Peace in Ukraine still elusive despite US push for settlement
Kyiv: When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine surpassed 1,418 days last month, it officially exceeded a historic milestone — the same span of time it took Moscow to defeat Nazi Germany in World War II.
And unlike the Red Army that pushed all the way to Berlin eight decades ago in what it called the Great Patriotic War, Russia’s 4-year-old, all-out invasion of its neighbour is still struggling to fully capture Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland.
After Moscow failed to seize the capital of Kyiv and install a puppet government in February 2022, the conflict turned into trench warfare with tremendous cost.
By some estimates, nearly 2 million soldiers are dead, wounded or missing on both sides in Europe’s most devastating conflict since World War II.
Russia has occupied about 20 per cent of Ukrainian territory since illegally annexing Crimea in 2014, but its gains after the February 24, 2022, invasion have been slow. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte this month likened Moscow’s advance to “the speed of a garden snail.”
Russian troops have moved only about 50 kilometres (about 30 miles) into the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine in the past two years in a grinding battle for control of a few strongholds.
Despite the slow pace and high cost, President Vladimir Putin has maintained his maximalist demands in US-mediated peace talks, saying Kyiv must
pull its forces from the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow illegally annexed but never fully captured. He has repeatedly brandished his nuclear arsenal to prevent the West from boosting military support for Kyiv.
Initially involving quick movements of large numbers of troops and tanks in Russia’s opening blitz and Ukraine’s counteroffensive in fall 2022, the fighting morphed into bloody positional warfare along the 1,200-kilometre front line.
The Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies estimated Russian military casualties at 1.2 million, including 325,000 killed. It put
Ukrainian troop casualties at up to 600,000, including up to 140,000 killed.
“Russia has suffered the highest casualty rate of any major power in any war since World War II, and its military has performed poorly, with historically slow rates of advance and little new territory to show for its efforts over the last two years,” it said.
