Coinciding with Biden visit to Poland, Russia signals scaled-back goals in Ukraine
LVIV, Ukraine — As President Joe Biden visited Poland on Friday in a show of support for NATO’S eastern flank, Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s military chiefs signaled a streamlining of war aims in Ukraine — a potentially face-saving path for Moscow to exit what has become a lengthy, grinding and increasingly deadlocked conflict.
Even as Ukraine continued to tout an emerging ability to launch counterattacks against a far stronger invading force, the start of the war’s second month brought fresh evidence of the horrifying toll in civilian lives. Ukrainian officials said Friday that at least 300 people had died in a Russian airstrike earlier this month on a drama theater in the encircled port city of Mariupol — apparently the war’s worst single episode of noncombatant fatalities.
At the same time, after weeks of silence on the subject, Russia acknowledged Friday that more than 1,300 of its troops had died so far in the invasion. That number, while still more than double Moscow’s previously announced tally, is a fraction of most Western estimates of Russian combat losses. NATO has projected Russian losses to be between 7,000 and 15,000.
In pushing ahead with a war that Putin had gauged would swiftly decapitate Ukraine’s government, the Russian military leadership, beset by supply, morale and logistical problems, said its focus was now on driving Ukrainian forces back from the eastern Donbas region, where the Kremlin fomented a separatist conflict eight years ago.
Expanding the separatist region westward was among Putin’s pretext for the Feb. 24 invasion, so if such an expansion were formalized in political negotiations with Ukrainian leaders, it could be a way for the Russian president to claim a measure of military success.
Despite a Russian failure to seize the
Ukrainian capital or unseat Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Maj. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi told a briefing in Moscow that the operation’s first phase had been “mainly accomplished.” But he pointedly refused to rule out an all-out assault on Kyiv or other major Ukrainian cities.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainian government said Friday that it had conducted its first prisoner exchange with Moscow. Ukrainian Deputy
Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, in a message posted to Telegram, said Ukraine received 19 civilians and 10 soldiers and handed back 11 civilians — captured from a sunken ship near Odesa — and 10 soldiers to Russia.
The exchanges came against the backdrop of Ukrainian accusations that Moscow forced hundreds of thousands of residents — including those from battered Mariupol — across the border to Russia, adding another layer to the humanitarian catastrophe of Russia’s protracted war.
Lyudmyla Denisova, the Ukrainian ombudsman, said more than 400,000 people, nearly a quarter of them children, have been sent to Russia. Denisova accused Russia of wanting to use them as “hostages” in negotiating Kyiv’s surrender.
The Russian government verified the relocations but said they were voluntary and focused on people in Donetsk and Luhansk, eastern regions where pro-russia separatists have fought in support of Moscow’s invasion.
The developments came as Biden, who attended emergency summits of NATO, the Group of 7 and the European Council in Brussels on Thursday, arrived in Poland to cap off a three-day trans-atlantic trip focused on the war.
Biden visited Rzeszow, a Polish city near the Ukraine border that has become a hub for weapons going into Ukraine and refugees flowing out, where he gave a pep talk to U.S. soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division, who are stationed in Rzeszow as part of NATO forces.
The president told the troops that, more than just a showdown between two nations, the war in Ukraine was part of what he sees as the growing clash between the world’s democracies and its autocracies.
“What you’re engaged in is much more than just whether or not you can alleviate the suffering of the people of Ukraine,” he said. “We’re in a new phase . ... We’re at an inflection point.”