Russia’s apparent decision to “change its Ukraine war plan underscores how Moscow is trying to secure territory closest to its own border,” according to a weekend report in the Wall Street Journal.
If true, that’s a much bigger story than almost anyone has noticed.
“Our forces and resources will focus on the primary objective: full liberation of Donbas,” said Sergei Rudskoy of the Russian general staff on Moscow’s official Russia-24 propaganda outlet.
NBC News reported more of Rudskoy’s statement:
Ukraine’s ability to fight had been “significantly reduced,” he said, adding that this makes “it possible, once again, to focus the main efforts on achieving the main goal — the liberation of Donbas.”
The Donbas — AKA Donets Basin — is Ukraine’s eastern energy-rich industrial area, populated in many cities mostly by ethnic Russians.
Rudskoy isn’t making a whole lot of sense here. If “liberating” the Donbas was always “the main goal,” then why wasn’t the Russian Army focused on it from the start?
A focused invasion of just the Donbas, using overwhelming force, could have been a repeat of Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s annexation of the Crimea in 2014. That effort was completed so quickly that Moscow was able to present it to the world as a fait accompli, avoiding a protracted war and crippling sanctions.
Rather than that, Russia opened with a high-risk gambit of using their best troops to first secure Kyiv — all the way on the other side of the country. That failed coup de main indicates far grander ambitions than merely nibbling off a bit of Ukraine’s eastern border region, as the Kremlin now claims.
In other words, Rudskoy tacitly admitted that Putin has drastically scaled down his war aims.
The full-scale invasion, now more than a month old, still isn’t going particularly well for Russia.
While it might be a bit of an overstatement, The Drive’s Tyler Rogoway argued last week that Russia has “already lost.”
While it was nearly impossible to see how Russia could achieve a positive outcome from its adventure in Ukraine just after it began, that question has only become more pressing with the weeks that have since passed. Taking an offramp to end or freeze the conflict as soon as possible seems absolutely critical to salvaging any sort of claim to success.
Helping Putin find that offramp has been my advice to the White House for weeks now.
In the meantime, however …
“Moscow’s intensified focus on Donbas comes as Ukrainian forces have regained some ground in the area where Russian troops had some of their early success after the invasion began,” according to the Journal.
ISW’s daily Ukraine War assessment —a great resource — reported on Sunday that “ongoing Russian efforts to replace combat losses in EMD (Eastern Military District) units and deploy additional reinforcements forward are unlikely to enable Russia to successfully resume major operations around Kyiv in the near future,” according to IWS.
That IWS report concluded that “the increasingly static nature of the fighting around Kyiv reflects the incapacity of Russian forces rather than any shift in Russian objectives or efforts at this time.”
But taken together with Rudskoy’s statement, it’s difficult to see the current redeployments from Kyiv as anything other than an admission from Moscow that they’ve seriously scaled back their initial war aims — at least until something, somewhere breaks.
If politics is the art of half a loaf, war is the art of settling for what you can get — before the whole damn thing falls apart.
With the usual caveats about the fog of war and the Kremlin’s habitual opacity, Friday’s statement from Rudskoy could be read as an indication that Moscow is ready to negotiate on terms already accepted in principle by Kyiv.
If so, then where is the US State Department? Where is the American president?
Recommended: Democrats Promise Free Gas Money for Everybody!
Join the conversation as a VIP Member