Russian troops continue their wave assault on eastern Ukraine

By Mike Collett-White

NEAR KREMINNA, Ukraine, March 14 (Reuters) – Russian troops continue to arrive in waves along the front line in eastern Ukraine, Ukrainian soldiers said on Tuesday, a sign of continued Russian winter offensive, despite the fact that Moscow has not won great victories so far.

Russia and Ukraine are locked in Europe’s bloodiest infantry battle since World War II, after Moscow launched an offensive involving hundreds of thousands of reservists and newly recruited mercenaries. The front lines have hardly moved for more than four months, despite the enormous losses suffered on both sides.

After failed assaults on other parts of the front, Russia appears determined to secure the ruins of the small town of Bakhmut in what would be its first victory since mid-2022.

In speech recorded overnight, President Volodymyr Zelensky said ‘Ukraine’s future is being decided’ in battles in the east, including Bakhmuth, where Ukrainian commanders say they are killing enough of Russian attackers to justify staying and fighting for a city in ruins almost surrounded.

“The situation in the east is very difficult, very painful,” Zelensky said. “We must destroy the military power of the enemy. And we will destroy it.”

Further north on the frontline near Kreminná, Oleksandr, 50, unit commander of the Ukrainian 110th Battalion, said the Russian assaults were still relentless despite claiming little ground there. The Russians are trying to reach Lyman, a major transit hub that Ukraine took over last year.

“They’re pressing. They’re dropping mortar shells on us,” Oleksandr told Reuters, describing Russian units advancing in three-man teams, with another wave behind them sent to replace them when killed. “At night they always attack on foot and we sit and look through our thermal goggles and shoot them.”

El Kremlin, por su parte, dijo que está compromisido a usar la fuerza para lograr sus objectsivos de guerra y Kiev debe aceptar “nuevas realidades”, su expresión para referirse a la reivindicación rusa de haber anexionado casi una quinta parte de Ucrania, que invadió one year ago.

“We have to achieve our goals. At the moment, this is only possible by military means due to the current position of the Kiev regime,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted as saying by news agencies. Russian press.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday that what is at stake in Ukraine is Russia’s very existence.

SHORTAGE OF AMMUNITION

After recapturing swathes of territory in the second half of 2022, Kyiv has remained mostly on the defensive for the past four months, while Moscow has launched a major offensive using its newly mobilized reservists and conscripted convicts from prison.

Ukrainian officials say they are preparing their own counteroffensive for later in the year, once the muddy ground has dried up and hundreds of Western tanks and armored vehicles arrive.

However, the outcome of these campaigns could depend on which side emerges stronger from Russia’s winter assault, in which both sides suffer huge casualties in what they describe as meat grinder fights.

The British Ministry of Defense said on Tuesday that Moscow was short of ammunition, “to the point that extremely punitive shell rationing is in force on many parts of the front”.

“This has almost certainly been one of the main reasons why no Russian formation has recently been able to generate operationally significant offensive action,” he said in a daily intelligence update. .

Ukraine is also facing a shortage of shells and ultimately has a smaller population to engage in a battle of attrition. Some military experts say Bakhmut is unfavorable ground for kyiv to fight off Russian forces that have advanced far enough around the city to hit Ukrainian supply lines in the rear.

“We could lose everything here that we wanted to use for these counter-offensives,” Ukrainian military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said of the Bakhmut battle.

Off the battlefield, negotiators hit a snag in talks to extend the Black Sea Grains Deal, brokered by the UN and Turkey to avert global starvation by guaranteeing wartime exports of Ukraine and Russia, both among the world’s leading suppliers of food products.

The deal expires this week. Russia agreed to extend it by 60 days, in what the Kremlin called a gesture of “goodwill”, but would block any further extension unless it received more guarantees from the West for exports of its own fertilizers and crops.

Kyiv rejected the 60-day extension, arguing that the agreement only allows for 120-day extensions. In his opinion, a shorter extension would not be enough to organize new shipments of grain.

(Reporting Reuters; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing in Spanish by Carlos Serrano)