US sees Putin moving away from bid to conquer Ukraine, toward holding its southeast

Unnamed senior US officials have said they believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is changing tack and will no longer focus on conquering all of Ukraine, including the capital Kyiv, and installing a Moscow-aligned regime, as was apparently his original plan, according to a Monday report.

After Russian troops did not quickly take Ukraine as they expected, the objective is now to hold areas seized in the southeast of the country while continuing with siege tactics against cities in other regions in order to extract key concessions including a pledge of Ukrainian neutrality, the Wall Street Journal reported.

“Based on our assessments militarily, it does appear that he is reverting to siege tactics,” said one US official, who spoke anonymously.

“The quick decapitation of the Ukrainian government didn’t work,” said Daniel Fried, a former senior State Department official who served as US ambassador to Poland. “Now he just wants to pound them because they are resisting and therefore it must be purged. It’s Stalinesque.”

The siege tactics seen at the battered seaport of Mariupol and other cities are reminiscent of the methods Russia used against Grozny in 1999 and 2000 during the Second Chechen War, when Putin became Russia’s prime minister and then its president. READ MORE