Russia’s military is making “incremental progress” in its efforts to capture the Donbas region of Ukraine, a senior U.S. defense official said.
Russia and Ukraine’s military are mainly fighting in the Donbas region, which is in the eastern part of Ukraine that borders Russia and where Ukrainians and pro-Russian separatists have engaged in fighting for years. After the Russians failed to conquer the capital of Kyiv, they redirected their attention to the Donbas.
“We would assess that Russian forces are making slow and uneven, and frankly, we would describe it as incremental progress in the Donbas, some advance in east of Izium and to the south a little bit. But there has been continued pushback by the Ukrainians, and so there’s a lot of still back and forth in the Donbas in terms of territory gained and or lost by, frankly, both sides,” the official told reporters Thursday.
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The Russians have 92 “operational battalion tactical groups” within Ukraine and another 20 in Russia, although they started with between 125 and 130, the official said. Each BTG consists of roughly 800-1,000 service members.
Russia is “once again relying on a fresh round of conscripts,” the official added. “We have some early indications that while the conscripts start out with high morale because they’ve been feasting on Russian propaganda, it doesn’t take very long before that morale is sapped once they get put into combat and face Ukrainian resistance.”
In addition to poor morale, the Pentagon believes the Russians have “not overcome all their logistics and sustainment challenges” that have plagued them since the start of their invasion back on Feb. 24, nine weeks ago. These difficulties have prevented Russian forces from making more than “several kilometers or so progress on any given day, just because they don’t want to run out too far ahead of their logistics and sustainment lines.”
Russia is also seeking to capture Mariupol, a strategically important port city on the coast of the Sea of Azov in the southeastern part of Ukraine, that its troops have already surrounded. If Russia can capture the city, it will have the territory connecting the Crimea Peninsula, which it annexed in 2014, and the Donbas region.
The defense official said the Pentagon believes Russian troops were moving out of Mariupol. At least 1,000 civilians, including women and children, have been sheltering underneath the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol alongside the city’s remaining defense forces, who are refusing to surrender to Russian troops.
Russian President Vladimir Putin canceled a plan to storm the steel plant last week, instead ordering Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to seal off the plant “so that not even a fly comes through.”
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United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres supported the opening of evacuation corridors in Mariupol, calling the city a “crisis within a crisis.”
“Today, the people of Mariupol are in desperate need for such an approach. Mariupol is a crisis within a crisis,” Guterres said in Kyiv, speaking at a press conference with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “Thousands of civilians need life-saving assistance. Many are elderly need medical care or have limited mobility — they need an escape route out of the apocalypse.”
