Russia shocks the battlefield. New Ukraine war strategy changes the fight overnight
Ukrainian servicemen gather around an infantry fighting vehicle on a road outside Bakhmut in February 2023. The city was seized by Russia three months later. Yevhenii Zavhorodnii/Reuters Introduction. A Battlefield Lost in the Mist The road leading to Pokrovsk looks like a scene from a world that has already ended. From a curtain of thick morning fog, a column of Russian fighters rolls forward. Some travel on battered motorcycles and mopeds, engines rattling across broken fields. Others cling to the open bed of a pickup truck scraping past ruins. One vehicle appears modified with a cage-like metal shield, the kind of improvised armor that reflects a new phase of the war. This strange procession is not a desperate retreat. It is the shape of Russia’s evolving strategy in eastern Ukraine, where speed and stealth are now replacing brute force. The city of Pokrovsk, once busy with life, has now become another shattered symbol of resistance. And if it falls, it may mark Russia’s most ...