Soldiers with the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces in the Zaporizhzhia region in southeast Ukraine on Sunday, May 1, 2022.
The Ukrainian and Russian armies are now in a grueling war of attrition, often fighting fiercely over small areas. But if Russia can hold the territory it occupies on land and maintain its dominion at sea, that could give it the capacity to strangle the Ukrainian economy and provide either leverage in any negotiated settlement or a staging ground for broader assaults across the country.
The province had 1.6 million people before the war; it is hard to estimate how many have stayed behind. The mayor of Melitopol said Monday that about 60% of the city’s residents had fled.On the edge of the eastern Ukrainian region of Donetsk, this once-thriving port city is now destroyed. Ukrainian officials estimate that 20,000 civilians have been killed in the monthslong Russian siege, and three-fourths of the population fled.
While Russia has never been able to establish control in the skies over Ukraine, it has nearly total superiority at sea.The Kremlin has said it wants to “liberate” the whole Donbas region, which combines two big eastern enclaves: Luhansk and Donetsk. The two provinces border Russia and run from outside Mariupol in the south to the northern border near Kharkiv.