Russian forces have launched a spring offensive in eastern Ukraine that includes the use of dozens of tanks and armored vehicles, according to Ukrainian military and analysts.
The attacks are accelerating as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy says he has a “very bad feeling” about the impact of the Middle East conflict on his country.
“We see that our diplomatic meetings and trilateral meetings are often postponed for one reason: the war in Iran,” he said in an interview with the BBC on Sunday.
“President Putin will want a long war. For President Putin, a long war in Iran is a positive,” he said, adding that higher oil prices and the suspension of U.S. sanctions on some Russian crude oil would benefit the Russian economy.
Against this backdrop, Russia is stepping up its attacks on eastern Ukraine.
“In response to changing weather conditions, the Russian aggressor is intensifying pressure across several sections of the front,” Ukrainian military commander Oleksandr Shirushkyi said on Friday.
“For several days in a row, the number of battles has exceeded 200,” he added, claiming that the Russian army was losing more than 1,000 soldiers per day.
“Active troop movements, reinforced artillery, tactical aviation, and extensive use of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) are observed in all areas, indicating that the Russian military is preparing for further attacks,” Dmytro Zapozhets of Ukraine’s 11th Corps told Ukrainian broadcaster Sashpirne on Saturday.
One of the focuses of the Russian attack is the town of Lyman in Donetsk region, on the edge of what is known as the region’s fortified zone of Ukraine, and is a key stronghold defending the metropolis of Sloviansk.
Ukraine’s III Corps announced on Saturday that Russian forces had used nearly 30 armored vehicles and more than 500 infantrymen in the region. But the Russian “attack was thwarted on all fronts,” said the corps commander, Brig. General Andriy Biletsky.
The scale of the attack represents a change in tactics for the Russian military, which has used small infantry units to penetrate Ukrainian positions for most of last year.
“This battalion-sized attack is significantly larger than most Russian mechanized attacks in recent months,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War (ISW) said.
According to ISW, there are indications that Russian forces are planning to intensify ground operations against other areas of the southern fortified zone, including the cities of Kramatorsk and Kostantinivka, key defensive locations in Ukraine.
According to Ukraine’s XI Corps, the Russian military has introduced armored vehicles and motorized units and doubled the use of artillery and tactical aviation in the Kramatorsk area.
Ukraine’s military is severely outnumbered on most fronts and relies heavily on drones to break up Russian attacks. However, ISW estimates that while Russia may make some tactical gains in Donetsk this year, it is unlikely to seize control of the fortified area. Russian military forces in the region are described as exhausted, poorly trained and overly stressed.
Maksym Virusov, a spokesman for Ukraine’s forces in the east, said the Russian military had shortened basic training for personnel involved in ground attacks from one month to one week, probably because of the high casualties.
Ukrainian forces also control the highlands east of Sloviansk. “For the enemy, stopping is tantamount to death, because we will annihilate him in the lowlands,” said Zaporozhets of the 11th Corps.
As the war enters its fifth year, the battlefield is increasingly dominated by surveillance and attack drones, making it nearly impossible to resupply frontline positions in some areas.
“There are always (Russian) reconnaissance drones in the sky, constantly searching for targets, and there are also attack drones such as Molniya and Lancet,” Bilousov told Ukrainian media on Saturday.
One Ukrainian soldier fighting in the south told CNN that the gray zone controlled by both sides has not expanded due to heavy drone activity.
Despite making modest gains in most of the battlefields in recent months, the Kremlin continues to insist that capturing the rest of Ukraine’s four eastern regions remains the goal of what it calls a special military operation.
Ukrainian forces still hold about 20% of Donetsk and large parts of Kherson and Zaporizhia. They rose to prominence in the South last month.
