6 Months Into War, Ukraine and Russia Are Both Reshaped

It has been six months since Russian forces swept into Ukraine. This is what the conflict looks like for the combatants, and to a worried continent trying to maintain solidarity.

Ukraine paraded captured Russian armored vehicles on Saturday in Kyiv’s Maidan Square, the site of a 2014 uprising against Russian influence.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times 

By Anton Troianovski, Andrew E. Kramer and Steven Erlanger

Aug. 24, 2022Updated 9:09 a.m. ET

 

For six months, a major land war has sown horror in Europe.

It is a war in which violence and normality coexist — death and destruction at the 1,500-mile front and packed cafes in Kyiv, just a few hundred miles to the west.

It is a war fought in trenches and artillery duels, but defined in great part by the political whims of Americans and Europeans, whose willingness to endure inflation and energy shortages could shape the next stage of the conflict.

And it is a war of imagery and messaging, fought between two countries whose deep family ties have helped turn social media into a battlefield of its own. 

No one knows how it will end. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, having silenced dissent, has proclaimed that “by and large, we haven’t started anything yet in earnest.” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, emboldened by a defiant populace and a mostly united West, has played down the chances of a settlement and urged his people not to bend. 

Will Western backing hold as Europe braces for the possibility of a winter with little Russian oil and gas? Will Mr. Putin, after strikes in Crimea and the killing of a nationalist commentator, escalate the war? And will Mr. Zelensky be able to sustain his nation’s determination against a nuclear-armed foe?

Ukraine Under Attack: Documenting the Russian Invasion

Photographers in and around Ukraine have captured the horrors of war.

Mr. Putin now controls about 20 percent of the country. But he appears as far as ever from bringing Ukraine back into Russia’s fold — and there is little indication he is prepared to stop fighting.

Half a year after Russian forces massed at their neighbor’s border made their move, here is how the conflict appears to the combatants, and to a continent plunged into turmoil. 

Ukrainian servicemen walking through a school bombed by Russian forces in Mykolaiv region this month.Credit...Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times 

After all, Wednesday also marks six months since Russia invaded Ukraine, unleashing a war that has driven many Ukrainians from their homes, killed thousands of troops and shaken the economy. Officials warned that Russia may strike with a volley of cruise missiles, or stage show trials of Ukrainian prisoners of war in the occupied city of Mariupol.

But Mr. Zelensky said the Ukrainian authorities planned no extraordinary precautions if Kyiv, the capital, was hit. The Ukrainian government will respond “the same as now” or any other day, he said at a news conference.

In towns along the front, in Russian-occupied areas and at the sites hit by long-range missile strikes, the most intense war in Europe since World War II burns with visible force.

But acclimated to risk, Ukrainians are creeping back to a sense of normality after the shock of the winter invasion.

After some early successes by the Ukrainian Army in repelling the Russian military from assaults on Kyiv and northern Ukraine, families prepared for the start of school. Patrons packed sidewalk cafes. 

Regions where a majority of Ukrainians live are stable and relatively safe, the government still stands, and the army, equipped with ever-more-potent Western weaponry, remains intact.

A Ukrainian brigade firing on advancing Russian infantry in Donetsk Province this month.Credit...David Guttenfelder for The New York Times

 “The original threat was that the Russian Army, being the second-largest in the world, would establish air superiority and domination,” said Andriy Zagorodnyuk, a former Ukrainian minister of defense. “We managed to learn how to stop them.”

But the cratering economy, the risk of airstrikes and the toll of attrition warfare could chip away at Ukraine’s ability to resist, he said. At the six-month mark, he said, survival is not the same as victory, or even a clear path toward it.

“We cannot stop, and we cannot move into a boring, low-intensity war,” Mr. Zagorodnyuk said. “We need to think how we can squeeze them out.”

At the least, the war is far from where Moscow had hoped it would be — a fact that Ukrainians drove home with taunts and a mocking parade this week of about 80 burned and disabled Russian tanks and military vehicles in Kyiv. Ukrainian children climbed onto the wreckage; passers-by stopped for selfies.

Russian Economy Contracts Sharply as War and Sanctions Take Hold

The country’s gross domestic product from April through June declined 4 percent from a year earlier, new government data shows.
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Shoppers in Moscow. The Russian economy has proved more resilient to sanctions than some economists initially expected, but experts now predict a downturn.Credit...Yuri Kochetkov/EPA, via Shutterstock

By Eshe Nelson and Patricia Cohen

Reporting from London.Aug. 12, 2022

The Russian economy contracted steeply in the second quarter as the country felt the brunt of the economic consequences of its war in Ukraine, in what experts believe to be the start of a yearslong downturn.

