“We hoped until the last minute that everything would go well,” said the worker at the Kramatorsk gas station. “But now war is everywhere.” He was in Kramatorsk on Friday when a Russian rocket hit a train station full of people leaving Donbas. The Russian attack killed more than 50 civilians, including five children, and injured dozens more. Moscow has denied responsibility for the attack. More than 200,000 people fled the Donetsk region via Kramatorsk last week alone, according to Liliya Zolkina, the regional official responsible for the evacuations. “People need to leave,” said Tetiana Ignachenko, a spokeswoman for Donetsk’s civil-military government, now based in Dnipro. As the civilians leave, Ukrainian and Russian forces are moving in the other direction as they converge on Donbas for what threatens to be the bloodiest battle of a war now in its seventh week. “The battle for Donbas will remind you of World War II,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba told NATO leaders on Thursday, adding that he expected large-scale operations involving thousands of tanks, armored vehicles and aircraft. In this way it will be different from the guerrilla-type battles around Kyiv that helped Ukraine repel Russian forces that tried to close the capital. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned this weekend of a “difficult battle” in Donbass, with the Russians gathering “a large number of troops, equipment and weapons that will occupy other parts of our territory.”

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The war has been raging in Donbass since 2014, when Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illegal annexation of the Crimean peninsula provided the catalyst for Russian-backed separatists to seize a piece of land around the Donetsk and Luhansk cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. kill more than 14,000 people. The Russian-backed separatists held about a third of Donbass before the full invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Fierce face-to-face fighting rages for weeks along the line of contact and in the disputed city of Izium. The fighting has moved about 35km south to Kramatorsk, according to local officials, and there have also been significant clashes in Marinka and Avdivka. Now withdrawing from areas around Kyiv, Moscow has said it will focus on Donbass as it tries to save its war. General Aleksandr Dvornikov, who led some of Russia’s operations during the conflict in Syria, was named the top commander on the battlefield in Ukraine late last week. In Donbass, the Russians will face about 40,000 of Ukraine’s best-trained and well-equipped troops, for a total of about a quarter of its army.

As the fighting is now likely to focus on a single front, close to its own territory, Moscow forces should theoretically be able to avoid the kinds of supply problems that caused them in the first weeks of the war. “As the Russians shorten their lines of communication and focus their area of ​​operations, it gives them the opportunity to concentrate their power more effectively,” a Western official said. Even so, Western defense officials say the Russian military has not yet made significant adjustments to battlefield tactics that have left it vulnerable to Ukrainian ambushes and counterattacks. Recovering from the losses suffered around Kyiv is another problem. NATO estimates that Russia has lost 7,000-15,000 troops, while Ukraine has raised the figure to 18,600. The large number of armored vehicles and charred tanks in the areas liberated by Ukraine is further evidence of the losses. Russia’s defense minister said late last month that 1,351 of its soldiers had been killed in the fighting. Ukraine will also need to reorganize after focusing on the defense of cities such as Kyiv and Kharkov. Kuleba told NATO allies on Thursday that they had “days, not weeks” to send weapons to help repel the Russians. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Boris Johnson has pledged to send armored vehicles and anti-aircraft missile systems to Ukraine during a visit to Kyiv over the weekend, while Slovakia has said it will provide a large air defense system. “The first army to get in better shape could more quickly determine the shape of the second phase of the conflict,” said Mathieu Boulègue, a senior researcher at the Chatham House think-tank. Territorial guards in the town of Barvinkove in eastern Ukraine © Fadel Senna / AFP / Getty Images If Russian forces in Donbass manage to keep pushing south of Izium to meet with troops moving north of Mariupol, defense officials and analysts say they could wrap up the Ukrainian army. But the same maneuver could expose them to attack from the rear by Ukrainian forces arriving from Kyiv. Ignatchenko predicted that the Russians would seek to “completely encircle” the Donbas to turn it into “a great Mariupol,” the port city that has been nearly destroyed by weeks of heavy bombardment, resulting in heavy civilian casualties. Russian forces destroyed the airport in Dnipro, one of the largest cities in eastern Ukraine, and a gateway to Donbass on Sunday, a local official said. Western officials and analysts believe that the Russian military is under political pressure to offer what Putin can see as a success before May 9, the annual celebration in which Russians commemorate the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. But this tight schedule can also lead to mistakes. “When you have a political check,” said a Western official, “you could end up in a military catastrophe.” Military experts agree that it would be very difficult for Ukraine to repel the Russians in Donbass as they did around Kyiv. The eastern part of the country is very different “both in terms of the forces at Russia’s disposal and the way in which Russia would defend those interests,” the Western official added. Kostyantyn Batozsky, a local political analyst, said Putin was “obsessed” with Donbass and wanted “full control” there. “He can try to annex Donetsk and Luhansk to Russia as he did with Crimea or turn them into independent states like he did with South Ossetia and Abkhazia,” he said, referring to two separatist Georgian areas backed by Moscow. Either way, Batozsky predicted that the battle for Donbas would be very different from what it has been before. “There will be a lot more blood on both sides,” he said.

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