THE WALL STREET JOURNAL / USA
By Yaroslav Trofimov
With Russia failing to achieve a strategic breakthrough, a long and bloody battle for eastern Ukraine looms
MARYINKA, Ukraine—The front line between Ukrainian troops and Russian-backed forces has skirted this village in Donbas since the conflict in eastern Ukraine began in 2014.
The line moved by just a few hundred yards after Russia launched its all-out invasion on Feb. 24, a sign that Moscow is struggling to reach even its most modest war aims in Ukraine.
“We are still here, holding firm, and this by itself is a victory,” said a Ukrainian Army captain as he waited out a salvo of Russian rockets at his mortar position in Maryinka on Wednesday.
The rockets slammed into the village’s main square, enveloping it in black smoke and peppering with shrapnel the remains of the village’s golden-domed church.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the war, he described it as a “special operation to protect Donbas,” which by then he no longer recognized as part of Ukraine.
In late March, when his initial attempt to seize the capital, Kyiv, collapsed because of stiff Ukrainian resistance, Mr. Putin reformulated the campaign’s current objective as “liberating” all of the Donbas areas still controlled by the government.
More than three weeks after the massive Russian offensive that aims to encircle Ukraine’s best forces in Donbas kicked off on April 18, Moscow’s achievements so far are limited at best. In a Senate testimony this week, Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the head of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, described the current stage of the war as a stalemate.
“The Russians aren’t winning, and the Ukrainians aren’t winning,” he said.
Prospects for peace soon are slim, Ukrainian, Western and Russian officials say.