An Ukrainian soldier covers his ears as he fires a D-30 howitzer towards Russian troops at the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine.
An Ukrainian soldier covers his ears as he fires a D-30 howitzer towards Russian troops at the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine.
Ukrainian forces have stalled the Russian offensive in the eastern Donetsk region in recent months and have started to win back small patches of land, according to Ukrainian soldiers and military analysts.
Russia still holds the initiative, and conducts dozens of assaults across the eastern front every day, the soldiers and analysts say. But after more than 15 months on the offensive, Russian brigades have been depleted and Moscow is struggling to replace destroyed equipment, offering limited opportunities that Ukrainian forces are trying to exploit.
“The Russian offensive effort in Donetsk has stalled in recent months due to poor weather, exhaustion among Russian forces, and effective Ukrainian adaptation to the way Russian troops have been fighting,” said Michael Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.
While it is too early to say the front has stabilised in Donetsk, he said, the situation has improved as Ukraine finds innovative ways to compensate for its shortage of troops.
Ukrainian soldiers cautioned that they expected the Russians to regroup and intensify offensive efforts to take advantage of the sudden suspension of American military assistance and intelligence sharing, which threatens to undermine the Ukrainian war effort.
The pause in intelligence is expected to be among the topics Ukrainian and American officials will discuss this week at their first high-level in-person meeting since a blow-up between President Trump and President Zelensky at the White House on February 28. Zelensky said the meeting will be held on Tuesday in Saudi Arabia and the state department says secretary of state Marco Rubio will be part of those talks. ( Zelensky also said he would meet in Saudi Arabia on Monday with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.)
Western military analysts and US officials believe that the order to hold back equipment is likely to take several months to have a significant impact on the front.
But the loss of intelligence is already hurting Ukraine’s ability to strike Russian command centers, logistics hubs and concentrations of troops behind the front lines.
Ukrainian soldiers said the lack of intelligence was especially problematic in the Kursk region of Russia, where Russian and North Korean soldiers are on the offensive and have rapidly advanced. Ukraine considers its hold on Kursk to be crucial to use as leverage in any negotiations to end the war. The soldiers, speaking from the front by telephone on Friday and Saturday, requested anonymity to discuss sensitive operations.
A senior US military official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters, said that the pause on sharing intelligence had hurt Ukraine’s ability to detect and attack Russian forces in Kursk and hampered its ability to strike high-value targets.
Keith Kellogg, a retired army general who is the special US envoy for Ukraine, acknowledged that the move would have a “significant” impact on Ukraine’s battlefield conduct.
Ukraine has proposed an immediate partial truce in air and sea operations and has acknowledged that some territory would remain under Russian occupation. But American officials have said the suspension would stay in effect until the Ukrainians bend to unspecified White House demands.
New York Times News Service