After a failed blitzkrieg to bring down the Kyiv regime, Russian forces scaled back their ambitions to focus on conquering Ukraine’s Donbass region, where a war of attrition is now being played out after 100 days of conflict .
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The steamroller tactic applied by Moscow to slowly nibble away at the Donbass seems to be bearing fruit: despite Ukrainian resistance, Russian forces now control part of the key city of Severodonetsk.
“The situation in the Donbass remains extremely difficult,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky conceded on Monday.
Despite everything, “the steamroller is certainly advancing, but laboriously, it is not a military subjugation”, argues Mathieu Boulègue, expert at the British think tank Chatham House.
“In the coming weeks, Moscow will be forced to move from a war of movement to a war of position. His material is not regenerated, his strength is exhausted. Positions will soon freeze.”
After taking the strategic port of Mariupol (southeast), linking Russia to Crimea, a military victory in the Donbass would be welcome for Vladimir Putin, whose failed entry into the war stunned Westerners.
On February 24, Moscow launched the largest military offensive in Europe since the end of the Second World War.
Three simultaneous fronts are open, diluting the Russian forces: in the north towards the capital Kyiv, in the east and in the south. The maneuver mobilized 160,000 men, a ratio of forces slightly greater than one to one against the Ukrainians.
However, military doctrine recommends a ratio of three to one to carry out an attack.
Lowered ambitions
Quickly, the “special military operation”, as Moscow calls it, launched without prior conquest of air supremacy, shows its limits in the face of a devolved Ukrainian defense trained for years by NATO.
Underestimated by the aggressor and supplied with anti-tank and anti-aircraft armament by the West, the Ukrainian troops inflicted heavy damage on the Russians, forced after a month to modify their objectives.
Moscow has since decided to focus on the entire Donbass mining basin in the east. An ambition revised downwards, accompanied by efforts to remedy the shortcomings observed.
“We have seen the Russians remedy certain difficulties, particularly on the logistical level. Donbass is closer to Russia and their organic supply lines,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby noted on Friday.
On the tactical level, “they employ smaller units, make smaller movements” and “try to have better coordination between air and ground operations”, he said.
From now on, the Russian artillery relentlessly pounded the Ukrainian positions to weaken them and nibble on the ground. But “the Ukrainians have taken root in the field, in the trenches”, underlines Mathieu Boulègue.
“After some surprising Ukrainian successes, in fact moves taking advantage of Russian loopholes, the Russians regained the initiative. The Battle of Donbass, however, is far from over,” comments French military historian Michel Goya on his blog “The Way of the Sword,” predicting that this eastern front “is turning into a decisive battle that will absorb efforts in the weeks to come.
Towards a frozen conflict
For the Kremlin, “the objective is indeed to reach the administrative limits of Donbass”, estimated Tuesday on RTL General Christophe Gomart, former commander of the French special forces. From then on, “I think that they will take a real operational break because we have two armies which have already been fighting each other for three months and which are exhausted. It’s starting to be a war of attrition.”
In nearly 100 days, this brutal conflict has already taken its toll. From Western sources, it is estimated that around 15,000 Russian soldiers were killed. Probably less on the Ukrainian side, from which no decent estimate comes out, even if Volodymyr Zelensky estimated that he was losing “60 to 100 soldiers a day”, in an interview with the American media Newsmax published on Wednesday.
According to a census compiled by the Oryxspioenkop blog, based on images uploaded from the theater, the Russians lost 739 tanks, 428 armored vehicles, 813 infantry fighting vehicles, around thirty fighter planes, 43 helicopters, 75 drones and nine ships, including their flagship in the Black Sea, the Moskva. On the Ukrainian side, we are only talking about 185 tanks, 93 armored vehicles, 22 combat planes, 11 helicopters and 18 ships.
In the Donbass, “Ukraine could lose ground in the short term, but Russia will face serious problems in sustaining its military effort over time and retaining its territorial gains,” said military expert Michael Kofman, from the center of American reflection CNA, judging that “the war could be prolonged”.
“This conflict is going to be a long war of attrition,” adds Mark Cancian, of the American research institute CSIS. “Neither party seems to want to compromise or make a deal,” he adds. Until then, “we could see an informal pause, a kind of low-intensity frozen conflict”.
