Advertisement
News Analysis
Russia Is Showing Signs of Weakness in Ukraine. So It Hits Harder.
The war has not been going the Kremlin’s way, with battleground losses and growing casualties. With fiercer strikes, Moscow hopes to gain a better position for negotiations.
Lara Jakes covers European defense and diplomacy.
The display of force that Russia rained on Ukraine early Tuesday, with hundreds of drones and missiles, cannot mask the increasing signs of Moscow’s weakness in the four-year war.
Russia’s frontline advance in Ukraine has slowed almost to a halt. It has stepped up coerced mobilization in occupied eastern Ukraine as its domestic recruitment efforts have fallen short. Domestic discontent is growing. Europe is providing new support to Ukraine. And peace talks brokered by the United States have all but ended.
All this adds up to a loss of momentum by Russia, analysts say.
“Ukraine’s position is much, much more formidable now than just a year ago,” Franz-Stefan Gady, a military analyst based in Vienna, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Some analysts say they believe that Russia’s recently stepped-up strikes are an attempt to reclaim an advantage in potential peace talks and to re-engage the Trump administration, which has become more focused on the war in Iran than the one in Ukraine.
Advertisement
Ukraine’s battlefield gains, nonetheless, have turned the tide in the war, said Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a research organization in London.
While Russia’s airstrikes could continue “for a long period,” Mr. Watling said on Tuesday, its combat performance is waning. That has led to “a growing optimism that Ukraine can fight Russia to a cease-fire,” he wrote in an analysis this week for Foreign Affairs.
That is a stark turnabout from last summer, when President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was so confident of victory that he flew to Alaska for a meeting of minds with President Trump on how to end the war. These days, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is the one pushing for a quick end to the hostilities.
In Moscow on Tuesday, Mr. Putin’s chief spokesman said the war could end as soon as Ukraine withdrew from the Donbas region, where Russia has claimed territory.
Advertisement
“We remain open to peace negotiations,” said the spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, even as he conceded that talks were at a standstill.
Mr. Gady said Russia was unlikely to seize full control of the Donbas by the end of 2026, as it had sought to do before returning to cease-fire negotiations. But, he said, the barrage of airstrikes like those on Tuesday show that Russia’s air power cannot be discounted, and “Ukraine is certainly going to see more of these attacks.”
Ukraine, in the meantime, is holding the line on the ground.
Analysts with DeepState UA, a Ukrainian open-source intelligence tracker, reported this week that the Russian military appeared to have lost more territory in May than it had gained, its first month with such a loss since Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive.
That was despite a 37.5 percent increase in the number of Russian attacks. Analysts said Russian battlefield forces had most likely degraded to the point that, at times, attacks were left to only one or two soldiers to launch.
“The war is entering a new phase, and it’s important for the Ukrainian state not to lose the initiative,” the DeepState analysts concluded.
Advertisement
Ukraine’s battlefield position continues to be backed by new military aid from Europe, including an arms package worth about $149 million from Finland and 16 Gripen fighter jets from Sweden, both announced this past week.
Recent estimates from Western officials suggest that Russia is suffering staggering battlefield casualties. Last week, the British spy chief, Anne Keast-Butler, said nearly 500,000 Russian soldiers had been killed since the war began in February 2022.
“As we remain steadfast in our support for Ukraine, Putin is going backwards on the battlefield,” Ms. Keast-Butler said in a speech in London.
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that Russia was losing 15,000 to 20,000 soldiers every month. “Not injured — dead,” Mr. Rubio said on Fox News. “It’s a bad war.”
That is why Moscow is trying to get more soldiers from eastern Ukraine.
Students in the occupied Luhansk and Donetsk regions have seen their mobilization deferrals canceled, and the Russian occupation authorities have resorted to mandatory registration, raids and threats of legal punishment to force Ukrainians into the Russian Army, according to Maksym Beznosiuk of the Jamestown Foundation, a policy group in Washington.
Advertisement
“The Kremlin’s mobilization strategy in the occupied territories aims to fill the personnel gap caused by catastrophic Russian military losses and reshape the demographic balance by removing some Ukrainian residents,” Mr. Beznosiuk, an expert on Russia’s military and E.U.-Ukraine relations, wrote in an analysis this week.
On Tuesday morning, Mr. Zelensky called the latest assault “a large-scale attack and a completely transparent statement from Russia: If Ukraine is not protected from ballistic and other missile strikes, these attacks will continue.”
And they could extend into Europe the longer that allies there supply Ukraine with weapons, Nikolai Sokov, a former Russian and Soviet diplomat, said in an interview on Tuesday.
Russia’s ability to prolong the war in Ukraine, Mr. Sokov said, should not be discounted.
“What I do not see in European policy is the understanding that instead of accepting defeat, actually Moscow may choose escalation,” said Mr. Sokov, now a senior fellow at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation in Austria. “That would be my concern.”
Advertisement
In his interview on Fox News, Mr. Rubio acknowledged that American efforts to negotiate a peace deal in Ukraine had “lost some momentum over the last few months, for a variety of reasons.”
“Hopefully, we’ll reach a point here soon where both parties re-engage,” Mr. Rubio said. “And we’re prepared to play the role to mediate and to bring that to a conclusion.”
He also said Russia might have recently felt “a little bit optimistic” because profits from the high costs of oil caused by the closed Strait of Hormuz had given the Kremlin an economic lifeline to continue supporting the military effort.
Even so, Mr. Rubio said, “the Ukrainians feel increasingly confident about their battlefield position.”
Lara Jakes, a Times reporter based in Rome, reports on conflict and diplomacy, with a focus on weapons and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East. She has been a journalist for more than 30 years.
Comments
Post a Comment