SLOVYANSK, Ukraine — When Russian troops blitzed into Ukraine, what was supposed to be an easy victory quickly foundered as Ukrainian forces mounted a strong defense that — along with Russia's many missteps — have left Moscow mired in a withering two-month war with no end in sight.
Unable to take the capital, Kyiv, Russia's war machine has since narrowed its ambitions, focusing on an intensifying battle to win the eastern Donbas region, where fighting has been waged since Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea and its backing of Ukrainian separatists.
Rather than dense urban centers, Russian and Ukrainian forces are facing off across wide tracts of mostly flat, open farmland, interspersed with smaller towns and cities with a fraction of the population of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa. Such a scenario is reminiscent of the battlefields of World War II when tanks and artillery ravaged the plains of Europe.
