ANALYSIS | Ukraine hasn’t given Russia a win in four weeks. A dark new phase of the war could be coming

Russian millionaire’s yacht received with blockade and protest 0:44 (CNN) — On Monday, after heavy fighting, Ukrainian forces regained control of Makariv, a city west of Kyiv that had been hit hard by Russian airstrikes.
It’s tempting to see this small victory for Ukrainian forces as a change of momentum in the battle for Kyiv: in better times, this suburb would be just an hour’s drive from Khreshchatyk, the capital’s central boulevard. Kyiv seemed to be the main target of what the Kremlin must have envisioned as a swift regime change operation. The capital has been rocked by explosions in recent days, but it is far from surrounded. In the Sea of ​​Azov, the city of Mariupol, despite being surrounded and mercilessly pummeled, block by block, by Russian firepower, continues to elude their control. Its supporters rejected an ultimatum to surrender by Monday morning, thwarting a Russian effort to finalize a land bridge linking Crimea with breakaway republics in eastern Donbas. A destroyed armored personnel carrier is seen in Makariv on March 4. Nearly a month after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian military has significantly changed its message. The Russian military’s advances have been hampered, the Ukrainians say, forcing a change in Russian tactics. “Due to the lack of success of the ground phase of the operation, the enemy continues to actively launch missile and bomb attacks against important military and civilian infrastructure using operational and tactical aircraft, high-precision missile weapons and indiscriminate munitions,” said the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in a statement on Tuesday. There are many signs to suggest that the Russians are taking a more confrontational approach, launching salvos of missiles from outside Ukrainian airspace. In a statement released on Sunday, Russia’s Defense Ministry said warships in the Caspian Sea launched Kalibr cruise missiles and planes launched Kinzhal hypersonic missile systems from airspace over Crimea. Those missiles targeted what the Russians described as a large Ukrainian Army fuel and lubricant storage base near Kostyantynivka in the southern Mykolaiv region. Separately, the Russian military said Kalibr cruise missiles were fired from the Black Sea, targeting a Ukrainian armored vehicle repair shop. Russian precision missiles also targeted what Russia described as a Ukrainian military training center near Ovruch in the northern Zhytomyr region. These expensive displays of firepower have a public relations element: Russia is interested in exporting a version of the Kalibr and has touted the Kinzhal as capable of evading missile defense systems. The UK Ministry of Defense, for its part, dismissed Russian claims of the Kinzhal’s combat debut, stating that its use was “most likely intended to downplay the lack of progress in Russia’s ground campaign. It is It is highly unlikely that the deployment of the Kinzhal will materially affect the outcome of the Russian campaign in the Ukraine.” However, these assessments are of little comfort to those who receive the full power of Russia’s weapons. Dozens of people were killed in a missile attack on a soldiers’ barracks in Mykolaiv on Friday, and long-range Russian strikes have hit areas far from the battle lines: at least 35 people were killed in the March 13 attacks on the Yavoriv military training camp, in the Lviv region of western Ukraine, not far from the Polish border. More than 30 missiles fired from warplanes over the Black and Azov seas hit the base. However, Russia has so far not captured any major Ukrainian cities in the offensive: neither Kharkiv in the northeast nor Odessa in the southwest. Even Sumy and Chernihiv in the north, both located across the border from the main military concentration zones inside Russia, remain under Ukrainian control. And in Kherson, a medium-sized city in the south under Russian control, Russian forces have faced another longstanding problem: angry residents who gather daily in the central square to tell Russian troops to go home. One such demonstration ended Monday with a man seriously injured after Russian troops used gunshots and apparently stun grenades to disperse the crowd. Military analysts are concerned about another consequence of this new phase of the war: As Russian ground forces face obstacles and make little new progress, their leaders are resorting more to the indiscriminate and coercive use of weapons against Ukrainian cities. An assessment conducted on March 19 by the Institute for the Study of War gave just such a grim forecast. “If the war in Ukraine reaches a dead end, Russian forces will continue to shell and raze Ukrainian cities, devastating them and killing civilians, even as Ukrainian forces impose losses on Russian attackers and carry out their own counterattacks,” the assessment said. . “The Russians could hope to break the Ukrainians’ will to continue fighting in such circumstances by demonstrating Kyiv’s inability to expel Russian forces or stop their attacks, even if the Russians are manifestly incapable of taking Ukraine’s cities.” The defeat of the initial Russian campaign by Ukraine may therefore set the conditions for a devastating prolongation of the conflict and a new and dangerous period that will test the resolve of Ukraine and the West.” In addition to this grim prognosis, the Ukrainian officials have begun warning of a possible new front in the war, with the country’s General Staff saying on Sunday that the threat of an offensive from Belarus into northwestern Ukraine was “high,” without elaborating. The Volyn region of northwestern Ukraine, bordering Belarus to the north and NATO-allied Poland to the west, could in theory serve as a gateway for attacking forces from the north to approach Lviv, a city in western Ukraine that is a center for government logistics and aid, as well as a transit point for many civilians seeking to flee fighting in other parts of the country.Russia has already used the terri territory of Belarus as a launching pad for its invasion, as Russian forces are conducting an offensive into Kyiv and central Ukraine from southern Belarus. It is not clear whether Belarus will actively join the war. But Ukraine’s General Staff has warned that Russia is trying to bring reserve forces to Ukraine’s borders. If true, that says a lot. It testifies to the high cost that the Russian military has already paid in terms of lives, although the Kremlin has not disclosed the number of victims since March 2. And it speaks of the political will of one person, Russian President Vladimir Putin, to continue depleting Ukraine of blood and treasure.