ANALYSTS SAY RUSSIAN TROOPS FACE LOW MORALE

Soldiers withdrawn from war refuse to return to battlefield

The Russian troops that have pulled away from areas around Ukraine’s capital in preparation for a renewed deployment to the east “are unlikely to enable a Russian breakthrough and face poor morale,” according to a Washington research group that is tracking the war.

In Izyum, an eastern city that Russian forces seized as a strategic staging ground for re-equipping its troops, Moscow “did not make any territorial gains” the past few days in an effort to link its soldiers in Crimea with Russia-backed forces in the eastern Donbas, the group, the Institute for the Study of War, said in a report released Saturday.

The majority of soldiers in some Russian units that have been withdrawn from the war are now refusing to return to the battlefield, the report said, citing a post from the Ukrainian General Staff on Friday. And soldiers in the field whose service contracts have expired are also being forced to keep fighting.

Neither of those claims could be independently verified, but they echo recent assessments by Western governments and other reports about the Russian military since the start of the war.

The institute’s report added that Ukrainian troops have continued to put pressure on Russian assaults in two besieged cities in the south, Mariupol and Kherson, which have been encircled since the early days of the war.

Faced with stalled offensives across the country, the Russian military is growing increasingly reliant on strikes from the air, the British Defense Ministry said in its latest assessment early Saturday.

Ukraine and its allies have blamed Russia for a missile attack Friday at a train station in the eastern city of Kramatorsk that killed at least 52 people — Russia has denied involvement, without providing any evidence to support its position.

That strike has emerged as a harbinger of what might be in store for the region, as airstrikes continued through the night in the east and south.

A pair of missiles landed in Odesa, a city on the Black Sea. No casualties were reported, but the Ukrainian military chief there, Maxim Marchenko, imposed a weekend curfew.

In central Ukraine, a missile strike targeted and damaged the infrastructure in the city of Myrhorod, injuring two people, the military reported on Saturday.

The air and missile strikes offered a clear indication of Moscow’s lack of progress on the ground, On Thursday, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, admitted to recent “significant” Russian losses.