Russian forces step up attacks in Ukraine’s east as one-year mark looms

Russian forces have stepped up attacks along the eastern frontline of the war in Ukraine as Kyiv prepares to mark the sombre first anniversary of the invasion.

Amid fears that the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, intends to mark the anniversary with fresh attacks on key cities, Ukraine’s general staff said it had repelled 90 assaults in the east and north-east in the past 24 hours.

Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said on Thursday that his country would ultimately prevail in the war, which began on 24 February last year when Russian armoured vehicles poured over Ukraine’s borders and jets and missiles pummelled its cities.

“We have not broken down, we have overcome many ordeals and we will prevail. We will hold to account all those who brought this evil, this war to our land,” Zelenskiy said on social media.

According to the general staff update, Russia launched attacks near Kupiansk, in the eastern Kharkiv region, and Luhansk and Donetsk oblast, all places where Russian forces have been concentrating their offensive.

There is no end in sight to the conflict, which in its first year has killed thousands in the fighting on both sides, displaced millions, reduced cities to rubble, and left large areas of Ukraine under Russian occupation.

Russia has fired 5,000 missiles at Ukraine and carried out almost 3,500 airstrikes, according to Ukraine’s general staff. More than 7,000 Ukrainian civilians have been verified as killed, the UN commissioner for human rights has said, though the real number is believed to be much higher.

The increase in the Russian offensives in the east, along the 600-mile frontline that runs from Kharkiv region down through the Donbas to the Russian-occupied south, comes amid Ukrainian fears that – at the very least – Moscow will mark the first year of the war by targeting its cities with missiles and kamikaze drones.

Ukrainian officials have pointed to what they believe are recent efforts by Russian aerial reconnaissance vehicles – continuing on Thursday – to identify the location of Ukraine’s air defences. They believe those efforts may be the prelude to another mass rocket attack. Such attacks have been happening since the early autumn, although with diminishing effect.

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While some people are understood to have left Kyiv for the anniversary, others took the view that Russia had done its worst in terms of missile attacks.

Among those was the military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, who told local media he did not believe Russia had the capacity to make more than a symbolic gesture either later on Thursday or on Friday.

“Russia’s not planning anything extraordinary as far as attacks tomorrow,” he told Ukraine Pravda, adding he did not believe they had either enough missiles or new tactics to make a significant impact. “Nothing unusual will happen. A small missile strike [maybe]. We’ve experienced this more than 20 times before.”

Budanov also suggested that he believed that far from trying to prolong the war, as some analysts have suggested, Russian generals were under pressure to deliver a limited victory in Donbas in the coming months.

For weeks Russia has been intensifying its push to capture all of Ukraine’s eastern industrial heartland of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, collectively known as Donbas. Kyiv and its western allies say Moscow could try to launch a wider, more ambitious attack.

Recent Russian efforts have, however, been marked by large losses on the Russian side as troops and vehicles are thrown at the Ukrainian defences in an apparent attempt to overwhelm by sheer weight of numbers, irrespective of casualties.

As the war grinds on, Ukraine is waiting for the delivery of battle tanks and other weapons pledged by the west for it to reclaim occupied areas.

While Putin is determined to achieve his goals, Ukraine and its allies are standing firm on preventing Russia from ending up with any of its land.

Experts warn that Europe’s largest conflict since the second world war could drag on for years, increasing the albeit remote possibility of a direct confrontation between Russia and Nato.

With both sides using up ammunition at a rate unseen in decades, the Ukrainian military analyst Oleh Zhdanov said Russia had poured more troops and weapons into the Donbas and attacked other areas in an apparent attempt to distract Ukrainian forces.

“Russia currently has the initiative and the advantage on the battlefield,” he said, noting Kyiv’s acute shortage of ammunition.

Russia has relied on its massive arsenal, and boosted production of weapons and munitions, giving it a significant edge. While Ukrainian and western intelligence agencies have observed that Moscow is running out of precision missiles, it has plenty of old-style weapons.

A wider Russian offensive beyond the Donbas could be a gamble for Moscow, which mobilised 300,000 reservists last autumn to bolster its forces.

Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank in London, predicted any Russian offensive would fail, but said it could drain Ukraine’s resources and keep it from preparing its own large-scale counteroffensive.

“The big question is how much damage does the Russian offensive do before it runs out of steam, because that will dictate the Ukrainian position,” he said.

Observers see little prospect for talks. Both sides were “irreconcilable on their current positions”, Bronk said.

He added that major Ukrainian battlefield successes this summer could fuel “significant political turmoil in Russia, because at that point, Putin’s own position within the leadership becomes very, very difficult to see as tenable”.

At the same time, if Ukraine fails to reclaim more territory before Russia builds up its troops, it could lead to a “long-term stalemate and sort of a grinding attritional war that just kind of goes on and on,” Bronk said, which would play into Moscow’s plan “to prolong the war and just wait for the west to get exhausted”.

Agencies contributed to this report