Russia's Ukrainian Retreat

Is Vladimir Putin mounting a charm offensive, a military offensive or both? Last month, Russia’s president greeted U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry with conspicuous warmth at a newly built palace in Sochi for their first meeting since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis. They talked about eastern Ukraine’s future not as a piece of Russia, nor as a Kremlin-backed breakaway republic, but under the rule of Kiev. Summoning his friendliest smile, the Russian president proclaimed at his annual spring press conference that his country “has no enemies.” And as if on cue, the Russian-backed leaders of Ukraine’s breakaway regions announced that the idea of Novorossiya—a tsarist-era term describing a swath of southern Ukraine that Putin used to hint belonged back under Moscow’s control—is officially dead.

“The Kremlin has effectively admitted defeat, no matter how it tries to spin it,” wrote Andrei Kolesnikov, the former doyen of the Kremlin press pool who is now at the Carnegie Moscow Center. “Moscow seems to have come to the realization that Ukraine has been lost.”

Yet at the same time, early June saw the first major breakdown of a fragile cease-fire in Ukraine, as separatist forces battled with tanks and rocket launchers for control of Maryinka and Krasnohorivka. That might signal the start of a major rebel push to take the strategic port of Mariupol. And, more worrisome, observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe as well as Western embassies have reported that since early May, Russia has been sending rebels the kind of hardware they need for a major assault on Ukrainian lines—from UR-77 Meteorit mine-clearing vehicles to engineering units trained to deploy floating pontoon bridges. On May 17, Ukrainian troops intercepted a Russian reconnaissance team that had surreptitiously crossed the Seversky Donets River, north of Luhansk, and captured two Russians after a firefight. Both admitted being members of the 3rd Spetsnaz Brigade, on a mission to probe weaknesses in the Ukrainian defenses.

http://www.newsweek.com/russias-ukrainian-retreat-340214