Russia zeros in on east Ukraine
Syria campaign veteran steps in as commander
KYIV, Ukraine — As Ukrainian forces dug in on Sunday, Russia lined up more firepower and tapped a decorated general to take centralized control of the war ahead of a potentially decisive showdown in eastern Ukraine expected to start within days.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Sunday in his nightly address to the nation that the coming week would be as crucial as any in the war, saying “Russian troops will move to even larger operations in the east of our state.”
He also accused Russia of trying to evade responsibility for war crimes in Ukraine.
“When people lack the courage to admit their mistakes, apologize, adapt to reality and learn, they turn into monsters. And when the world ignores it, the monsters decide that it is the world that has to adapt to them,” Zelenskyy said.
“The day will come when they will have to admit everything. Accept the truth,” he added.
Experts have said that the next phase of the battle may begin with a full-scale offensive. The outcome could determine the course of the conflict, which has flattened cities, killed thousands and isolated Moscow economically and politically.
Questions remain about the ability of Russia’s depleted and demoralized forces to conquer much ground after their advance on the capital, Kyiv, was repelled by determined Ukrainian defenders. Britain’s Defense Ministry reported Sunday that the Russian forces were trying to compensate for mounting casualties by recalling veterans discharged in the past decade.
In Washington, a senior U.S. official said that Russia
has appointed Gen. Alexander Dvornikov, one of its most seasoned military chiefs, to oversee the invasion.
Until now, Russia has had no central war commander on the ground.
The new battlefield leadership comes as the Russian military prepares for what is expected to be a large, focused push to expand control in Ukraine’s east. Russia-backed separatists have fought Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region since 2014 and declared some territory there as independent.
Dvornikov, 60, gained prominence as head of the Russian forces deployed to Syria in 2015 to shore up President Bashar Assad’s government during the country’s devastating civil war. U.S. officials say he has a record of brutality against civilians in Syria and other war theaters.
Russian authorities do not generally confirm such appointments and have said nothing about a new role for Dvornikov, who received the Hero of Russia medal, one of the country’s highest awards, from President Vladimir Putin in 2016.
U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” played down the significance of the appointment.
“What we have learned in the first several weeks of this war is that Ukraine will never be subjected to Russia,” Sullivan said. “It doesn’t matter which general President Putin tries to appoint.”
FOCUS ON EAST
Western military analysts say Russia’s assault has increasingly focused on a sickle-shaped arc of eastern Ukraine — from Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, in the north to Kherson in the south.
“Just looking at it on a map, you can see that they will be able to bring to bear a lot more power in a lot more concentrated fashion,” by focusing mainly on eastern Ukraine, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said Friday.
Newly released Maxar Technologies satellite imagery showed an 8-mile convoy of military vehicles headed south through Ukraine to Donbas, recalling images of a convoy that got stalled on roads to Kyiv for weeks before Russia gave up on trying to take the capital.
On Sunday, Russian forces shelled government-controlled Kharkiv and sent reinforcements toward Izyum to the southeast in a bid to break Ukraine’s defenses, the Ukrainian military command said.
Oleg Sinegubov, the head of the Kharkiv regional administration in northeastern Ukraine, said on Facebook that Russian troops launched “about 66 artillery and mortar strikes” on the center of Kharkiv and other areas, wounding nine people. He said two people were killed and an unknown number injured in an attack on the city of Derhachi.
The Russians also kept up their siege of Mariupol, a key southern port that has been under attack and surrounded for nearly 1½ months.
A Russian Defense Ministry spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, said Russia’s military used air-launched missiles to hit Ukraine’s S-300 air-defense missile systems in the southern Mykolaiv region and at an air base in Chuhuiv, a city not far from Kharkiv.
Sea-launched Russian cruise missiles destroyed the headquarters of a Ukrainian military unit stationed farther west in the Dnipro region, Konashenkov said. Neither the Ukrainian nor the Russian military claims could be independently verified.
The airport in Dnipro, Ukraine’s fourth-largest city, was also hit by missiles twice on Sunday, according to the regional governor.
Ukraine’s foreign minister said Sunday that although it is “extremely difficult” to think of sitting down for peace talks with Russia after recent attacks on Ukrainian civilians, he would still be willing to do so if it meant future atrocities can be prevented.
“If I have a chance to save a human life, a village or a town from destruction, I will take that chance,” Dmytro Kuleba told Chuck Todd on NBC News’ “Meet the Press.”
EU MEMBERSHIP BID
The president of the European Commission said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that Ukraine’s response to a questionnaire she recently handed to Zelenskyy will enable her to decide whether to recommend the nation as a candidate to join the EU.
The process normally takes years, but EU leader Ursula von der Leyen has said Ukraine’s application could take just weeks to consider.
