Fighting raged around the eastern Ukraine city of Kreminna on Tuesday as Ukrainian forces moved closer to retaking that small but strategically important city, while the Russians battled to defend some of their hardest-fought gains of the war.
Kreminna is a gateway to two much larger cities nearby, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, important industrial centers in the Donbas region that fell to Russia after a grueling and costly summer campaign. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has called conquering and annexing the Donbass the core of the war effort.
Since enduring a series of humiliating retreats, the Russian army has reinforced its lines at Kreminna with a series of defensive barriers, part of its effort to fortify its positions up and down a jagged front stretching for hundreds of miles. Retaking the city and other nearby cities would boost the position of the Ukrainians in the region and give them control over the main roads leading to Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk.
“The situation there is difficult, acute,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said of Kreminna and other areas in eastern Ukraine, in his nightly address late Monday night. “The occupiers are using all available resources – and these are considerable resources – to make at least some progress.”
Serhiy Haidai, the Ukrainian regional governor of Luhansk province, said on Monday that part of the Russian command in Kreminna had withdrawn under military pressure to the town of Rubizhne, a few kilometers to the southeast, although it was not possible to verify the claim . “The Russians understand that if they lose Kreminna, their entire line of defense will ‘fall’,” he said in a Telegram post on Tuesday.
Vitaly Kiselyov, a Russian-backed official in occupied Luhansk, said on Russian state television Monday that the situation around Kreminna and another small town nearby, Svatove, remained “very tense.”
The Ukrainian counterattack in the east comes as the country’s battered economy shows new signs of the war’s toll, making the country increasingly dependent on Western aid. The Ukrainian government has struggled to raise money in bond markets, unable to roll back debt accumulated before Russia invaded in late February, and has since paid investors about $2.2 billion more than they received in bond sales said the Central Bank.
Overall, Ukraine’s economy is expected to shrink by about 40 percent this year as Russia occupies about a fifth of its territory, pounding its cities with cruise missiles and attacking critical industries such as steel production and agriculture.
All this has left Ukraine’s public finances, which faltered at the best of times during three decades of independence, heavily dependent on aid from the United States, the European Union, European countries donating individually, and other donors.
The International Monetary Fund, which saved Ukraine through a long series of post-independence financial crises, failed to make large-scale loans during the war. “If the IMF is concerned about debt sustainability and financing capacity, imagine what private investors think,” said Tymofiy Mylovanov, a former economy minister who is a professor at the Kyiv School of Economics.
The Russian economy has also suffered from the 10-month war, although it has not collapsed under the pressure of Western sanctions. This week, Russian and Ukrainian leaders again suggested they were open to peace talks, but only on terms rejected by their counterparts.
Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said his government wanted a “peace summit” brokered by the United Nations, but Russia could not be invited before facing prosecution for war crimes. Mr Putin said he was ready to negotiate – but days earlier he reiterated his determination to keep fighting, and has insisted that territories conquered by his forces must remain Russian forever.
On Tuesday, Putin made no sign of expecting the war or bitter relations with the West to abate any time soon. He met with the president of Belarus and expressed concern that he would – again – use that country to launch an attack on Ukraine. And he signed a long-awaited decree banning the sale of oil to countries that imposed a price cap on Russian oil: the European Union and its members, the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Canada and Australia.
Lacking diplomacy, the militaries of Ukraine and Russia have battled each other and muddy winter weather to gain more ground and entrench themselves in what they control.
Ukraine’s campaign to recapture Kreminna began in the fall, when its forces finished traversing the country’s northeastern Kharkov region and turned south to focus on Luhansk, which was almost entirely under Russian control .
Since then, the sides have fought a series of battles and artillery duels over highways and villages around Kreminna and Svatove. Russian forces took both places not long after their full-scale invasion began, cutting pontoon bridges over a river and building layers of defensive lines to moor at the front.
Ukraine and Russia are also engaged in fighting hundreds of miles to the southwest, in the Kherson region, where Ukrainian troops are driving Russian troops out of the capital, but the Kremlin still controls much of the territory. A Russian artillery strike in Kherson on Tuesday damaged a kindergarten, infrastructure and a medical aid station, although there were no casualties, regional governor Yaroslav Yanushevich said on Telegram.
Since taking command of Russia’s war effort in October, General Sergei Surovikin has been trying to rally Russian forces after their string of defeats this fall. He drew Russian troops from the city of Kherson in an organized retreat and has made efforts to preserve Russian artillery stocks and reconstitute units, analysts say.
After the loss of the city of Kherson and other setbacks in the region, Russia is regrouping and reinforcing its forces in northern Luhansk for an offensive aimed at extending its control over the region, the Institute for the Study of War said. a research group from Washington.
To that end, the institute said, Russia is prioritizing mobilizing troops to defend Kreminna and Svatove over operations in other parts of eastern Ukraine. The institute cited Ukrainian military reports of increased Russian movements of troops, military equipment and ammunition in the area.
However, it said that short-term Russian success seemed unlikely given the difficult terrain and the “very limited” offensive capabilities of the Moscow forces after months of heavy casualties. Although an autumn conscription provided Russia with hundreds of thousands of much-needed troops, the artillery heavy warfare has depleted its best-trained units and strained its supplies.
Ukraine is also facing serious supply problems, analysts say, especially as Western supporters begin to replenish their supplies themselves.
“Ukrainian artillery usage, conservatively, is probably about 90,000 rounds per month,” Michael Kofman, the director of Russian studies at CNA, a research institute in Virginia, said last week on the “War on the Rocks” podcast. That’s far more than anyone in the West is making right now. So this is all coming from the stock, which is like going through your savings accounts.
He added that Ukrainian leaders were “willing to say whatever it takes to get the help they need” to beat back Russian troops. “I don’t blame them. Their war effort depends on outside material support, that’s pretty much it.