Putin’s Ukraine Gamble Pivots to a Very Different Battlefield

 

A Ukrainian soldier in February in Trokhizbenka, in the Luhansk region.

“KYIV, Ukraine — There are fields instead of city streets, farmsteads instead of apartment buildings. Open highways stretch to the horizon. The battles in the north that Ukraine won over the past seven weeks raged in towns and densely populated suburbs around the capital, Kyiv, but the war is about to take a hard turn to the southeast and into a vast expanse of wide-open flatland, fundamentally changing the nature of the combat, the weapons at play and the strategies that might bring victory. Military analysts, Ukrainian commanders, soldiers and even Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin acknowledge that a wider war that began with a failed attempt to capture the capital will now be waged in the eastern Donbas region. ...”

NY Times

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Bloody Borders or a Bloody Cross?

 

Aerial shots of a map of Kyiv and view of debris of buildings after shelling in Borodianka of Kyiv province