Kyiv lost much of Ukraine’s east.

 

POKROVSK, Ukraine —  Obscured in the daily fighting is the geographic reality that Russia has made gains on the ground.

The Russian Defense Ministry said Tuesday that its forces in eastern Ukraine had advanced to the border between Donetsk and Luhansk, the two Russian-speaking provinces where Moscow-backed separatists have been fighting Ukraine’s army for eight years.

The ministry’s assertion, if confirmed, strengthens the prospect that Russia could soon gain complete control over the region, known as the Donbas, compared with just a third of it before the Feb. 24.

The Donbas control, combined with the Russian’s early success in controlling parts of southern Ukraine adjoining the Crimean peninsula, gives the Kremlin enormous leverage in any future negotiation to halt the conflict.

And the Russians enjoy the added advantage of naval dominance in the Black Sea, the only maritime route for Ukrainian trade, which they have paralyzed with an embargo that could eventually starve Ukraine economically and is already contributing to a global grain shortage.

The Ukrainians are increasingly dependent on an infusion of Western military and humanitarian aid, much of it from the United States, where the House voted Tuesday evening to approve a nearly $40 billion emergency package.

Still, Russia has all but achieved one of its primary objectives: controlling a land bridge connecting Russian territory to the Crimean peninsula.

Some of Russia's military’s most skilled fighters poured out of Crimea and southern Russia, quickly controlling a ribbon of Ukrainian territory along the Sea of Azov. The last stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in this area, at the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, has been whittled to a few hundred hungry troops now confined mostly to bunkers.

Russian forces now control about 80 percent of Donbas, according to Ukrainian officials, and have concentrated their efforts on a pocket of Ukrainian-held territory with Kramatorsk at its center.

Ukraine’s economy is expected to shrink 30 percent this year, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said on Tuesday, worsening its forecast from just two months ago, when it predicted a 20 percent shrinkage.

The war has “put Ukraine’s economy under enormous stress, with the heavy devastation of infrastructure and production capacities,” the bank said in an economic update.

It estimated that 30 percent to 50 percent of Ukrainian businesses have shut down, 10 percent of the population has fled the country and a further 15 percent is displaced internally."