Can the international community stop Putin?
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(CNN) --
As Russia's war in Ukraine enters a crucial new phase, fighting intensifies in the country's east and officials have warned of a battle that will "recall World War II."
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Thursday that the fighting in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine was intensifying but "has not reached its maximum scale."
"The battle for Donbas will be reminiscent of World War II, with large operations, maneuvers, involving thousands of tanks, armored vehicles, planes, artillery. It will not be a local operation based on what we see in Russia's preparations," he said. Kuleba at a press conference in Brussels.
"Russia has its plan, we have ours, and the battlefield will decide the outcome," he added.
What is Sloviansk and why could it become key in the war in Ukraine?
In the coming weeks, authorities expect Russian forces to resupply and reposition with the aim of launching a brutal new offensive in Donbas, encompassing the Luhansk and Donetsk regions, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said on Tuesday. .
"Now we see a significant movement of troops away from Kyiv to regroup, rearm and resupply, and a shift of focus to the east," he told reporters in Brussels.
"This is a crucial phase of the war."
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Much of the region has already faced relentless assault.
Russian forces are trying to wipe the besieged southeastern city of Mariupol "off the face of the earth," a Ukrainian military commander in the city told CNN Wednesday night.
Serhiy Volyna, deputy commander of the Mariupol Marine Battalion, which has been fighting in the region since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, called the situation "critical."
"It is a humanitarian catastrophe. The military that participated in active hostilities here are completely surrounded. There are problems with the supply of water, food, medicine and supplies in general. It is a very difficult situation."
"We have been surrounded in Mariupol for more than 40 days. The enemy outnumbers us and outguns us, his artillery, he has sea artillery, tanks, armored vehicles and, of course, mortars. It is difficult for us," Volyna said.
Mariupol has been under continuous attack for weeks.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on Wednesday also listed the cities of Volnovakha, Izium and Popasna as places where "reports of numerous civilian casualties" have occurred.
Russian troops carried out 27 attacks on residential areas in the northeastern city of Kharkiv on Tuesday night, the head of the Kharkiv Regional Military Administration, Oleg Synegubov, said in a statement on Telegram.
Taking control of Mariupol would allow Russia to create a land corridor linking Crimea with Donbas, allowing troops to move freely from the south of the peninsula to reinforce their units on the mainland.
But the Russian troops have not yet been able to break the Ukrainian resistance in the east.
They are likely to try to encircle Ukrainian fighters in the east in the coming weeks, and whether or not they succeed could be crucial in determining the course of the war.
Russia reverses course
Since the start of the war, Russia has used a devastating array of airstrikes across much of the country, using massively destructive missile and artillery fire that spread into the center and west of the country.
But a faltering ground campaign and a series of military setbacks, notably around the capital Kyiv and in the north, means that Moscow has made much less progress than most analysts expected in terms of capturing ground. .
Russian fighters withdrew from the Kyiv region this week after Ukrainian troops regained control of the area containing the capital, while Russia has also failed to achieve complete air superiority over Ukraine and has suffered heavy personnel losses since the start of the invasion.
Now Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to be changing course.
Putin has revised his war strategy to focus on trying to take control of Donbas and other regions of eastern Ukraine with a target date of early May, according to several US officials familiar with the latest U.S. intelligence assessments. USA
To achieve that goal, Stoltenberg said NATO expects Russia to carry out a "very concentrated" attack in the east with the aim of capturing the entire Donbas region.
It is still too early to say whether Putin has definitively abandoned his goal of taking Kyiv and defeating resistance throughout Ukraine.
But his change of focus comes after a series of losses in other parts of the country that have stalled his invasion and affected his forces.
New Key Battlegrounds
Russian troops are now expected to try to cut off Ukrainian forces in the east and unite their troops across the region.
That means attention will likely soon turn to the city of Sloviansk, with Russian units advancing north from Izium.
"The efforts of the Russian forces to advance from Izyum to take control of Slovyansk will likely become the next crucial battle of the war in Ukraine," the think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW), based in Ukraine, said. the city of Washington, in its Monday update on the conflict in Ukraine.
His report uses a different transliteration of the names of cities and towns in Ukraine.
A successful Russian assault on the city would give Moscow the option of joining troops with those fighting in Rubizhne, northeast of Sloviansk, or moving them south toward Horlivka and Donetsk in an attempt to encircle Ukrainian fighters there. the group added.
"If Russian forces are unable to take Slovyansk, Russian frontal assaults in Donbas are unlikely to independently break through Ukrainian defenses and then Russia's campaign to capture the entirety of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces will likely fail." the ISW said.
