What should have been a quick invasion could ultimately turn into a war of attrition.
It has been almost a month since the army started fighting in Ukraine, and while the situation is deteriorating day by day for civilians and the bombardments are numerous, Russia only controls one large city, Kherson .
100,000 still stranded in Mariupol
In the port city, surrounded by Vladimir Putin's army and regularly bombarded, at least 100,000 civilians are still stranded in "inhuman conditions".
According to the Ukrainian president, the siege of Mariupol is “total, without food, without water, without medicines”.
Read alsoSuspicions of war crimes: Mariupol, a textbook case?
According to the municipality of the city - strategically located between Crimea (south), occupied by Moscow since 2014, and the separatist territory of Donetsk (east) - two "superpower bombs" fell, but the death toll was not erected for the time being.
“It's not war, it's genocide,” said Ukraine's Attorney General, Iryna Venediktova, because “theaters of war have rules, principles.
What we see in Mariupol (is) the complete absence of rules”.
Another failure of humanitarian corridors
Three humanitarian corridors were to be opened on Tuesday between three localities near Mariupol and Zaporozhye, 250 km to the northwest.
But, according to Volodymyr Zelensky, “all our attempts, unfortunately, are frustrated by the Russian occupiers.
With bombardments or obvious terror”.
The Ukrainian president even assured that a humanitarian convoy had been “captured by the occupiers and on the agreed route, moreover, near Mangush.
Members of the National Emergency Situations Service (SESU) and drivers are now being held in captivity”.
The diminished Russian ranks?
A senior Pentagon official said on Tuesday evening that, "for the first time", the Russians had gone "a little below 90% of their available combat power" massed in Belarus and on the Russian-Ukrainian border. .
US intelligence sources, quoted by the New York Times, claim that more than 7,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the start of the war.
The same American daily, relying on Pentagon sources, explains that the loss of 10% of an army's military personnel (dead or wounded) greatly hampers its ability to fight.
The Russians "do not conduct their operations with the coordination that one would expect from a modern army", explained on CNN the spokesman for the American defense, John Kirby.
End of the curfew in Kyiv
Once again hit Monday by a deadly Russian bombardment against a shopping center, the Ukrainian capital had decreed a new total curfew running from Monday evening to Wednesday morning.
Sirens of bombings and detonations in the distance echoed at regular intervals all day Tuesday and overnight in almost deserted kyiv, bathed in spring sunshine.
At least one person died Tuesday in an attack against a building of the National Academy of Sciences, in the northwest of the city, AFP noted.
On the spot, a Ukrainian military intelligence officer announced three victims, killed by Russian “kamikaze” drones.