“Yesterday, somebody told me: ‘You know, when our soldiers are dying, I want them to know that their children will be free and be part of the European Union,’” von der Leyen said.
Ukrainian authorities have accused Russian forces of committing war crimes against civilians, including airstrikes on hospitals, a missile attack that killed at least 57 people at a train station and other violence discovered as Russian soldiers withdrew from the outskirts of Kyiv.
Zelenskyy said Sunday that he spoke to German Chancellor Olaf Scholz about sanctions against Russia and Germany’s financial and military support for Ukraine.
“I am glad to note that the German position has recently changed in favor of Ukraine. I consider it absolutely logical,” Zelenskyy said.
The two “emphasized that all perpetrators of war crimes must be identified and punished,” Zelensky said.
Ukraine has opened 5,600 war crimes cases since Russia’s invasion, top prosecutor Iryna Venediktova said Sunday, but the country will face an uphill battle getting Russian officials to court.
A day after meeting with Zelenskyy in Kyiv, Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer announced that he planned to meet today in Moscow with Putin. Austria, a member of the European Union, is militarily neutral and not a member of NATO.
Ukraine has blamed Russia for killing civilians in Bucha and other towns outside the capital where hundreds of bodies, many with their hands bound and signs of torture, were found after Russian troops retreated. Russia has denied the allegations and claimed that the scenes in Bucha were staged.
In Mariupol, Russia was deploying Chechen fighters, reputed to be particularly fierce. Capturing the city on the Sea of Azov would give Russia a land bridge to the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia seized from Ukraine eight years ago.
Residents have lacked food, water and electricity since Russian forces surrounded the city and frustrated evacuation missions. Ukrainian authorities think an airstrike on a theater that was being used as a bomb shelter killed hundreds of civilians, and Zelenskyy has said he expects more evidence of atrocities to be found once Mariupol no longer is blockaded.
Oleksiy Arestovich, an adviser to Zelenskky, said the Russian offensive now has two fronts — one in Mariupol, and the other in eastern Ukraine, particularly parts of Luhansk, including Severodonetsk, where local officials said an attack occurred Sunday.
The attack damaged a school, and two residential buildings came under heavy fire and two elderly residents had to be evacuated, said Luhansk’s governor, Serhiy Haidai. There were no casualties, he said.
Ukrainian officials and the state railway company announced new evacuation routes Sunday for civilians in Donetsk and Luhansk, and Haidai urged them to leave “before it’s too late.”
Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk said Sunday that “all the routes for the humanitarian corridors in the Luhansk region will work as long as there is a cease-fire by the occupying Russian troops.”
The Institute for the Study of War, an American think tank, predicted that Russian forces will “renew offensive operations in the coming days” from Izyum, a town southeast of Kharkiv, in the campaign to conquer the Donbas, which makes up Ukraine’s industrial heartland.
But in the view of the think tank’s analysts, “The outcome of forthcoming Russian operations in eastern Ukraine remains very much in question.”
NEW NATO REALITY
NATO is working on a plan to have a permanent military presence on its eastern borders amid concerns over future Russian exploits, according to Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg.
“What we see now is a new reality, a new normal for European security,” he told the Telegraph, a British newspaper, in revealing the plans.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has forced a “very fundamental transformation” for the alliance, he said.
The relatively small existing presence on the alliance’s eastern border would be replaced with sufficient forces to repel an attempted invasion of members such as Estonia and Latvia, Stoltenberg said.
Nations that are part of the NATO alliance have resisted direct military action in Ukraine, so as to avoid direct military conflict with Russia, which could raise the possibility of nuclear combat. But they have made clear in recent weeks that any Russian aggression on NATO countries would be met with a swift response.
Although Russia and Russia-allied leaders have criticized the supplying of “offensive” weapons to Ukraine, Stoltenberg said “everything Ukraine does with different types of weapons is defensive.”
“It is about defending themselves against the atrocities, against the invasion, against a brutal use of military force against their own country,” he said.
Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, said the Western campaign to isolate Russia from the global economy is on track to decimate the country’s gross domestic product this year.
“If you look at independent projections of the Russian economy, it is likely to fall by something like 10 to 15% this year,” Sullivan said on ABC News’s “This Week” on Sunday. “It is likely to cease to be one of the world’s major economies because of the economic pressure we have put on them.”
Goldman Sachs, the Institute of International Finance and other analysts estimate that Russia’s GDP will contract 10 to 15% this year, with more economic fallout expected in 2023. The United States and other world powers have been layering sanctions on Russia and oligarchs connected to Putin in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
Information for this article was contributed by Cara Anna, Adam Shreck, Yesica Fisch, Robert Burns and Calvin Woodward of The Associated Press and by Annabelle Timsit, Bryan Pietsch, Miriam Berger, Jennifer Hassan and Julian Duplain of The Washington Post.