According to military and analyst estimates, soon Russia and Ukraine they will enter the third and most difficult phase of the war.

Russians armed forces announced on Sunday that they had launched a new offensive in Zaporozhye, but the Ukrainian soldiers did not seem particularly worried.

“In the last two weeks there have been more movements, with shelling (…), but they do not send infantry through line because they are afraid,” said Vitaliy, a senior sergeant in Mariupol’s 56th motorized rifle brigade, which “holds” the defensive line around the city, 100 kilometers east of Zaporozhye.

Missiles Harbinger

However, Vitaly acknowledges that there is strong mobility. Rockets and rockets on this sector of the southern front more than doubled in January, about 4,000 a day. Two weeks earlier, the Russians twice advanced armored vehicles towards the Ukrainian positions, but withdrew under fire.

Officers at the front assume that sooner or later, probably in the next few months, one of the two sides will take the initiative to strike in an attempt to break the stalemate. The question is who will strike first and where.

“The big battle will take place this spring or even earlier,” Vitaly believes. A “storm” is expected to break out along the 1,200-kilometer front line over the next few days at some point in what is arguably the most violent phase of the war.

Two lines of defense

Both sides use this time to strengthen their forces. Vitali’s men work every day to reinforce the bunkers, while the invading forces set up two additional lines of defense with minefields, trenches and anti-tank traps, setting up small concrete pyramids known as “dragon’s teeth”.

While defensive preparations are evident, it remains less clear whether the Russians are secretly gathering additional forces for the attack. The Ukrainians monitor them day and night with drones and satellites and receive information from sources as the Russians move motorized units from Crimea to the eastern front in Donetsk and Luhansk.

Russia is steadily building up its forces, and Vladimir Putin is attempting a military coup in the economy to produce new tanks and missiles. Valery Gerasimov, Chief of the Russian General Staff, is personally overseeing operations in Ukraine, in what many analysts see as a precursor to a major offensive.

Three phases of the war

The first phase of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine eventually took its toll on Putin’s forces, which were driven back from the north, and then from Kharkiv in September and Kherson in November.

The second stage was the “war of attrition” operation, during which thousands of “expendable” Russian mercenaries and convicts sacrificed by Russia for insignificant territorial gainnear the cities of Bakhmut and Solentar, combined with an attempt by the Kremlin to force the Ukrainians to surrender by “freezing” them with massive missile strikes on power plants, power lines and water bodies.

“Russia has deployed most of its guided missile arsenal, and although the Ukrainian energy system has been hit, the lights are still on and the Ukrainian will to fight is unshakable,” comments the Guardian.

The third phase, which is expected to start, will be total battle with a critical advantage at stake. It assumes that motorized infantry, artillery and aviation formations will be involved, while an attack from the sea is also possible – to “break” fortified positions. The world has not seen anything like it since the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and Europe has not seen anything like it since World War II.

The death toll in this conflict exceeded the 100,000 casualties of the Bosnian war. There, most of the human casualties were civilians killed by Serbian troops.