Vadym Denysenko, adviser to Ukraine's interior minister, agreed Thursday that "the most difficult situation" Ukraine now faces is in the east of the country, where the Ukrainian military says it has seen a build-up of Russian forces.
"Unfortunately, the Russians are still doing everything they did before in Kharkiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, etc. - destroying civilian infrastructure," he said.
"The situation now is very difficult in the direction of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk," Denysenko said.
"These are the key points in this phase of the war. I think, in fact, that the results of, at least this phase of this war, will very much depend on the fighting in the east."
Families walk along a platform to board a train at Kramatorsk central station as they flee the eastern city on April 5.
What is the current situation in the east?
The cities of eastern Ukraine have been under continuous and devastating attacks by the Russians for several weeks.
Mariupol, at the southern tip of Donetsk province, has been particularly decimated, becoming a symbol of the brutality of the Russian war.
In a round table held on Wednesday, the mayor of Mariupol, Vadim Boychenko, stated that more than 90% of the city's infrastructure has been destroyed by Russia and that at least 40% of it "is no longer recoverable".
In the first month of the invasion, 5,000 people have died in the city, of whom some 210 are minors, Boychenko said, citing preliminary estimates.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation in Mariupol is "getting worse and worse," Lucile Marbeau, the spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told CNN on Wednesday.
"Right now there is nothing, no water, no electricity, there is hardly any connection," Marbeau said.
About 90% of Mariupol's infrastructure is believed to be destroyed, the city's mayor said.
But Mariúpol is not the only one;
Ukrainian authorities said on Wednesday that heavy fighting was taking place across eastern Ukraine, with the regional military governor of the eastern Luhansk region urging civilians to evacuate some towns.
Vadym Denysenko, adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, said: "If we talk about the key directions where there will be fighting, they are Sloviansk [Donetsk region] and Barvinkove [Kharkiv region], in the Luhansk region it is in Popasna and Rubizhne areas and, of course, in Mariupol".
Serhii Haidai, the military governor of the Luhansk region, issued a statement on Wednesday calling for the evacuation of several cities in the region.
"The Russians are destroying the railway links in the Donetsk region," he said on Telegram.
"We will get everyone out if the Russians allow us to get to the meeting places," he said.
"As you can see, they don't always respect the 'ceasefire regime'."
What does Putin want in eastern Ukraine?
Pro-Russian separatists seized control of parts of the Donbas region in 2014, when Moscow reacted to protests that toppled a pro-Kremlin Ukrainian president by fomenting a rebellion in eastern Ukraine.
Since then there has been fighting in that region.
When Putin began his invasion by sending troops into eastern Ukraine on February 22, he claimed that protecting the population of Donbas from "genocide" by the Ukrainian authorities was one of the motivations, a false claim that was roundly rejected by Ukraine and the community. international.
That followed days of baseless claims about Ukraine's sovereignty, and Russia's decision to recognize two territories, Luhansk and Donetsk, held by pro-Russian separatists, as independent.
And since the launch of a full-scale war two days later, the supposed liberation of Donbas has played a central role in the Kremlin's rhetoric.
In the first weeks of the invasion, there were bombings of cities and towns far beyond that part of Ukraine;
Russia invaded from the north, east and south, focusing much of its attention on Kyiv and other major cities, with attacks reaching as far as Lviv in Ukraine's far west.
But the revision of his strategy has Putin refocusing his attention on the region that was at the center of his attempts to justify the invasion.
Russian Defense Ministry daily summaries have tried to focus on successes in these regions, and over the past week, various officials have described the Donbas region as the main target of the operation, with other actions simply designed to immobilize Ukrainian troops.
The fight for Sloviansk could be the "next crucial battle" of the war in Ukraine
"In the coming weeks we expect a new Russian push in the east and south of Ukraine, to try to take all of Donbas and create a land bridge to occupied Crimea," Stoltenberg said on Tuesday.
After six difficult weeks of war, Putin is under pressure to show he can show victory, and eastern Ukraine is the place he is most likely to be able to do so quickly, several US officials familiar with the latest US intelligence assessments said. Joined.
Interceptions by US intelligence services suggest that Putin is focused on May 9, Russia's "Victory Day," according to one of the officials.
But other officials point out that even if there is a Russian celebration, an actual victory may be further away.
"Putin will hold a victory parade on May 9, regardless of the situation of war or peace talks," a European defense official said.
"On the other hand: a victory parade with what troops and vehicles?"
-- Nathan Hodge, Tim Lister, Ivan Watson, AnneClaire Stapleton, Niamh Kennedy, Chris Liakos, Olga Voitovych, Barbara Starr, Jim Sciutto, Alex Marquardt, Jeremy Herb, and Katie Bo Lillis contributed reporting.
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