Even as Russia is closing in on capturing all of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region, the Kremlin has its sights trained on the Ukrainian capital, a new report says. Russia’s defense ministry said a joint force its soldiers and Kremlin-backed separatists “completely liberated’’ the railway hub of Lyman and Russians were hammering Sievierodonetsk with heavy shelling, putting Ukrainian soldiers in what a local military chief called “a tough defensive position.” Crushing Ukraine’s eastern Donbas, though, will likely not be enough to satisfy Vladimir Putin. 

A new report in an independent Russian news site now operating in Latvia, Meduza, says Moscow is once again discussing a possible assault on Kyiv as the Russian army advances. Citing Kremlin sources, the site says that part of Russia’s “Maximum Plan” calls for conquering Kyiv, even though an initial attempt to take the capital failed last March. The Kremlin source said: “We are going to kill them [Ukrainians] anyway. Most likely, by the autumn everything will be over.”

While taking Kyiv will be a tall order, particularly after Russia’s ignominious and notably brutal prior retreat, it is clear that the faster the dust settles in Donbas, the more things risk heating up again in the central Ukrainian heartland. Meduza claims that only about 5 percent of the territory of Luhansk and slightly more than 40 percent of the Donetsk are under Ukrainian control. 

It further reports that the secretary of the general council of United Russia, the country’s biggest political party, regularly travels to Donbas and Andriy Turchak “even planted a Russian flag on the administration of a village in the Zaporozhye region, occupied by the Russian military.” In addition, it says that the head of the Kremlin’s political unit, Sergei Kiriyenko, is already readying referendums for the accession of the self-proclaimed DPR and LPR republics to Russia.

None of this bodes well for anything like a summer of tranquility in Ukraine. The Kremlin is also banking on Ukraine fatigue in the West. One of Meduza’s Kremlin-linked sources said: “Sooner or later, Europe will get tired of helping — this is both money and the production of weapons, which they themselves need more. Closer to autumn, it will be necessary to negotiate [with Russia] on gas and oil for the heating season.” 

Underscoring the likely accuracy of that assessment, signs of incipient malaise on the Continent are becoming impossible to ignore. A headline in yesterday’s Die Welt neatly sums it up: “Despite promises, Germany has delivered hardly any weapons for nine weeks.” The major German newspaper says Chancellor Scholz has refused to supply any light weapons of significance since the end of March. 

France, too, has ponied up few weapons, while President Macron cannot be said to have gone soft on Mr. Putin because he was never hard on him in the first place. 

There is now some head-scratching in Washington, too, as to how or whether to send Ukraine mobile multiple launch rocket systems to help push the Russians back from Donbas. London’s Observer reported today that some of President Biden’s advisers fear Ukraine might use the rockets to strike targets inside Russia, which they believe could spark an escalation possibly drawing in America and NATO.

If past is prologue — and for better or for worse in Europe, it usually is — Mr. Putin will pounce on prey he sees as his at the earliest possible logistical opportunity. This is despite a steady stream of advanced American and British weaponry flowing into Ukraine from Poland and possibly elsewhere. In a new Sky News documentary that aired in Europe this weekend, a Russian ex-chess grandmaster and leading Kremlin critic, Garry Kasparov, said it was the annexation of Crimea that really set the course for the war. “Crimea’s triumph convinced Putin that now he could go much, much further.”

In the documentary, called “Putin’s Obsession: The Fight for Ukraine,” a former British ambassador to Belarus, Rosemary Thomas, evoked the war in Chechnya: ”What he did was show that if you were going to go into a war that you would have to prosecute it ruthlessly and use whatever tactics that you saw fit.” A Russian opposition leader and journalist, Vladimir Kara-Murza, seconded that, saying: “We saw then in Chechnya, all the same things that we are seeing today in Ukraine.”

“If Ukraine becomes democratic, if a country like that breaks away from its Soviet legacy, that is not just an annoyance, but actually an existential threat to a regime such as Vladimir Putin’s,” Mr. Kara-Murza added. The strategic value of Ukraine also explains Mr. Putin’s tenacity and how Kyiv is still in his sights, if temporarily backstage in his military planning. A professor of international affairs at New York’s New School, Nina Khrushcheva, granddaughter of a former Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, told Sky that Ukraine “has been always important for any Russian leader,” and that the engine of the former Soviet Union’s power was an industrialized and fertile Ukraine.

From the Kremlin’s perspective, without Ukraine under the Russian belt in one way or another, Russia is not really a superpower. In that sense everything that has happened in Ukraine over the past several years and everything that is happening now can be seen as part of Mr. Putin’s gambit on a violent geopolitical correction of sorts. “I think the invasion was inevitable because that was Putin’s plan,” Mr. Kasparov told Sky.  “But it was inevitable since the free world showed no appetite to stop this aggression” in its early days.

Had President Obama taken a harder line against Mr. Putin’s move to annex Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014, the world might not be where it is today. Now, with June fast approaching and hopes of a viable ceasefire lost amid the buzz of armed drones and bullets, what appear to be breaks in any given battle may indeed be just that: appearances. The keeper of the Kremlin is still mad, and still diabolically adroit at putting them on.