RUSSIAN TROOPS HAVE been fighting in Ukraine for almost 50 days.

Putin’s advance on Kyiv was a spectacular failure. His troops are retreating and re-deploying to Donbass to support a renewed offensive there.

The significance of Putin’s defeat at Kyiv is not to be underestimated. His elite mechanised forces advanced less than 200 kilometres in almost a month. This represents a rate of advance of less than 6 kilometres per day.

Medieval foot-soldiers would have advanced at a rate many times faster than that and would have overtaken the hapless Russian advance. This is a serious blow to Russian military prestige. It proves, on the battlefield, that Russian ground forces lack the leadership and capacity to manoeuvre and coordinate their combat assets. Simply put, the Russian military is no ‘Red Army’. It is a lame duck.

As is the case with many defeated armies – mauled by a superior fighting force and forced to withdraw – Putin’s military have taken out their frustrations on the civilian population north of Kiev. Reports from towns like Bucha show evidence of torture, mass executions and rape of men, women and children.

In the coming days and weeks, as the Ukrainian military recover ground around Kyiv, there will be more evidence uncovered of mass graves and war crimes. These will be a harbinger of what is to come in the renewed offensive in Donbass.

On another sinister note, Russian Rosgvardiya units – a militia of the Interior Ministry commanded by Vladimir Putin himself – have been operating behind the lines of advancing Russian troops to purge occupied towns of elected officials, persons with military service and community leaders.

Their activities are reminiscent of the ‘Einsatzgruppen’ that followed Hitler’s forces in their invasion of Ukraine during the Second World War, systematically murdering innocent men, women and children along their axis of advance.

Given Putin’s personal command and control of these forces, he should face investigation for war crimes in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine.

Russia’s main military efforts now represent a pivot – to reorganise, re-equip, reinforce and regenerate a major offensive on the Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts. This consists of the main assault on Mariupol in order to enforce a land corridor between Russian territory and the Crimean Peninsula through Eastern Ukraine.

There is a supporting advance on Kharkiv and Izyum to the north – with heavy fighting there in recent days. There is also a southern axis of advance from Crimea towards Kherson. This force will hope to link up with their counterparts – if and when Mariupol falls.

Donbass

Kharkiv AP AP

Throughout the campaign in Donbass, Putin’s forces have breached their obligations under Articles 51 (7) and Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions to allow Ukrainian civilians to flee the cities of Sumy, Kharkiv, Mariupol and Kherson.

The names of these towns will endure in infamy as the targets of a Russian strategy to destroy entire cities – and annihilate the men, women and children trapped there – in order to claim ‘victory’.

Terms such as ‘urbanicide’ and ‘political cleansing’ have emerged in recent weeks to describe these tactics – relentless indiscriminate air and artillery attacks on a civilian population trapped in basements of towns reduced to rubble.

Ukrainian civilians find themselves trapped in this nightmare scenario, denied water, food and medical treatment.

This is precisely the strategy employed by Putin in Syria in his support of the Assad Regime and their assault on Syrian cities. Putin’s appointment of General Alexander Dvornikov, ‘the Butcher of Syria’, to take overall command of the Donbass operation is a clear signal of his intent to continue, and intensify their onslaught on the civilian population in the coming days.

Deprived of a conventional military victory against the Ukrainian armed forces, Putin and his generals have decided to direct their force and fury at the civilian population. This strategy is reminiscent of the campaigns of ethnic cleansing that were a feature of the war in Bosnia in the 1990s.

In the last 24 hours – shortly after Dvornikov took command – there have been unconfirmed claims by Ukrainian forces of the use of chemical weapons in the onslaught. Assad’s forces – supported by Russian troops – carried out chemical attacks in Syria.

In 2013, over a thousand civilians were murdered in Eastern Ghouta, Damascus, including 426 children. In 2014, Assad targeted Kafr Zitov and Saraqeb in Idlib Province with a chlorine attack. A similar chlorine gas attack was mounted in Zubdiya, a suburb of Aleppo in 2016. There is therefore precedence for chemical attacks on Putin and Dvornikov’s watch in Syria.

Chemical weapons consist of a variety of agents including nerve, blood, blister and choking chemicals. Nerve agents such as Sarin consist of neurotoxins, in gel, liquid or aerosol form that inflict an indiscriminate and hideous death on men, women and children. They are particularly effective in the urban environment – particularly where defenders and civilian inhabitants are bombed into cellars and basements below ground.

Chemical agents are heavier than air and can seep down into bomb shelters and subterranean shelters to kill those trapped there. The agents act in different ways – some choke the victim to death agonisingly slowly, others fill the victim’s lungs with blood, slowly drowning them in this way. The weapons generate terror on an unprecedented scale and if used, would accelerate the fall and surrender of a city like Mariupol. The use of such weapons would represent war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Putin’s defeat at Kyiv and his stalled offensive in Donbass demonstrate clear problems with Russia’s combat capabilities in conventional operations. Unlike their ‘gray zone’ asymmetric operations, involving ‘maskirovka’ or deception campaigns including special forces, Russia’s conventional ground units – including elite units – appear to flounder in the battle space.

If properly supplied and supported from mainland Europe, Ukraine’s military could conceivably halt Putin’s last throw of the dice in Donbass. That would spell the end of Putin’s leadership and he and his cronies will take desperate measures in order to achieve a grotesque ‘victory’, however pyrrhic. This might even include the use of chemical weapons – or white phosphorous weapons, a burning agent – in the direct fire role against civilian targets.

If Putin prevails, he will move on Odessa. If he succeeds in taking Odessa, Moldova and Transnistria will be targeted. If Putin’s forces are halted in Donbass, he may lash out and fire missiles at Polish border crossings – or other neighbouring NATO member states – to target Ukrainian re-supply lines.

This could lead to an escalation of the war, with unforeseeable consequences. This is a situation that is entirely of Putin’s making.

It is vital that Ukraine prevails in the coming weeks and months. It is also vital that Putin and his enablers face a war crimes tribunal in the aftermath of this tragic and completely unnecessary conflict.

Dr Tom Clonan is a former Captain in the Irish armed forces. He is a security analyst and academic, lecturing in the School of Media in DIT. You can follow him on Twitter.