The growing momentum of Russian forces has continued for the fifth week after the fall of Avdiivka in eastern Ukraine, as the Russian command moved reservists from other parts of the front to press its advantage.
The villages of Tonenke and Nevelske, west of Avdiivka, fell to the Russian advance on Saturday.
In the same area, the Russian Defense Ministry reclaimed Orlivka three days later, and Russian forces appeared to be devouring the town of Berdychi street by street.
“The enemy concentrated its main efforts in the direction of Avdiivka and for several days in a row tried to break through the defenses of our troops, defended by three brigades,” Ukraine's commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyii said on Friday.
“Three brigades are being attacked by an army made up of several divisions,” said Dmytro Kukharchuk, commander of a Ukrainian battalion in the Avdiivka area. “Russian troops are trying to create a 10-to-1 advantage.”
Dmytro Lykhovyi, spokesman for the Tavria Group of forces facing Russia there, said the front was “stabilized” in early March.
Ukrainian military observer Konstantyn Mashovets said the assessment was premature but that the Russian advance was slowing because “the enemy has already activated most of its tactical reserves and has already 'unpacked' operational reserves.”
“The enemy did not make advances tens of kilometers deep” and advancing “even a couple of kilometers is not cheap,” Mashovets said, suggesting that Ukrainian forces retained their power to exact a high price. Kukharchuk also said that Russian forces were paying for their tactical success with “colossal losses.”
Ukraine's military said it killed or wounded 6,600 Russians in the week leading up to President Vladimir Putin's re-election on Sunday, nearly 1,000 a day. Al Jazeera was unable to confirm this number.
While the Avdiivka region was the main focus of the Russian attack, Russia also stepped up operations elsewhere. His forces advanced marginally near Verbove, a village in the southern Zaporizhia region, and near Synkivka, a village in the northeastern Kharkiv region, demonstrating the complexity of Ukraine's defensive tasks.
Russia also kept up pressure on Ukrainian civilians, firing drones and missiles into the country during the 108th week of the war.
The worst attack came on Friday, when two Iskander ballistic missiles fell on homes in the Black Sea port city of Odessa, killing 21 people, one of the deadliest attacks on the city of the war.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia fired 130 missiles, 320 Shahed drones and 900 gliding bombs in March alone.
Since March 13, Ukraine has shot down 80 of the 101 Iranian-designed Shahed drones launched by Russia, he said.
Russians pay at the pump
While these desperate fights unfolded on the ground, Ukraine continued to attack Russia on its territory, carrying out a stated policy of making the Russians feel the pain of their own war by destroying oil infrastructure.
On Friday, Ukrainian military intelligence sources said they had attacked the Perviy Zavod oil refinery in Kaluga, 160 kilometers (100 kilometers) southwest of Moscow, which supposedly supplies the army. The Russian media Baza confirmed that there was a fire and a large burst at the plant was caught on camera.
The next day, Zelenskyy said Ukraine attacked three oil refineries in Russia's Samara region, 500 kilometers (310 miles) southeast of Moscow. The governor of Samara confirmed that there was an explosion at the Novokuibyshevsky refinery. The RBC-Ukraine news outlet said the Kuibyshevsky and Syzran Rosneft refineries were also affected and that the three refineries were responsible for a tenth of Russian oil refining capacity, processing 25 million tonnes of crude oil a year.
On Sunday, Putin's re-election day, Ukraine's Security Service said it had attacked the Slavyansk oil refinery, 500 kilometers (310 miles) south of Moscow. According to a Russian military news outlet, it was just one of eight attacks on infrastructure across the country that day.
Russia banned exports of refined petrochemicals in September to lower prices from a high of nearly 77,000 rubles ($840) a ton for standard AI-95 gasoline. RBC-Russia reported that the repeated attacks had helped AI-95 reach its highest price since then, of 60,500 rubles ($661) a ton on March 13.
Ukraine has attacked several Russian petrochemical processing or loading plants since the beginning of the year, from St. Petersburg to the Black Sea coast.
kyiv also allowed anti-Putin Russian paramilitaries to launch a cross-border raid from its soil the week before Putin's election. The Russian Volunteer Force, the Russian Freedom Legion (LSR) and the Siberian Battalion attacked border garrisons in Belgorod and Kursk on 12 March.
On Sunday, the LSR and the Siberian Battalion said they had taken an administrative building in Gorkovsky, a border settlement in Belgorod, suggesting the raid was ongoing.
That led Putin to talk about creating a “sanitary zone” on Ukrainian soil to protect Russian borders.
“I do not rule. …We will be forced at some point, when we consider it appropriate, to create a certain 'sanitary zone' in the territories today subordinated to the Kiev regime,” Putin said at a press conference on Monday, calling the paramilitaries “traitors.” .
The raids also went in the opposite direction.
Ukraine said it had repelled three reconnaissance and sabotage groups that crossed into its Sumy region from Russia.
Russia has frequently spoken of its openness to a negotiated end to the war, and this has won support among Western countries, including members of the US Republican Party who have pressured Ukraine to open talks.
Putin's right-hand man and deputy head of the National Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, described last week what such a negotiated peace could look like.
In a Telegram post on March 14, he demanded “unconditional surrender,” the exclusion of Ukraine from the United Nations list of sovereign countries, its complete demilitarization, and Western recognition of its government as Nazi.
“This may be Russia's soft formula for peace,” Medvedev said. “This is a compromise position, right? I believe that it is precisely on this basis that we can seek a benevolent consensus with the international community.”
Less than a week later, Zelenskyy said in an afternoon speech that “Putin must lose.”
“Our actions must be far-reaching to defeat Putin instead of being in a situation where doubts about the strength of the West benefit this lunatic,” the Ukrainian leader said.