The economy shrank 4 percent from April through June compared with a year earlier, the Russian statistics agency said on Friday. It is the first quarterly gross domestic product report to fully capture the change in the economy since the invasion of Ukraine in February. It was a sharp reversal from the first quarter, when the economy grew 3.5 percent.

Western sanctions, which cut off Russia from about half of its $600 billion emergency stash of foreign currency and gold reserves, imposed steep restrictions on dealings with Russian banks and cut access to American technology, prompting hundreds of major Western corporations to pull out of the country.

But even as imports to Russia dried up and financial transactions were blocked, forcing the country to default on its foreign debt, the Russian economy proved more resilient than some economists had initially expected, and the fall in G.D.P. reported on Friday was not as severe as some had expected in part because the country’s coffers were flush with energy revenue as global prices rose.

Analysts, though, say the economic toll will grow heavier as Western nations increasingly turn away from Russian oil and gas, critical sources of export revenue.

“We thought it would be a deep dive this year and then even out,” Laura Solanko, a senior adviser at the Bank of Finland Institute for Economies in Transition, said of the Russian economy. Instead, there has been a milder economic decline, but it will continue into next year, putting the economy in a shallower recession for two years, she said.

Russia, a $1.5 trillion economy before the war started, moved quickly in the days after the invasion to mitigate the impact of sanctions. The central bank more than doubled the interest rate to 20 percent, severely restricted the flow of money out of the country, shut down stock trading on the Moscow Exchange and loosened regulations on banks so lending didn’t seize up. The government also increased social spending to support households and loans for businesses hurt by sanctions.The measures blunted some of the sanctions’ impact. And as the ruble rebounded, Russia’s finances benefited from high oil prices.“

Russia withstood the initial sanction shock” and “has been relatively resilient so far,” said Dmitry Dolgin, the chief economist covering Russia at the Dutch bank ING. But, he noted, unless Russia manages to diversify its trade and finances, the economy will be weaker in the long term.Retail trade declined about 10 percent, the statistics agency said, while wholesale business activity fell 15 percent.

Michael S. Bernstam, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said the data released on Friday were in line with other reports from Russia. He, too, expects the economy to deteriorate in the second half of this year, and then again in 2023.Filling up in St. Petersburg. ...
Anatoly Maltsev/EPA, via Shutterstock

As the war drags on, many countries and companies will look to permanently end relationships with Russia and its domestic companies. Businesses will have trouble getting replacement parts for Western-made machines, and software will need updates. Russian companies will need to rearrange their supply chains as imports seize up.

Ukraine and the Contest of Global Stamina

The conflict’s long-run trajectory seems increasingly likely to be shaped by whether the United States and its allies can maintain their military, political and financial commitments to holding off Russia.

Destroyed cars in Irpin, Ukraine, this month. More than four months into the Russian invasion, the war has evolved into a battle of inches with no end in sight.Credit...Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

By Peter Baker and David E. Sanger
July 9, 2022

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WASHINGTON — Another day, another weapons shipment: On Friday, the Pentagon announced a new transfer of precision-guided shells and multiple rocket launchers to Ukraine, the latest armaments heading east. But will there come a day when that system begins to slow?

More than four months after Russia invaded Ukraine, a war that was expected to be a Russian blitzkrieg only to turn into a debacle for Moscow has now evolved into a battle of inches with no end in sight, a geopolitical stamina contest in which President Vladimir V. Putin is gambling that he can outlast a fickle, impatient West.

President Biden has vowed to stand with Ukraine for “as long as it takes,” but neither he nor anyone else can say how long that will be or how much more the United States and its allies can do over that distance, short of direct military intervention. At some point, officials acknowledge, U.S. and European stocks of weapons will run low; while the United States has authorized $54 billion in military and other assistance, no one expects another $54 billion check when that runs out.


So Mr. Biden and his team are searching for a long-term strategy at a time when the White House sees the dangers of escalation increasing, the prospect for a negotiated settlement still far-off and public weariness beginning to set in at home and abroad.


“I worry about the fatigue factor of the public in a wide range of countries because of the economic costs and because there are other pressing concerns,” said Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware and a close ally of Mr. Biden’s who attended the NATO summit meeting in Madrid last week.

