Four stages of war

At the end of the third stage of this war, the Russians will likely control a straightened and relatively defensible line in eastern Ukraine

The war in Ukraine is currently in its third, and profoundly different, phase. In the first phase of the war, the armed forces of the Russian Federation and its proxies from the self-declared “People’s Republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk moved swiftly towards major population centres in southern, eastern, and northern Ukraine. Russian paratroopers — the feared Vozdushno-Desantnye Voyska, in their sky-blue berets and striped shirts — were dropped well ahead of frontlines; the invasion moved along multiple axes towards the cities of Kyiv, Mariupol, Kherson, Mikolayiv, Zaporishia, and Kharkiv. But, as is now well understood, the timing of the invasion