From Washington to Munich, there is almost no major Western world leader who hasn’t had Ukraine on his or her mind these past several days, and as the Russian invasion lurches toward the two-year mark the topic is set to get hotter. The untimely death, or more likely murder, of the Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, has served as a bitter reminder of the kind of regime  with which Kyiv and its Western partners are dealing. 

As that reality sinks in and as debate in Congress over more financial aid swirls, Moscow is also tightening the vise on Ukraine’s long-embattled eastern Donbas. It is a tense and ugly situation, and could get even uglier as the Russians both consolidate gains in southeastern Ukraine and look to prepare potential new offensives there. 

The death of Navalny and the ongoing war in the Middle East, along with successful Ukrainian strikes against Russian naval assets in the Black Sea, have tended to obscure the Russian tenacity elsewhere. President Putin continues to show his ruthlessness, leveraging Russia’s quantitative edge in manpower and ammunition stocks. Both of those are what contributed to Avdiivka falling into the hands of Russian special forces over the weekend. 

The Ukrainian forces in the area, now semi-surrounded, had already in the last month prepared a new system of trenches and artillery positions that ran east of the positions they had previously lost. Yet according to most reports of the battle action, for every Ukrainian shell fired, the Russians fired 10 and sometimes up to 20 back at the defenders. From the air the Russians dropped guided bombs with warheads reportedly weighing more than 3,000 pounds. 

“Based on the operational situation around Avdiivka, in order to avoid encirclement and preserve the lives and health of servicemen, I decided to withdraw our units from the city and move to defense on more favorable lines,” Ukraine’s top military commander, General Oleksandr Syrsky, said in a statement. But how, or whether,  a redeployment along new lines can solve the problems of recent weeks remains unclear. 

Last spring the big buzzword on the battlefield was Bakhmut. After 11 months of fighting, the Russians closed in on the devastated town in May 2023. Today, Russian’s positions hinge on the small urban center of Chasiv Yar, where the Russians have concentrated more than 60,000 men in a likely waiting game before launching an assault on Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, slightly to the west. Cruise missiles hit those cities over the weekend.  

Ukrainian difficulties in sending reinforcements and maintaining connections with the rearguard are not diminishing. Are there enough troops, or enough drones (at present) for that matter, to repel further Russian aggression? Again, it is less than clear, but if Kramatorsk and Slovyansk were to be taken, Mad Vlad will have moved considerably toward a big goal of his: full occupation of the eastern Donbas.

Another city that could make more news in the third year of the Russian invasion is Zaporizhzhya. The Russians want to create a bridgehead between that strategic city, home to Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, and the Donbas. With that in mind, last month they took the village of Marinka, and now aim to surround Vulhedar, further south. Almost due south of Vulhedar is Mariupol, the port city that Russia destroyed and where it is reportedly stationing 40,000 soldiers. 

Demoralized those troops might be, but that doesn’t mean Moscow won’t use them as cannon fodder in a future Russian push toward Zaporizhzhya. 

Another word on Kramatorsk: It is no exaggeration to say that the Kremlin is likely still sore about the loss of Kherson, which Ukraine recaptured in November 2022. Wresting it back would mean tangling anew with fire across the Dnieper River, where the Russians would be sitting ducks. They might set their sights instead on the area south of Kharkiv, including the towns of Lyman, Kupyansk, and Izium, all of which Ukraine has recaptured. 

Yet Russian assaults near there have been testing Ukraine’s defenses, particularly around  Kreminna. There is fragile calm there now, but war is in the air and the calm is not likely to last.