Editor’s note: On March 29th Russia said it would “drastically reduce combat operations” around Kyiv and Chernihiv, another northern city in Ukraine. This article has been updated as a result.
ON FEBRUARY 26TH, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, RIA Novosti, a Russian state-run news agency, accidentally published an article that had been due to run two days into what the Kremlin thought would be a quick and easy war. “Ukraine has returned to Russia,” it boasted. “Did someone in the old European capitals, in Paris and Berlin, seriously believe that Moscow would give up Kiev?” A month into its botched campaign, Russia may be doing just that.
On March 25th Russia’s defence ministry held a briefing in which three generals—including General Mikhail Mizintsev, compared by Ben Wallace, Britain’s defence minister, to a “Death Eater” from the Harry Potter books—declared that the war was a roaring success. “The main tasks of the first stage of the operation have been completed,” they declared, despite much evidence to the contrary. Kyiv was never the aim, they insisted. It was attacked only to prevent Ukraine from reinforcing the Donbas region in the east (see map). Russia first invaded Donbas in 2014, creating two so-called “People’s Republics” which it recognised as independent states on February 21st this year. “Our main aim,” said the generals, is “liberating Donbas.” On March 29th, when Russian and Ukrainian negotiators met in Turkey, Russia’s deputy defence minister said that its forces would “drastically reduce” operations around Kyiv and Chernihiv, another northern city.
The idea that Russia was only ever interested in Donbas is nonsense. Western officials who had sight of Russian war plans for months before the invasion say that the intention was to capture Kyiv and occupy much of the country. As he launched the war, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, promised: “We will seek to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine.” His forces’ actions in the first days of the war, including a cack-handed effort to seize Hostomel airport outside Kyiv, attest to this (the airport has been in and out of Russian hands since). Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, has claimed that his forces found ceremonial uniforms in the first batch of captured Russian tanks, suggesting that the Kremlin was planning a victory parade.
Russia is pivoting largely because the first phase of its war has been a failure. Its pincer movement on the capital from the north-west and north-east has stalled in the face of staunch Ukrainian resistance, jammed-up supply lines and a shortage of manpower. Russia has failed to encircle the capital, let alone assault it. Nor has it taken any major city other than Kherson—and even there its control looks increasingly precarious. One NATO official says that the alliance estimates that somewhere between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian troops may have died so far—a rate that would outstrip any Russian military operation since the bloodiest campaigns of the second world war—with as many as 40,000 casualties (those killed, captured, wounded or missing) overall.
Some officials think the Russian announcement of a new phase in the war could be a ruse, intended to draw Ukrainian defenders away from the capital. “I don’t think Putin has said goodbye to the idea of regime change in Kyiv yet,” warns Sabine Fischer of the SWP think-tank in Berlin. Explosions could be heard around Kyiv on March 27th. Early on March 28th British defence intelligence said that there had been “no significant” change to the disposition of Russian forces in occupied areas in the preceding 24 hours. A Western official notes that Russia “still poses a significant threat to Kyiv through their strike capability”. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that Russian strategy is changing on the ground.
Konrad Muzyka of Rochan Consulting, which tracks the war, says that “the most battered units” are being withdrawn and sent back to Russia to recuperate. Satellite pictures show no Russian troops at Hostomel airport, for instance. Russian forces outside Kyiv are “digging in” and “establishing defensive positions”, noted a US defence official on March 25th, suggesting that efforts to enter the capital have been put on ice. On March 28th Ukraine’s armed forces claimed that Russia was blowing up several bridges, including one on the Snov river north-east of Chernihiv.
At the same time, Russia has prioritised its offensives in the Donbas, and fighting there has intensified over the past week. The Western official says that forces from Georgia and Kaliningrad, as well as fighters from the Wagner Group, a network of mercenary companies, are being deployed to the area. Russian forces have attempted to move south from Izyum, a town 125km south-east of Kharkiv, at the same time as they advance north towards Zaporizhia, with the intention of encircling what the Ukrainians call the Joint Forces Operation (JFO)—the troops fighting around Donbas—and preventing them from retreating west over the Dnieper river.
There is no guarantee that Russia can achieve this: its supply lines would be stretched further, and progress south from Kharkiv and Izyum has been slow and grinding. Ukrainian forces are still mounting counter-attacks around Kharkiv and Izyum, among other places. The furthest extent of Russia’s northward advance is currently Huliaipole, which leaves some way to go. But if the manoeuvre works, it would be a blow to Mr Zelensky. “A lot depends on whether or not Mariupol falls,” says Ben Barry of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a think-tank. The city appears surrounded and will eventually run out of ammunition and supplies; that could free up Russian forces to move north.
Russia might see victory in Donbas as a consolation prize for its failure to secure regime change in Kyiv—and perhaps as an exit strategy. Russian proxies held only a third of Donbas before this war; the rest of the region includes Mariupol, the besieged port, the loss of which would deprive Ukraine of any coastline on the Sea of Azov. Since Mariupol is home to the Azov battalion, a paramilitary group in Ukraine’s armed forces which boasts SS insignia, conquering it would also serve the Kremlin’s narrative that it is “de-Nazifying” the country. Russia may also still hope to keep a so-called land bridge to Crimea, which would run through Mariupol and stretch farther west beyond Donbas.
What Russia intends to do with all this territory is less clear. One option would be to use it as a bargaining chip to secure other concessions from Mr Zelensky, such as limits on Ukraine’s foreign policy and armed forces. But because Russia has already recognised the independence of the sham republics—“Ukraine does not need these territories,” declared Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and now the deputy chairman of its security council, on February 21st—this could be tricky.
Another option would be to annex it to Russia, though the Kremlin probably lacks the appetite to govern and rebuild these areas. A third would be to create another frozen conflict like those in Transnistria, in Moldova, and South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in Georgia, places where Russia has garrisoned its troops for years, essentially creating proxy pseudo-states to wield influence over those countries. Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, says that Russia’s aim is to “create North and South Korea in Ukraine”.
Whatever the endgame, a military strategy that focuses on Donbas is a losing proposition. Grabbing chunks of Ukraine (or Georgia before that, and Moldova before that) and using them as leverage could be done at a tolerable economic and military price to Russia in 2014. Doing so now is a different matter. In an interview with The Economist in Kyiv on March 25th, Mr Zelensky suggested he was open to territorial compromises: “Our land is important, yes, but ultimately it’s just territory.” Two days later he told Russian journalists: “I understand it’s not possible to make Russia completely leave the [Donbas] territory—that’ll lead to world war three.” But even Mr Zelensky, wildly popular as he is, would probably be unable to persuade his compatriots to relinquish land beyond that which was lost in the Russian attacks of 2014-15.
Russian occupation of the greater Donbas would thus come at a heavy cost. Ukraine’s armed forces, flush with confidence and Western weaponry, are likely to expand their counter-attacks; some even harbour hopes of driving Russia out entirely. Western countries—buoyed by Ukraine’s resilience, surprised by their own solidarity and wary of setting a precedent for other aggressors—are unlikely to lift sanctions as long as Russia hangs on to any of its new gains from this war. Those sanctions are suffocating Russia; S&P, a ratings agency, forecasts that its GDP will shrink by 22% this year, setting it back by 15 years.
The irony is that, had Mr Putin confined his war to the Donbas from the beginning, he might have split the West and avoided such punitive measures. Now the Kremlin faces an unappetising choice. It can have Mariupol—or it can have an economy.
