After their latest push on Debaltseve, pro-Russian rebels are hemming in thousands of Ukrainian troops on three sides, and are close enough to shell their supply route from Artemovsk. Ukraine’s generals have ordered their men to hold the line while diplomats struggle to revive the Minsk peace deal. Their soldiers fight valiantly, but with little understanding of the strategy. “We’ve either got to attack and even out the line, or retreat,” says one. “We’re doing neither.”
Debaltseve’s strategic value lies in its rail and road links. With time, it has assumed symbolic importance. “There is not a tactical explanation for what Ukraine is doing,” says Igor Sutyagin at RUSI, a London-based think-tank. “There is a political and psychological explanation.” Losing Debaltseve would dent morale. Doctors in Artemovsk say official casualty figures are understated. Draft-dodging haunts Ukraine’s mobilisation effort. Criticism of the generals has mounted since the loss of Donetsk airport. Although Ukraine’s forces have so far given up little ground at Debaltseve, its fall is a matter of time.
Putin says U.S. bent on world domination:
President Vladimir Putin says Russia is facing Cold War-style containment efforts and will oppose world domination by a single nation.
Putin's remarks on February 7 were the latest in a series of bitter denunciations of Western nations, which have imposed sanctions on Russia over its interference in Ukraine and are pressing him to drop support for separatists fighting government forces there.
"As for the idea that a war is being waged against our country, there is no war, thank God. But it is perfectly clear that there is an attempt to hold back our development by various means," Russian news agencies quoted him as saying during a trade union congress in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi.
Clearly referring to the United States, Putin said that the world order that emerged after the Soviet collapse is dominated by "one undisputed leader who wants to remain such -- a leader who assumes that everything is allowed to him, but that others only need what he allows them and what meets his own interests."
"Russia will never be satisfied with this kind of world order," Putin said. (Interfax and TASS)
Biden says the top separatist officials and the "trained fighters" in eastern Ukraine "directly answer to Mr. Putin."