Analysis: What the battle for Sievierodonetsk shows about the war.

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Wars are not won by retreats. But it is also possible to win the battle and lose the war.

The two military axioms — the first from Winston Churchill after the retreat from Dunkirk, and the second from more than 2,000 years ago when the Greek king Pyrrhus strode into the Roman Empire, triumphant but unable to secure the territory he wanted because of heavy losses suffered in the campaign to get there — both resonate as Russia grinds its way to battlefield advances in eastern Ukraine.

Depending on the prism it is viewed through, the fall of Sievierodonetsk and the Ukrainians’ desperate bid to hold on to Lysychansk reveal different aspects of the four-month-old war.

First, in the brutal war of attrition in the east, the Russians have shown that with their vastly superior firepower and willingness to scorch the earth to claim land, they can grind out territorial and tactical gains. And they can inflict heavy losses on Ukrainian forces. The Ukrainian government has said that over the past month, thousands of its soldiers have been killed.

The battle also underscored the importance of Western support for the Ukrainian military and why that assistance will most likely need to be sustained for a long time if Kyiv hopes to not only defend its land, but also set about reclaiming it.

At the same time, however, by holding out for as long as they did in Sievierodonetsk, Ukraine’s soldiers were able to severely degrade Russia’s combat abilities, according to Western and Ukrainian military analysts.

As in the Ukrainians’ defense of Mariupol — which lasted three months before the last garrison of the country’s soldiers surrendered at the Azovstal steel plant in mid-May — the fight in eastern Ukraine has allowed time for Western weapons to flow in and for Ukrainian forces to begin staging counterattacks in other parts of the country.

“The Kremlin’s ideological fixation on the capture of Sievierodonetsk, much like the earlier siege of Azovstal, will likely be to the ultimate detriment of Russian capabilities in future advances in Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based research institute, said on Thursday.

“The loss of Sievierodonetsk is a loss for Ukraine in the sense that any terrain captured by Russian forces is a loss,” it said, “but the battle of Sievierodonetsk will not be a decisive Russian victory.”



Source : Nytimes