Russia Covets This Ukraine Province Above All. These Maps and Charts Show Why.
Putin wants to win territory in peace talks that he hasn’t managed to seize militarily
Peace talks with President Trump have prompted international discussions around a key aim that has eluded Russia’s Vladimir Putin in more than a decade of war: full control of Ukraine’s industrial eastern province of Donetsk.
The Kremlin leader thinks he can make a hugely significant strategic gain at the negotiating table rather than on the battlefield, where it could take years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Taking the territory would make further advances easier by bypassing Ukraine’s main defensive line.
These five maps and charts show why Putin is eager to get his hands on the land.
Russia has failed to fully take any of the four provinces in southeastern Ukraine that it has sought to annex. While Russian forces control almost all of the easternmost Luhansk region, they still don’t hold around a quarter of the other three regions. U.K. military intelligence estimates that seizing all of them would take Russian forces a further 4.4 years of fighting and cost around 2 million casualties in killed and wounded troops—a cost Putin would like to avoid with talks.
If Ukraine were to hand over the rest of the Donetsk region to Russia, it would move the front line of the war beyond the fortified cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk that have served as military hubs for Ukraine since 2014. West of Donetsk, the land is much flatter, opening up a swath of territory on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River that the Kremlin could try to make a grab for by resuming its invasion.
Russia has been advancing in eastern Ukraine for months, but the rate of progress has been glacial. Ukraine has successfully slowed down the Russian advance primarily using explosive drones to eliminate vehicles and infantry soldiers. As a result, Russia has been unable to make a breakthrough, and its advance in some areas, such as around the eastern city of Kupyansk, has been slower than the British and French advance at the Battle of the Somme in World War I.
Russia’s wasteful style of warfare, which commits infantry troops to risky assaults in search of incremental advances, has caused heavy losses. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank, has estimated that as many as a quarter of a million Russian soldiers have been killed in 3½ years of war. The Kremlin has had to offer huge bonuses to attract volunteers to bolster its army. Ukraine’s losses have been smaller, but its population is also much smaller, around a quarter of Russia’s, meaning it is also struggling for manpower.
