Peace Talks in Limbo Russia Intensify Offensive to Break Ukraine in Two
Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, April 20: With the peace talks lying in limbo, Russia has hurled its military might against Ukrainian cities and towns and poured more troops into the war, seeking to slice the country in two in a potentially pivotal battle for control of the eastern industrial heartland of coal mines and factories.
As apprehended by the Ukrainian president Volydymyr Zelensky, the fighting on Wednesday unfolded along a boomerang-shaped front hundreds of miles long in what is known as the Donbas. If successful, the Russian offensive would essentially slice Ukraine in two and give President Vladimir Putin a badly needed victory after the failed attempt by Moscow’s forces to storm the capital, Kyiv, and heavier-than-expected casualties nearly two months into the war.
The cities of Kharkiv and Kramatorsk came under deadly attack, and Russia also said it struck areas around Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro west of the Donbas with missiles. Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov said air-launched missiles destroyed 13 Ukrainian troop and weapons locations, while the air force struck 60 other Ukrainian military facilities, including missile warhead storage depots.
Russian artillery hit nearly 1,300 Ukrainian military facilities and over 1,200 troop concentrations over the past 24 hours, Konashenkov said. In what both sides described as a new phase of the war, the Russian assault began Monday along a front stretching more than 480 kilometres from north-eastern Ukraine to the country’s southeast. Ukraine’s military said Russian forces tried to “break through our defences along nearly the entire front line.”
A Russian victory in the Donbas would deprive Ukraine of the industrial assets concentrated there, including mines, metals plants and heavy-equipment factories.
With Moscow announcing a second round of operations a day ago, the Kremlin said on Wednesday that it has passed on a draft document to Kyiv containing ‘absolutely clear, elaborate wording’ of its demands as part of peace talks. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also said ‘the ball is in their court’ and that Russia is now ‘waiting for a response.’
Peskov didn’t give further details but did claim Kyiv had constantly deviated from previously confirmed agreements. “The dynamic of work on the Ukrainian side leaves much to be desired, the Ukrainians do not show a great inclination to intensify the negotiation process,” he said. Ukraine presented Russia with its own draft last month in Istanbul, where the two sides held talks aimed at ending the conflict. It has been unclear how regularly the two sides have spoken to each other since then.
A senior U.S. defence official said the Russians had added two more combat units, known as battalion tactical groups, in Ukraine over the preceding 24 hours. That brought the total number of units in the country to 78, all of them the south and the east, up from 65 last week, the official said.
That would translate to about 55,000 to 62,000 troops, based on what the Pentagon said at the start of the war was the typical unit strength of 700 to 800 soldiers. But accurately determining Russia’s fighting capacity at this stage is difficult.
A European official said Russia also has 10,000 to 20,000 foreign fighters in the Donbas. They are a mix of mercenaries from Russia’s private Wagner Group and Russian proxy fighters from Syria and Libya, according to the official.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine – which began on February 24 – has forced more than five million people to flee the war-torn country, the UN refugee agency said on Wednesday.
Ukraine had a pre-war population of 44 million people and the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHCR) said the conflict has displaced more than seven million within Ukraine along with the 5.03 million who had left as of Wednesday. According to the agency, another 13 million people are believed to be trapped in the war-affected areas.
Meanwhile, Mariupol – where Russian troops have intensified their assault – could fall into Russian hands within ‘hours,’ Ukrainian officials said. As the fighting raged, the two sides also agreed to a humanitarian corridor to allow civilians to flee the devastated port city. The port city has strategic value as a link between territories in the south and east of Ukraine which are held by Russian forces or Russia-backed separatists.
Meanwhile, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called for a four-day halt in fighting in Ukraine, starting Thursday to coincide with Orthodox Christians’ Holy Week observances. Noting that Orthodox Easter is coming amid an intensifying Russian offensive in eastern Ukraine, the U.N. chief said Tuesday that the need for a “humanitarian pause” is all the more urgent.
Russia is assaulting cities and towns across Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland in what both sides call a new phase of the war after losing about 25% of the combat power it sent into Ukraine, according to Pentagon estimates. Russia gave Ukrainian fighters still holding out in Mariupol a fresh ultimatum to surrender on Wednesday as it pushed for a decisive victory in its new eastern offensive, while Western governments pledged more military help to Kyiv. Thousands of Russian troops backed by artillery and rocket barrages were advancing in what Ukrainian officials have called the Battle of the Donbas.
Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency says direct phone communications between the decommissioned Chernobyl power plant and Ukraine’s nuclear regulator have been restored. Ukraine informed the Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog on March 10 that it had lost direct contact with the plant, the site of the 1986 disaster. Russian forces seized Chernobyl at the beginning of the invasion on February 24 and withdrew on March 31.
