Taking the battle to Putin
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s military setbacks in the war in Ukraine are mounting, with evidence emerging that he has lost at least 7000 troops and more than 200 tanks in the conflict so far.
The Ukrainian side also says it is now counter-attacking against stalled Russian positions as the invasion enters its fourth week. Moscow is having to summon troops from other deployments.
Russian forces were being held off both east and west of the capital, Kyiv, as well as in Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, despite a ferocious bombardment.
The besieged city of Mariupol was resisting a Russian advance in the south, and the Ukrainian military said it was counterattacking east of Mykolaiv and around Kherson, which is in Russian hands.
Meanwhile, Britain said it would deploy its Sky Sabre missile defence system as well as 100 troops to Poland as part of measures to beef up security on Nato’s eastern flank.
Antony Blinken, the United States secretary of state, said Russian attacks on civilians constituted ‘‘a war crime’’, and that American officials had started to document allegations of atrocities.
A Ukrainian official said about 90 per cent of buildings in the port city of Mariupol had been damaged or destroyed, as rescuers continued to search the rubble of a theatre hit by a Russian air strike on Thursday.
An online monitor, Oryx Blog, which uses only open-source material to establish losses, said 230 Russian tanks had been confirmed destroyed, abandoned, captured or otherwise lost. That would represent the greatest loss of tanks by an army in conflict since World War II. It is also possibly an underestimate of total losses, put by the Ukrainian side at 400.
‘‘It clearly is not going the way that Russia planned,’’ said a Western official, speaking on condition of anonymity. ‘‘Not only is it not going the way that it was planned, but even as they have adjusted to a rather more grinding form of warfare, that is stalling as well.
‘‘We know that Russia is trying to generate more forces to sustain the campaign, and we see signs out of some quite peripheral places around Russia and its borders, which clearly was not part of the original plan.’’
There have also been new estimates of Russian losses. The Pentagon said it believed that at least 7000 Russian troops had been killed – well short of the Ukrainian estimate of almost 14,000, but still more than the US lost in Afghanistan and Iraq put together since 2001.
Russia has, significantly, not released an official figure for military losses since admitting on March 2 that 498 soldiers had been killed.
Japan’s defence ministry said it had seen four Russian warships carrying armoured vehicles sailing past its waters, apparently on its way to Europe. Land convoys have been seen heading west inside Russia from as far afield as Siberia.
Russian spokesmen have put forward a different account of the war, saying that Ukraine has lost 180 military aircraft and almost 1400 tanks and armoured vehicles since the start of the Kremlin’s ‘‘special operation’’. Moscow also claims to have eliminated 177 drones.
Despite this, Russia has not achieved superiority in the skies above Ukraine, and has made slow progress in seizing cities.
Moscow has also denied targeting civilians, saying that images of bombed-out buildings have either been manipulated, or that Ukrainians have attacked their own side to win sympathy.
Russian forces largely bogged down outside major cities have turned to shelling them from a distance, including dozens of confirmed attacks on hospitals and health facilities.
The World Health Organisation’s director-general said it had verified 43 such attacks, with 12 people killed and 34 injured. ‘‘The life-saving medicine we need right now is peace,’’ Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the United Nations Security Council in a virtual briefing.
A Russian air strike killed 21 people and destroyed a school and community centre in Merefa, near the northeast city of Kharkiv, officials said.
During a video address to German lawmakers, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy condemned Russia for the dire situation in Mariupol, saying: ‘‘Everything is a target for them.’’
In Chernihiv, the governor said civilians were hiding in basements and shelters without access to utilities in the city of 280,000 people.
Both sides are reporting some progress in negotiations.
Zelenskyy’s adviser Mikhailo Podolyak said Ukraine was demanding a ceasefire, the withdrawal of Russian troops, and legal security guarantees for Ukraine from a number of countries.
Another official in Zelenskyy’s office, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the main subject under discussion was whether Russian troops would remain in separatist regions in eastern Ukraine after the war, and where the borders would be.
The official said Ukraine was insisting on the inclusion of one or more Western nuclear powers in the negotiations, and on legally binding security guarantees. In exchange, the official said, Ukraine was ready to discuss a neutral military status.
Russia has demanded that Nato pledge never to admit Ukraine to the alliance or station forces there.
Just before the war, Russia recognised the independence of two regions controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014, and extended the borders of those regions to areas Ukraine had continued to hold, including Mariupol.