War in Ukraine festering 66 days after invasion began

It has been 66 days since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. In the meantime, the Kremlin has been forced to modify its strategy as a result of the initial resounding failure of the operation, weighed down in equal parts by multiple logistical problems and fierce resistance from the Ukrainian army. But the conflict is expected to drag on. The new phase of the conflict is now focused on the Donbas region, which Vladimir Putin intends to annex to Russia as he did in 2014 with the Crimean peninsula.

For weeks now, the Russian army has been reorienting its troops towards the provinces of Donetsk and Lugansk after abandoning the northern front in the face of the inability to occupy Kiev, defended tooth and nail by Ukrainian forces, and after committing war crimes in enclaves such as Bucha and Borodyanka. But this new approach did not deter the Kremlin from shelling the capital again on Friday during the visit of UN Secretary General António Guterres, just a day after meeting Putin himself in Moscow.

Ukraine and its Western partners are stepping up preparations for an imminent stalemate in the war, which could drag on for months or even years. That is why US President Joe Biden is urging Congress to approve $33 billion in additional economic, humanitarian and military aid to the Kiev government. And that is why the Pentagon revealed on Friday that it has begun training Ukrainian military personnel on German territory, as more weapons assistance to the resistance arrives.

"We do not consider that we are in a state of war with NATO. Unfortunately, there is a feeling that NATO believes it is at war with Russia," veteran Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov said. The Biden administration's latest moves have irritated a Kremlin that is debasing its rhetoric and reiterating threats about the risk of nuclear war. The US, however, does not take Lavrov's statements seriously.

Things on the ground have hardly changed in the last few hours. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) report published on Friday claims that Ukrainian troops "are successfully holding off Russian attacks in the east, which made only small gains west of Severodonetsk and made no progress on the Izyum front" inside Lugansk oblast. The Russian army is also likely to leave a minimal contingent in besieged Mariupol, according to the ISW, to "block" Ukrainian positions in Azovstal.

The Russian army's brutal siege of the well-known steelworks in the port city of Mariupol, where half a thousand soldiers of the Azov Battalion and a thousand civilians are sheltering, continues. The civilian population was scheduled to be evacuated on Friday with Putin's initial commitment, reports RNE's special envoy Fran Sevilla. However, Russia's refusal to allow international supervision of the process complicates the exit.

British MI6 claims that Russia has been forced to merge units that were wrecked on the northeastern front, and that these troops may be morally weakened, a human factor that has conditioned the development of the invasion by being exploited by the Ukrainian resistance. But this does not assuage the fears of Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky, who denounced Russia's intentions to "uninhabit" the Donbas region.

The recent attacks in Transnistria, the pro-Russian separatist region in eastern Moldova, have set off alarm bells not only in the small Eastern European country bordering Ukraine, which fears a Russian offensive, but also in the rest of the West, which is watching with trepidation a strange escalation of tensions in a region anchored in the Soviet Union and 'de facto' dominated by Russia. Moldova has accused eight Russian spies of being behind the attacks.

Ukrainian intelligence warns that these 'false flag' attacks have been committed to lure Moldova into war and coerce the Chisinau government, led by the young president Maia Sandu, in order to put an end to its pro-European vocation. Lavrov also declared that Moldova "should be worried about its future" because it is being dragged into NATO, a fact that, according to the head of Russian diplomacy, will not improve its security.

The journalist and author of the bestseller 'How the KGB took over Russia and took on the West', Catherine Belton, an expert on the inner workings of the Kremlin before, during and after Vladimir Putin's rise to power, confirms in an article for 'The Washington Post' that the first deep divisions within the Russian elite have already begun to emerge as a result of the large-scale invasion proposed by the president.

According to Belton, at least four of Russia's leading oligarchs who enriched themselves in the 1990s, during the mad years of President Boris Yeltsin, have left the country after experiencing the Western-driven economic fallout from the aggression in Ukraine. Powerless to influence the course of the conflict and even more powerless to influence Vladimir Putin's decision, personalities such as former deputy prime minister Anatoli Chubais have chosen to leave Russia.

Those who hold important positions in the Russian Federation's institutional architecture do not have President Putin's permission to resign. In this case, the Tatar economist and head of the Central Bank of Russia since 2013, Elvira Nabiullina, stands out. According to Belton, she is said to have resigned, but was refused by the Kremlin.