Compared with the last two years, the last several days have been like a vacation for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
His nemesis, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is now spending most of his time begging the United States and Europe for military support, a sign that the tens of billions of dollars that once used to flow into Kyiv’s war chest is now increasingly scarce. Back in Russia, Putin’s most prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony over the weekend after years behind bars for a litany of spurious charges. And on Saturday, Russian forces finally captured a city in eastern Ukraine, Avdiivka, after four months of brutal combat — Russia’s first territorial gain since May.
Of this news, the battle for Avdiivka is the most significant in terms of Putin’s most important objective: winning the war in Ukraine on Russia’s terms. It’s difficult to underestimate just how brutal, intense and downright hellish the battle for this eastern Ukrainian city was. The only previous battle one could compare it with was the Russian offensive in Bakhmut, in which thousands of Russian convicts-turned-soldiers were ordered to storm entrenched Ukrainian positions to overpower the defenders. It took Moscow more than nine months and 20,000 fatalities to bring a city about a third the size of Des Moines, Iowa, into its grasp. And by the time the Russians planted the flag, Bakhmut was razed to the ground, a collection of skeletonlike buildings and corpses.
Avdiivka was about half the size of Bakhmut, yet the Russians still needed a good chunk of time and perhaps as many as 13,000 deaths to take it. The Russian army went about the job by exploiting its advantage in ammunition, bombs and bodies. According to one account, Russia dropped at least 800 guided bombs, some weighing as much as 3,300 pounds, within Avdiivka’s city limits since January. Faced with dwindling supplies of its own, the Ukrainians simply couldn’t keep up. Ukraine’s top general, Oleksandr Syrskyi, who many fault for sticking around in Bakhmut for longer than was necessary, decided to cut his losses after his troops were in danger of being surrounded.
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