Vladimir Putin has set himself a tight deadline to declare victory in Ukraine. He wants to turn Russia’s traditional Victory Day parade of May 9 in the Red Square, commemorating the end of the Great Patriotic War in 1945, into his own personal triumph.
This is why he is in such a hurry to seize some chunk of Ukraine to declare part of his greater Russia. Charges of war crimes, of deliberate killing of civilians around Kyiv in outlying towns like Bucha, are ignored in isolated Moscow.
Meanwhile more troops are being called from all over Russia. Units are being pulled out from Georgia and the eastern districts of Siberia. The twice-yearly call-up of conscripts has been brought forward. Some 130,000 new national service personnel are to be sent immediately to the army.
“It’s an unusually high number,” explains a senior Western diplomat. “Putin said he won’t send national service personnel to Ukraine but we know he has already. The new recruits will be untrained, and not much use in battle.”
A renewed Russian offensive is now expected to seize more of the Donbas, where the enclaves of Luhansk and Donetsk have been fought over for eight years. But even the Russian speakers, in whose defence Putin falsely declared war on Kyiv, have fled the crescendo of rocket fire. Russian forces are now on a mission to defend a wasteland.
The second major objective is the Black Sea port of Odesa, which handles 70 per cent of Ukraine’s exports normally. It is now being bombarded by ships at a distance, while Russian ground forces advance from Crimea. Others are mobilised in Transnistria, the Russian enclave to the west.
To take and hold the Donbas and Odesa would take 100,000 to 120,000 soldiers. This is about the number Russia started with when they first attacked Ukraine on February 24. With 30,000 to 40,000 killed, missing, captured and injured, Russia has lost a third of its combat force.
A long hot war through the summer in Ukraine will test the resolve of Volodymyr Zelensky’s forces. But guerrilla resistance and counter-strike play to their strengths. They just have to survive. Vlad the would-be Impaler of Ukraine could become Vlad the Impaled — by his own manic delusion.
