Russia signaled on Friday it may be reducing its war aims, announcing that it would now focus its forces on taking more territory in eastern Ukraine and that the goals of the “first stage of the operation” had been “mainly accomplished.”
With Ukraine putting up fierce resistance and Russia having failed to seize key cities in the early days of the war, Friday’s statement from a senior general amounted to the most direct acknowledgment yet that Russia would not be able to take control of all or most of Ukraine. The plan now, the general said, was to focus on taking the eastern region known as the Donbas, where Russia has recognized the independence of two Russia-backed separatist “republics.”
Ukraine’s combat power had been “significantly reduced,” Maj. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi, the chief of the Main Operational Directorate of the Russian military’s General Staff, said in a statement. “As individual units carry out their tasks — and they are being solved successfully — our forces and means will be concentrated on the main thing: the complete liberation of the Donbas.”
It was General Rudskoi’s first public statement since the start of Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24, a signal that his comments carried more significance than the daily updates on the course of the war delivered by the Defense Ministry’s spokesman, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov. And while it was far from certain that Russia was prepared to end the war quickly, his comments laid the groundwork for the Kremlin to be able to make the argument that Russia was getting what it wanted despite the challenges on the battlefield.
“The demilitarization of Ukraine is being achieved” through missile strikes on military infrastructure and attacks on Ukrainian units, General Rudskoi said. “Demilitarizing” Ukraine was one of the main goals that Mr. Putin set for the war when it began on Feb. 24, and Russian and Ukrainian officials have been negotiating the contours of a settlement in recent weeks even as the fighting has continued.
General Rudskoi said Russia could still mount an offensive against Kyiv and other major cities, but that the main purpose of positioning troops outside those cities was to prevent Ukraine from sending reinforcements to the east. Russian troops have been slowly advancing westward from the portion of eastern Ukraine occupied by Russian-backed separatists, and have been bombarding the port city of Mariupol, the biggest population center in the part of the Donbas that was controlled by Ukraine before the war.
“We do not exclude” the possibility of storming cities, General Rudskoi said, but “our forces and resources will be concentrated” on the Donbas.
Russia has said that its terms for peace also include Ukrainian recognition of Russian control of Crimea, which President Vladimir V. Putin’s forces seized from Ukraine in 2014, and of the independence of the Russia-backed Donbas statelets, the “Donetsk People’s Republic” and the “Luhansk People’s Republic.” President Volodymyr Zelensky has ruled out ceding Ukrainian sovereignty to stop the war, and Russia’s continued offensives appear aimed at creating facts on the ground to force him to accept.
The West supplying weapons to Ukraine is “a huge mistake,” General Rudskoi said. “This prolongs the conflict, increases the number of victims and will not be able to influence the outcome of the operation.”
But even winning control of the full Donbas region would be a far cry from Russia’s more expansive, earlier war aims, which appeared to include taking control of Kyiv and toppling Mr. Zelensky’s government.
General Rudskoi said 1,351 Russian soldiers had been killed in the war, the first figure Russia offered in more than three weeks. Last week, the U.S. Defense Department estimated that at least 7,000 Russians had died, and the Ukrainian government has claimed more than twice that many Russian war dead.
Pavel Luzin, a Russian military analyst, cautioned that the public pronouncements of Russian military commanders should not be taken at face value. While Russia could indeed be narrowing its war aims, he said, General Rudskoi’s statements could also be a feint as Russia regroups for a possible new offensive.
“We could say that this is a signal that we’re no longer insisting on dismantling Ukrainian statehood,” Mr. Luzin said. “But I would rather see it as a distracting maneuver.”