Compared with the last two years, the last several days have been like a vacation for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
His nemesis, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is now spending most of his time begging the United States and Europe for military support, a sign that the tens of billions of dollars that once used to flow into Kyiv’s war chest is now increasingly scarce. Back in Russia, Putin’s most prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, died in an Arctic penal colony over the weekend after years behind bars for a litany of spurious charges. And on Saturday, Russian forces finally captured a city in eastern Ukraine, Avdiivka, after four months of brutal combat — Russia’s first territorial gain since May.
Of this news, the battle for Avdiivka is the most significant in terms of Putin’s most important objective: winning the war in Ukraine on Russia’s terms. It’s difficult to underestimate just how brutal, intense and downright hellish the battle for this eastern Ukrainian city was. The only previous battle one could compare it with was the Russian offensive in Bakhmut, in which thousands of Russian convicts-turned-soldiers were ordered to storm entrenched Ukrainian positions to overpower the defenders. It took Moscow more than nine months and 20,000 fatalities to bring a city about a third the size of Des Moines, Iowa, into its grasp. And by the time the Russians planted the flag, Bakhmut was........