Russian missiles rained down on the Ukrainian city of Odessa for a second day Tuesday, in an apparent effort to destroy supply lines and target Western weapons shipments.
The strikes on the historic port in the southwest of Ukraine came as US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Kremlin had not given up on its hopes to take large swaths of Ukraine.
“We assess President [Vladimir] Putin is preparing for a prolonged conflict in Ukraine during which he still intends to achieve goals beyond the Donbas,” Haines told lawmakers Tuesday.
Putin’s hopes to install a Kremlin-friendly government in Kyiv were stymied when his forces failed to take the capital early in the war.
A combination of Ukrainian resistance and Russian logistical failures led to a retreat from central Ukraine in late March and a declaration from the Kremlin that it was only focused on the eastern Donbas region. Fighting there has occurred sporadically since Russia egged on a separatist movement in the region in 2014.
But Western assessments — and continued bombardments across Ukraine — indicate that Russia wants more than eastern Ukraine.
That fact caused Haines to express concern about the fighting to come.
“Combined with the reality that Putin faces a mismatch between his ambitions and Russia’s current conventional military capabilities . . . the next few months could see us moving along a more unpredictable and potentially escalatory trajectory,” she said.
Still, top US intelligence officials acknowledged that the months-long war was at a “bit of a stalemate.”
“The Russians aren’t winning and the Ukrainians aren’t winning and we’re at a bit of a stalemate here,” said Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Regardless, reports Tuesday indicated that Russian forces have been as unsuccessful in the east as they have been elsewhere.
In the decimated port city of Mariupol, Russian troops were still unable to dislodge the Ukrainian forces holed up in a sprawling Soviet-era steel plant, despite continued shelling and ground assaults.
Ukrainian forces Tuesday retook four villages outside the northeastern city of Kharkiv, in an effort to push Russian artillery out of range.
Those counterattacks also endanger Russian supply lines, according to military experts.
“They’re trying to cut in and behind the Russians to cut off the supply lines, because that’s really one of their (the Russians’) main weaknesses,” Neil Melvin of the RUSI think tank in London told Reuters Tuesday.
“Ukrainians are getting close to the Russian border. So all the gains that the Russians made in the early days in the northeast of Ukraine are increasingly slipping away,” he said.
Meanwhile, Oleh Synehubov, the head of Kharkiv’s regional administration, said authorities found 44 bodies in the rubble of a building destroyed in March.
A semblance of normal has begun to return to Kyiv, where the German foreign minister has reopened her nation’s embassy. A provocative anti-war sculpture featuring a handgun and a likeness of Vladimir Putin was removed from a public square Tuesday.