The Russian invasion of Ukraine changed course. Faced with the resounding failure of the original plan that was to take Kyiv in a few hours, overthrow the government of Volodymyr Zelensky and install a puppet government, Vladimir Putin decided to concentrate on the Donbas region, in the east of the country. The majority of the Russian-speaking Ukrainian population is located there. And he believes that it is a more realistic goal from a military and political point of view. That was the primary plan when he began massing troops on the border. He was sidelined to launch an offensive throughout the Ukrainian territory. Now, he again became the main target of this Third Ukrainian War.

The first war took place between 2014 and 2021. It began with the invasion and annexation of Crimea and the delivery of weapons and the training of Russian officers to separatists in the enclaves of Luhansk and Donetsk, on the Russian-Ukrainian border. There, in the so-called Donbas region (which includes the two enclaves and the provinces of the same name) a battlefield was developed that left 14,000 dead in those seven years.

The second war was launched on February 24, 2022, with the invasion of Russian troops. The plan of the Kremlin generals was to surprise the Ukrainians with special forces that remained hidden among the civilian population and that had to act to guarantee control of the Antonov military airport, in the north of Kyiv. They wanted to create a beachhead and an air bridge there that would guarantee the presence of thousands of soldiers at the gates of the capital. Meanwhile, the special forces were to locate and assassinate President Zelenskyy. In this way, they believed, they would take control of Ukraine without much cost. It failed miserably. They underestimated the defense capacity of the Ukrainian armed forces and of the hundreds of thousands of civilians who immediately enrolled in the Popular Militias. Nor did they think that the aid in weapons and intelligence information from the United States and Europe would be so extensive.

They advanced from the south to secure a corridor linking the already overrun Crimean peninsula with the separatist enclaves and a month later they still failed to do so. They are destroying the key port of Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, which was still resisting until last night, and they have in their power a single city, Kharkiv, whose population is putting up a heroic unarmed resistance. Robert Gates, a former CIA director and US Secretary of Defense, said Putin “has to be staggeringly disappointed” in his military’s performance. “We are seeing recruits in Ukraine who do not know why they are there, who are not very well trained and who have huge problems with command and control, and unbelievably lousy tactics,” Gates told an OSS Society forum.

On March 25, the third war began with a narrower focus, centered on the Donbas region, not necessarily as an end game, but as a way to recover from early failures and use that region as a new starting point. The deputy chief of the Russian General Staff, Colonel General Sergei Rudskoi, said his forces had largely achieved the “main objectives” of the first phase of what Moscow calls a “special military operation” in Ukraine. He added that his forces had “considerably reduced” the combat power of the Ukrainian military, and as a result, the Russian troops could “focus on the main efforts to achieve the main goal, the liberation of Donbas.”A euphemism to say that they failed in their attempt to seize power in Kyiv and that, to save face, they are going to keep the East of the country.

The danger of this new approach is that Putin could actually create two Ukraine, the West and the East, in the style of the Koreas. Trying to put together a “cushion” between the pro-Western territory and the border of your country that guarantees supposed greater security. “There are reasons to think that Putin is contemplating a Korean-style scenario, consisting of a dividing line between the occupied and unoccupied regions of our country,” said Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Intelligence Department of Ukraine’s Defense Ministry.

President Zelenskyy insisted on his call for Russia to negotiate an end to the war but made it clear that Ukraine would not agree to give up any of its territories. “Ukraine’s territorial integrity must be guaranteed, ” he said in his late-night video address to the nation. “That is, the conditions must be fair because the Ukrainian people will not accept them otherwise.” This Tuesday there will be a new round of talks mediated by Turkey. Russian delegates are likely to put on the table the possibility of dividing up Ukrainian territory. It could be another misjudgment from the Russian generals.

Russian military analyst Pavel Felgenhauer, with knowledge of the Kremlin’s plans, told Al Jazeera that the war will enter a phase of less intensity due to weather conditions. “The winter campaign is basically over. There will be flooding and more mud. In May, everything will dry up and then the summer campaign will come, which will most likely be decisive, ”he explained. “Right now there is going to be a pause with the Russian military explaining to the population that ‘everything is fine, everything is under control, this is a pause’. But everything continues and the goals will be reached eventually ”.

Ukrainians scoff at this type of analysis and continue to display memes with photos of Ukrainian peasants’ tractors dragging away Russian tanks that were bogged down in the mud. And they understand that the war continues with the same intensity, regardless of whether or not it is concentrated in Donbas. Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank, thinks Putin is simply recalibrating. “Moscow is looking for a way out of its impasse in Ukraine. Focusing their military objectives on control of Donbas could be a way to back down without admitting defeat,” Thompson told US public radio.

An analysis published Saturday by the Institute for the Study of War in Washington says the degree to which the Russians can push for an accelerated move to cut off Donbas “will depend in part on how soon their forces can gain full control of Mariupol and of how badly they come out of that fight ”. He also noted that a break in the Russian offensive on Kyiv could reflect “the inability of Russian forces more than any change in Russian goals or efforts at this time.”

Keep in mind that while the Russian military is increasingly concentrating on bleeding Ukrainian troops in the East, they continue to use their arsenal of air- and sea-launched cruise missiles to methodically attack fuel depots. , military arsenals and weapons factories throughout the country. Philips Obrien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, described the weekend’s cruise missile attacks in Lviv, near the Polish border, as part of a Russian strategy to cut off supplies to Ukrainian forces. Fighting in the East. “They will still want to disrupt, as far as possible, the flow of goods and supplies from west to east, much of which begins its journey around Lviv,” Obrien told India’s Outlook magazine.

The Third Ukrainian War began this weekend and now Putin wants to end the campaign by May 9, Victory in Russia Day, which commemorates Nazi Germany’s surrender in World War II. He plans to somehow claim victory and make a grand triumphal parade on Red Square. The detail is that the forces of the Soviet Red Army were far superior to the soldiers he now has and he might have to wait several more months to declare himself the winner of a Pyrrhic victory.