NI SHAGU NAZAD??

From the New York Times this morning:

“Russia’s push to give its president a showcase victory in Ukraine appeared to face a new setback on Saturday, as Ukrainian defenders pushed the invaders back toward the northeast border and away from the city of Kharkiv, with the Russians blowing up bridges behind them.

“With less than 48 hours before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia aimed to lead his country in Victory Day celebrations commemorating the Soviet triumph over Nazi Germany, the apparent Russian pullback from the area around Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, contradicted the Russian narrative and illustrated the complicated picture along the 300-mile front in eastern Ukraine.

“The Russians have been trying to advance in eastern Ukraine for the past few weeks and have been pushing especially hard as Victory Day approaches, but Ukrainian forces — armed with new weapons supplied by the United States and other Western nations — have been pushing back in a counteroffensive.

“The destruction of three bridges by Russian forces, about 12 miles northeast of Kharkiv, reported by the Ukrainian military, suggested that the Russians not only were trying to prevent the Ukrainians from pursuing them, but had no immediate plans to return.”

No. Immediate. Plans. To. Return.

Kharkiv is the second-largest city in Ukraine after Kyiv, and is only 40 miles from the Russian border. And the mighty Russian Army hasn’t been able to take it in 72 days.

Over the past week, Ukrainian forces have retaken a several towns and villages in the outskirts of Kharkiv, which places them in position to expel Russian forces from the region and reclaim complete control of the city over the next several days, according to a recent analysis by the Institute for the Study of War. This defeat now forces the Russian military to choose whether to send reinforcements intended for elsewhere in eastern Ukraine to help defend their positions on the outskirts of Kharkiv. The fact they are reduced to choosing one location over another means that the overwhelming force they began this war with is no longer a factor.

In the past several days, the Russians have made public moves to show them preparing to annex vast new swaths of Ukrainian territory, moving to cement control of much of the country’s east even as they struggle to capture key areas on the battlefield. Video was released of survivors in Mariupol cleaning up the wreckage created by the Russian assault on the city, “protected” by the “libeators” of the Russian Army. The occupation of the strategic Ukrainian port marks a rare Russian success, but the city’s bombed-out ruins don’t make for a “successful” backdrop for a parade. Sergei Kiriyenko, head of the Russian presidential administration, ruled out an official Victory Day parade there Thursday. In Kherson, the Russians have begun renaming streets with Russian names, while shutting down the open internet and replacing it with the closed Russian internet, and replacing money with the ruble. However, the population is refusing to use the Russian money, and the Russian internet service has been hacked and put down repeatedly despite Russian efforts to maintain the operation.

In Moscow, this year’s Victory Day parade will be smaller and humbler than in years past, with less equipment on parade and no friendly heads of states invited, not even Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, who on Thursday criticized the way the war has dragged on (he has reason, since his support of the war has emboldened the democratic opposition to his dictatorship).

As to how popular the “limited military operation” is in Russia, on Saturday night two shadowy figures in the Siberian oil city Nizhnevartovsk made clear what they thought of conscription. One, wearing a gray hoodie and camouflage pants, hurled seven Molotov cocktails into a local military recruiting center while the other recorded the incident. This was the most recent one of six recent arson attacks on Russian recruiting offices. Several of the attacks led to the arrests of young Russian men.

A move by the Kremlin to formally claim the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, along with the southern city of Kherson as part of Russia, could push the conflict into an unpredictable, even more explosive phase.

U.S. sources have said “highly credible” intelligence indicates Russia will probably stage fraudulent referendums in mid-May in which citizens of Donetsk, Luhansk or Kherson would appear to express support for leaving Ukraine and becoming part of Russia, in a manner similar to the “Potemkin referendum” held in Crimea in 2014. After that, Russia would probably install leaders loyal to Moscow in those areas.

Moscow recognized the separatist Donetsk and Luhansk regions as independent of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, just before launching the invasion on Feb. 24, sending Russian forces into those regions for “peacekeeping” purposes.

Putin might be hoping Europeans would tolerate annexation as a way to end the bloody conflict. But Russian atrocities would make a peace offensive based on annexation more difficult for Ukraine’s Western backers to accept. Such a plan works if he’s won, but the problem for the Russians may be that they claim territory not on the basis of having beaten the Ukrainians but on the basis of an extravagant claim they can’t support. Russian troops have been making “minimal progress at best” in their attempt to seize the Donbas region.

Britain’s Defense Ministry said that more than a quarter of Russian units sent to Ukraine had been damaged to the point where they were probably “combat ineffective.” The ministry said it could take years for Russia to reconstitute elite units weakened in the war. For Putin to announce a general mobilization tomorrow would create domestic problems, since it would take at least six months to train conscripts well enough to be able to send them into combat.

Taken together with an accelerating flow of Western weaponry for Ukrainian forces, the reports of logistics challenges and battlefield reversals suggest a hard road ahead for Russia as it approaches its traditional May 9 Victory Day celebration.

On the eve of Victory Day, “Ni shagu nazad!” seems an empty boast.

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