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.
Just outside the Donbas, Ukraine’s second-largest city, Kharkiv in the northeast, is partially blockaded by Russian forces, the Ukrainian military said in its Saturday morning update. The city, once home to nearly 1.5 million people, has been pounded by almost nonstop bombardment since the Russian invasion began Feb. 24.
In the southeast, the devastated port of Mariupol remains contested, Ukraine said Saturday despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s claim of victory two days earlier. But the situation was dire: Russia continued to bombard the giant steelworks plant where holdout Ukrainian forces and an unknown number of civilians were holed up.
A new British military intelligence assessment early Saturday said heavy fighting was still occurring in Mariupol, despite Russia’s “stated conquest” of the city.
Another assessment, from the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, predicted that Russia would “starve out” the remaining defenders and the civilians trapped alongside. Putin ordered a tight blockade of the steel plant, the Ukrainians’ final redoubt, which is a sprawling collection of above-ground and below-ground structures.
Communications have been largely severed for weeks with Mariupol, strategically located on the Sea of Azov, and the horrors of weeks of bombardment and besiegement are only beginning to be fully revealed. Satellite imagery has revealed the existence of at least one mass grave on the city’s outskirts, and the Associated Press reported that another mass burial site has been detected.
Municipal authorities have said an estimated 20,000 people have died in the siege of the city, which has lasted nearly the entire duration of the war. Control of Mariupol is vital to Russia’s aim of linking the part of Donbas it controls with the Crimean peninsula, which it seized and annexed eight years ago.
Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, Iryna Vereshchuk, said authorities were trying to bring some civilians out of Mariupol on Saturday, back to Ukrainian-held territory, but she warned on Telegram that Russians were trying to divert some of those fleeing, pushing them toward Russian-controlled areas.
Russia on Friday telegraphed a potential expansion of its war aims, with a senior military officer saying Moscow also sought a land corridor linking the Donbas to a Russian separatist territory in the neighboring country of Moldova, to the west. That would involve seizing Ukraine’s entire southern seacoast, including the coveted port city of Odesa, leaving the country landlocked.
In an overnight address to compatriots, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the remarks by Gen. Rustam Minnekayev were proof that Russia’s war drive was not limited to Ukraine, but menaced neighboring nations as well — particularly those like Moldova, vulnerable because it is not a member of NATO.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine was intended only as a beginning, then they want to capture other countries,” Zelenskyy said.
Western governments including the U.S. administration called on Russia on Friday to respect Moldova’s sovereignty. The former Soviet republic, which is small and impoverished, said it had summoned the Russian ambassador to express “deep concern” about the comments regarding its breakaway region.
It remained unclear, though, whether the general’s remarks represented a new official policy on Moscow’s war aims. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov declined comment.
With new evidence coming to light daily of atrocities against civilians by Russian troops in territory they previously occupied or now control, Zelenskyy repeated his call for war crimes accountability.
“The occupiers are trying to achieve a primitive goal — to kill as much as possible and destroy everything they see,” Zelenskyy said in his address.
Investigators are at work in satellite towns and suburbs of Kyiv, documenting evidence of execution-style killings of civilians and other atrocities. More than 1,200 people are believed to have been killed during a Russian occupation of areas near Kyiv, lasting about a month.
In Ukraine’s east, Western analysts say there was little sign that Russia had managed to capture much more ground in recent days. The British military intelligence assessment reported “no major gains in the last 24 hours, as Ukrainian counterattacks continue to hinder their efforts.”
With punishing Russian artillery fire aimed at towns and cities across the Luhansk region, its governor, Serhiy Gaidai, said on television Saturday that in some areas, Ukrainian troops pulled back to new defensive lines. The front line was fluid, with some settlements changing hands repeatedly.
Moscow’s forces are still massing in preparation for an expected wider attack. Ukrainian officials say some Russian units are being shifted away from Mariupol to other parts of the east.
The Kremlin is also coping with the aftermath of one of its biggest symbolic defeats of the war: the sinking of the flagship of its Black Sea fleet, the Moskva, in what the Kyiv government and Western military officials say was a Ukrainian missile strike.
More than a week after the ship went down, Russia’s defense ministry confirmed the death of one sailor and said 27 others were missing, which still appeared to leave large numbers unaccounted for. The crew consisted of nearly 500 sailors, and some families have taken to social media to express anguish over the still-unknown fate of loved ones among the crew.
Efforts to end the war through negotiation have so far been fruitless, but United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres is to meet in the coming week — separately — with Zelenskyy and Putin. The U.N. says the talks in the countries’ respective capitals will center on a cease-fire and efforts to pluck civilians from the battle zone.
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(Bulos reported from Kramatorsk, Ukraine, and King from Berlin. Staff writer Carolyn Cole contributed from Bucha, Ukraine.)
