While Ukrainian defenders brace for a large-scale Russian attack in the east that may or may not ever come, the mood seems eerily similar to that of the war's first days and first push towards Kyiv. In principle, Russia's new plan appears to be to sweep south from Izyum and north from the Mariupol region to capture all or most of Donetsk and Luhansk, cutting off the dug-in Ukrainian positions that have held stable in the war against Russian-backed separatists for years.
In practice, this all relies on Russian commanders showing skills that they haven't yet shown, marshaling forces on a scale they haven't yet been able to marshal, the protection of supply lines longer and more tenuous than the ones that quickly fell to pieces around Kyiv, all with a makeshift assemblage of battered troops pulled from other offensives and, theoretically, mercenary forces pulled from elsewhere.
In other words, Russia's top-level strategy is believed to be implausibly ambitious by the military experts who have watched the war unfold to date—and even that ignores the onset of Ukraine's rainy season, turning much of the front into the sort of thick mud slurry that has claimed seemingly as much Russian armor as Ukraine's human defenders have.
One new variable on the scene is the appearance of a new Russian general who at least in theory will be taking command of a Ukrainian invasion that up until now had no visible leadership at all. Aleksandr Dvornikov is said to have earned the favor of Russia's leadership through, bluntly, a campaign of war crimes in Syria, where he oversaw the sort of civilian bombings that Russia has become infamous for elsewhere.
But again: In practice, the number of Russian generals who have targeted civilian populations when they could not rout the enemy military consists of approximately All Of Them. It is standard Russian military doctrine at this point, though we likely underestimated the extent to which Russian generals have chosen the strategy not as institutional preference but due to what now is more clearly seen as staggering Russian incompetence at combatting armed opponents—forcing Russian commanders to prefer civilian targets so as to report back to the home office with news of at least something that can plausibly be spun as success.
The Russian military north of Kyiv, for example, has heroically been lobbing missiles at Ukrainian wheat farms, where at least one Russian missile successfully destroyed three of the Russian military's most-feared opponents: farm tractors. Russia also destroyed six large granaries, Ukrainian officials say. There is no tactical advantage in destroying granaries, but we can deduce that Russian artillery commanders are primarily occupied with shelling any building large enough to be visible from a distance. Granaries are among the biggest, so here we are.
Everything we've seen on the Donbas front so far is a continuation of Kyiv-area tactics. Russia launches battalion-sized raids into enemy territory; Russian forces get decimated by Ukrainian defenders with access to anti-armor weapons and, now, able to target those advances with precision artillery strikes; Russian forces retreat while continuing to shell whatever civilian infrastructure happens to be within range. That Russia was able to finally capture Izyum is significant, but even it faces the Kyiv problem. The supply lines are long, winding through contested areas, and Ukraine can bring the same tactics that it used around Kyiv to whittle down Russian columns before they ever make it to the frontlines.
The rest of it looks eerily familiar. It's unclear what new order this new Russian general is being installed to impose, but a campaign of shelling cities, destroying granaries and missile strikes on crowds of fleeing civilians is something that all the other Russian generals have been accomplishing very well on their own. It may only be another name to pin the resulting war crimes to, in the aftermath of all this.
If Gen. Dvornikov doesn't fall out of a Moscow window a month or two from now, of course.