KRAMATORSK, Ukraine — Russian and Ukrainian troops faced off Saturday along a 300-mile battlefront in the country’s east, where the Ukrainian military said its forces had beaten back more than half a dozen separate attacks. But punishing shellfire forced defenders to regroup in some areas.
With the war soon to enter a third month, Moscow is pressing ahead with an offensive in Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland as it seeks to gain full control over the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, known together as the Donbas.
Western analysts and officials, however, say Russia has not made major territorial gains since Monday, when both sides said that the fighting in the east had entered a new phase. Russia redeployed its forces to concentrate on the east after failing last month to seize the capital, Kyiv.
