Despite Russian missile attacks, conditions on the battlefield favor the nimbler, more highly motivated and better armed Ukrainian military.
LONDON — Russia’s efforts to counter Ukrainian advances by pounding Kyiv and other cities with missiles and mobilizing hundreds of thousands of reservists represent a significant escalation in the seven-month-old war but are unlikely to shift the dynamics of a conflict now clearly tilting in favor of Ukraine, Western intelligence assessments and military experts say.
U.S. and other Western officials predict that Ukraine will remain on the counteroffensive well into the coming months, even as the weather forces the pace of the war to slow. No longer, however, is there an expectation that Russia will be in a position to seize significantly more ground. So dramatically has Ukraine turned the fight around that the only outstanding question is how much more territory Ukraine will be able to take back — not whether Russia will be able to achieve its goals, said Rob Lee of the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute.
“We don’t want to underestimate our enemy, and we understand that if 200,000 arrive on the battlefield things could change,” he said. At a restaurant in Moscow, police present conscription orders to a diner who says he’s celebrating his daughter’s birthday.
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