The Pentagon estimated that Russia now has about 75 battalion tactical groups in Ukraine, each with roughly 1,000 troops.
Now, instead of lightning attacks from the Russian front lines, Moscow’s forces, focusing on taking the Donbas, have increased their long-range artillery barrages and sent small detachments of troops to probe Ukrainian defenders, many entrenched in earthworks established during the Moscow-backed insurgency in the eastern region that began eight years ago. That miscalculation was compounded by flawed logistics, poor soldier morale, an unexpectedly tenacious Ukrainian resistance and Western-supplied weapons used to devastating effect on Russian armored vehicles, upending Russia’s hopes for a quick victory and forcing its military to retreat and regroup. David Guttenfelder for The New York Times 24 to subjugate Ukraine, which was marked by rapid and ultimately unsuccessful advances of tanks and helicopter assaults deep inside the former Soviet republic.Ĭars passing through the war-ravaged Kyiv suburb of Horenka on Tuesday. Western military experts said the offensive promised to be much more methodical than the blitz-like operation the Kremlin launched Feb. The claims of both militaries could not be independently verified.ĭespite Russian warnings, Ukraine’s Western supporters, led by the United States, are now rushing to send longer-range weapons including howitzers, antiaircraft systems, anti-ship missiles, armed drones and even tanks - arms that American officials said were designed to thwart the Russian offensive. Ukraine’s military said that its forces had repulsed seven different Russian thrusts along the front on Tuesday, destroying 10 tanks and 18 armored units in the battles. The Donbas has now become the stated territorial objective of Russia’s redeployed invasion force along a front that stretches roughly 300 miles, from an area near the northern city of Kharkiv to the besieged southern port of Mariupol, where die-hard Ukrainian defenders ensconced in a sprawling steel plant have repeatedly defied Russian demands to surrender. The strikes mainly hit the eastern region known as Donbas, Ukraine’s industrial heartland, where pro-Moscow separatists have battled Ukrainian forces since Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014.