But is Russia winning on the ground?
(Lorenzo Cremonesi) Conquering as much Ukrainian territory as possible with bombs to demonstrate to Trump that Zelensky's army is exhausted and thus impose a vague possibility of peace under the best conditions for Moscow: this is the key to reading the ground offensive wanted by Putin in recent days and concentrated above all in the Donbass.
A series of intense military operations aimed, therefore, at heavily influencing today's Trump-Putin summit. Cities and villages contested for months and months such as Pokrovsk, Kostiantynivka, Siversk, Dobropillia, Rubizhne and many other small towns are almost surrounded, are heavily bombed and some have already been infiltrated by small patrols of Russian elite troops supported by drones and aviation.
The Russians are exploiting the strategy of sending agile and well-trained units very similar to that adopted at the beginning of the war by the Ukrainians against the heavy enemy columns that were aiming for Kiev, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia.
The Kiev General Staff, after the alarm repeatedly raised in recent days about the conquest by the enemy of over 120 square kilometers of territory north of Pokrovsk and the infiltration of Russian commandos on foot into Dobropillia, with the risk of isolating Kramatorsk (the most important city in Donbass still in Ukrainian hands Ukraine), yesterday sent reassuring messages claiming that the attack had been substantially stopped. A few dozen Russian soldiers hiding among houses and in the forests does not mean at all that they are in control, high-ranking officials in the Ukrainian capital specify.
About three and a half years after the beginning of the military aggression desired by Putin to eliminate the Zelensky government and annex the whole of Ukraine in a few weeks, the Russian army, which would like to project itself in the international community's imagination as a superpower on a par with the USA and China, remains mired in a war of attrition that has decimated hundreds of thousands of its soldiers.
The Russians have been saying for at least 12 months that they are about to liberate Pokrovsk. In front of the Kramatorsk railway station in April 2022, Army missiles massacred about 60 women and children waiting to be evacuated. At the time, it seemed that the arrival of Putin's tanks was a matter of hours. Fighting is still ongoing on the outskirts of Chasiv Yar, about thirty kilometers to the east, and Bakhmut, the heart of one of the bloodiest battles of the entire war lost by the Ukrainians in May 2023, is only a twenty-minute drive away.
However, if the Russians were able to break through the Ukrainian defense line in Donbass, now reinforced by several volunteer battalions from the Azov Battalion, they would easily have a clear path to Dnipro and the center of the country.
In any case, very serious news is coming from the field. According to Vadym Filashkin of the Donetsk military administration, of the original 60,000 inhabitants of Pokrovsk remain, there is no electricity and water, and Russian artillery is firing on all escape routes. It seems that of the 150 Russian commandos who penetrated the urban area, 30 are still operational. The evacuation of over 8,000 residents of Kostiantynivka is also now impossible.
Russian drones dominate the skies. On social media, there are very harsh messages from Ukrainian soldiers accusing the command of being too rigid and of chaos in the trenches.
