are still managing to thwart Russia’s push into Chasiv Yar, another Ukrainian stronghold. Bloody urban fighting in another nearby stronghold – Toretsk – has slowed Russian advances in that direction. But the situation remains unpredictable.

To the south, the Russians are stepping up assaults in the direction of Kurakhove and Vuhledar – two towns that play a crucial role in the overall defense of the Donbas. If these strongholds were to fall, it could lead to a wider breakdown of the overall defenses in the region.

Analysts say that Ukraine’s bold military gambit in Kursk created a battlefield that is more dynamic than perhaps at any time in the past 18 months.

By redirecting Russian forces away from the east, “Ukraine is betting that other parts of the 750-mile front won’t collapse, that it will not lose a large number of soldiers and equipment in Kursk, and that the benefits from its operations in Kursk will outweigh the costs sustained elsewhere,” Michael Kofman and Rob Lee, two military analysts, wrote in an assessment in Foreign Affairs.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine has said that he hoped the Kursk offensive would ease pressure on the eastern front. But the success of that strategy is unclear. Instead of redirecting Russian units away from the east to thwart Ukraine’s Kursk offensive, the Kremlin appears to be relying on conscripts and other units instead.

The Kursk operation still holds potential diplomatic benefits, even if not all military goals are achieved, said Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and fellow at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based research group.

“Notwithstanding the failure to draw Russian troops from the Donbas, the Kursk campaign has forced the West to at least rethink some of its strategic assumptions about Ukrainian capacity,” Ryan said. “It has not, unfortunately, resulted in a shift in strategy from the ‘defend Ukraine for as long as it takes,’ which is a strategy for defeat.”

Ryan said the Ukrainian plan seems designed to telegraph to Putin “that Ukraine will retain Russian territory and destroy Russian forces and strategic targets for as long as it takes to achieve the aims.”

Putin’s theory of victory is predicated on the idea that he can outlast the West’s willingness to provide robust military support to Kyiv while breaking Ukraine’s ability to function by pounding crucial infrastructure, throttling the economy and terrorizing the population through punishing missile and drone strikes.

Those tactics were evident in a series of devastating assaults on Ukrainian cities in the past 10 days, including a missile strike in Poltava on Tuesday that killed 53 and wounded almost 300.

Zelenskyy has his own vision for how Ukraine could achieve victory and has said that he will present his plan to President Joe Biden – as well as former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris – when he travels to the United States later this month.

“For our part, we definitely want the war to end,” Zelenskyy said this week in an interview with NBC News. The victory plan, he said, “is aimed purely at forcing Russia to end the war.”

That, he has said, can only be done by making Russia feel the cost of the war directly, articulating a rationale for the invasion into Kursk.

While Ukraine hoped that the Kursk campaign would show Western fears of escalation were overwrought and demonstrate that the Kremlin’s “red lines” were illusory, it has not led to a change in U.S. policy prohibiting the use of long-range weapons to hit deep inside Russia. Zelenskyy and members of his inner circle have lobbied relentlessly for permission to do so.

Zelenskyy said that an overhaul of his wartime Cabinet this week – including the replacement of the country’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba – was part of an effort to bring new energy to the fight, both at home and abroad.

However, the overhaul has largely resulted in filling senior positions with officials who have largely been beholden to Zelenskyy for their political rise, making major changes in how Ukraine pursues its strategic objectives unlikely.

After approving the dismissal of Kuleba, Ukrainian lawmakers voted to appoint Andrii Sybiha as the new foreign minister.

A career diplomat who served as Ukraine’s ambassador to Turkey in 2016, he joined Zelenskyy’s administration as deputy chief of staff in 2021 before moving over to the foreign ministry.

It is expected that key foreign policy decisions will remain tightly controlled by the president’s office, a system that is likely to increase criticism against the administration, which has been accused of consolidating too much power within a small circle.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.