Ukraine’s Daring Gambit Inside Russia

The once stalemated lines of contact between Russian and Ukrainian forces have become far more fluid in recent weeks, and not to Ukraine’s advantage.

“Russian forces have made swift and significant territorial gains in Ukraine,” the Financial Times’ Christopher Miller reported yesterday. The Russian military is advancing beyond Ukraine’s defensive lines in eastern Donetsk, seizing some key settlements and threatening future advances with the forward movement of Russian artillery. “Our defenses are showing cracks,” one Ukrainian official told Miller. Indeed, according to one Finnish research group, the amount of territory Moscow’s forces have captured since May “is nearly double that which Ukraine’s military won back at heavy cost in terms of lives and military materiel with its summer offensive a year ago.”