“I think we need to be determined and continue to support Ukraine,” said Mr. Coons, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Exactly how long this will go, exactly what the trajectory will be, we don’t know right now. But we know if we don’t continue to support Ukraine, the outcome for the U.S. will be much worse.”

While the fighting lately has focused mainly on a crescent in eastern and southern Ukraine, the White House worries it could easily spiral out of control. A recent missile strike on a shopping center in central Ukraine suggested that Moscow was running low on precision weaponry and increasingly turning to less sophisticated armaments that could hit unintended targets — potentially even across the border, in NATO allies like Poland or Romania. And American officials worry that Mr. Putin may resort to tactical nuclear weapons to break out of the box he faces on the battlefield.

Indeed, the Biden administration has concluded that the Russian leader still wants to widen the war and try again to seize Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. “We think he has effectively the same political goals that we had previously, which is to say that he wants to take most of Ukraine,” Avril D. Haines, the director of national intelligence, said at a conference last week.

Mr. Putin almost seemed to confirm that on Thursday, when he warned that he had more expansive options available. “Everybody should know that, largely speaking, we haven’t even yet started anything in earnest,” he told parliamentary leaders in Moscow.

“We are hearing that they want to defeat us on the battlefield,” Mr. Putin added. “Let them try.”

U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy deliberations, are urging the Ukrainians to consolidate their forces at the front. But Ukraine’s leaders want to go further and mass enough personnel to mount a counteroffensive to retake territory, a goal that American officials support in theory even if they are dubious about the Ukrainians’ capacity to dislodge the Russians. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine told Group of 7 leaders last week that he wanted the war over by the end of the year. But there are serious doubts in Washington about whether that is possible militarily.

The Biden administration does not want to be seen pressuring Mr. Zelensky to negotiate a deal with the Kremlin at the risk of rewarding armed aggression, but officials and analysts said it would be hard to sustain the same level of material support as war fatigue grows on both sides of the Atlantic. Military aid passed by Congress is expected to last into the second quarter of next year, by some estimates, but the question is how long current supplies of weapons and ammunition can last without degrading the military readiness of the United States.

 U.S. intel: Putin preparing for "prolonged conflict" beyond eastern Ukraine

• Zachary Basu    AXIOS

Ukrainian forces conduct a training exercise on May 09 near Kryvyi Rih. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

The U.S. intelligence community assesses Russia is preparing for a "prolonged conflict" in Ukraine that is likely to become "more unpredictable and escalatory" due to a "mismatch" between Vladimir Putin's ambitions and military capabilities, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines testified Tuesday.

Why it matters: Both Russia and Ukraine believe they can continue to make progress militarily, turning the conflict into a "war of attrition" with no "viable" prospects for peace negotiations in the near term, Haines told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The big picture: While Russian forces have refocused on the eastern Donbas region after failing to capture Kyiv in the first few weeks of the war, the U.S. views this as "only a temporary shift."

• "We assess President Putin is preparing for a prolonged conflict in Ukraine, during which he still intends to achieve goals beyond the Donbas," Haines said.
• Despite its stumbles, the Russian military has seized much of eastern Ukraine. It could soon control the Donbas region.
• The House passed $40 billion more in aid for Ukraine, totaling about $53 billion over two months.

Zoom in ... Putin has at least four "near-term military objectives," according to the U.S. intelligence community:

• Fully capture and establish a "buffer zone" in the Donbas, where Russian-backed separatists have declared "people's republics."
• Encircle Ukraine's military west of the Donbas "in order to crush the most capable and well-equipped Ukrainian forces fighting to hold the line in the east."
• Consolidate control of the land bridge that Russia has established from the Donbas along the southern coast of Ukraine to Crimea, allowing Russian forces to occupy the Kherson region and control Crimea's water supplies.
• Between the lines: The U.S. views it as "increasingly unlikely" that Russia will be able to establish full control over the Donbas or extend the land bridge to Transnistria, especially without a broader mobilization of Russia's reservists.

• "But Putin most likely also judges that Russia has a greater ability and willingness to endure challenges than his adversaries and he is probably counting on U.S. and EU resolve to weaken as food shortages, inflation and energy prices get worse," Haines warned.
• The U.S. believes Russia will continue to use "nuclear rhetoric" to deter the West from providing further military assistance to Ukraine, but that Putin "would probably only authorize the use of nuclear weapons if he perceived an existential threat to the Russian state or regime."
• "We're supporting Ukraine, but we also don't want to ultimately end up in World War III and we don't want to have a situation in which actors are using nuclear weapons," Haines said.