Putin blames West for war in Ukraine

Ukrainian soldiers stand next to a destroyed Russian tank on the outskirts of KharkivImage caption: Ukrainian soldiers stand next to a destroyed Russian tank on the outskirts of Kharkiv

Whatever else Russia’s Victory Day parade is supposed to represent, it won’t be any sort of victory over Ukraine, regardless of the spin President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin will try to put on it, writes defence analyst Michael Clarke.

Putin now has few options but to keep going forward to make this war bigger – either bigger in Ukraine or bigger by advancing beyond its borders. Escalation is built into the current situation and Europe has reached a very dangerous moment in its recent history.

Having failed with Plan A to seize the government in Kyiv before President Zelensky’s forces, or the outside world, could react, Moscow then switched to a Plan B. This was a more “manoeuvrist” military approach to surround Kyiv and move in on other Ukrainian cities – Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Mariupol and Mykolaiv and simply snuff out Ukrainian armed resistance while Kyiv itself would be threatened with capitulation or destruction.

This, too, failed. Kherson was the only major city that fell under Russian control and has since continued to resist Russian administration. The fact is that Russian forces were too small to dominate such a big country; they performed very poorly for a mixture of reasons; they were badly led and dispersed around four separate fronts, from Kyiv to Mykolaiv, with no overall commander.

And they turned out to be up against a determined and well-trained Ukrainian army who fought them to a standstill in a classic demonstration of “dynamic defence” – not holding a line but rather hitting the attackers at points of maximum vulnerability.

In frustration, Russia has now moved to “plan C”, which is to give up on Kyiv and the north, instead concentrating all its forces for a major offensive in the Donbas region and across the south of Ukraine, probably as far as the port of Odesa in the south-west – effectively to landlock the country.

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