(CN) — Ukraine's army was on the offensive Wednesday not just in the south but also along the northern front lines near Kharkiv, the country's besieged second-largest city, a development that is making this one of the war's bloodiest phases.
The war is in its seventh month and intensifying ahead of the approach of colder and wetter months. Fighting is taking place at many points along the 800 miles of front lines.
While Ukraine goes on the offensive, Russian forces continue their attacks in Donetsk, an eastern region Russian President Vladimir Putin is determined to seize and annex along with the neighboring region of Luhansk. Before the invasion, this area, known as the Donbas, was the theater of near-constant low-level fighting since 2014. The frozen conflict there laid the stage for Putin's invasion on Feb. 24.
At an Asian economic summit Wednesday in Vladivostok, a far-eastern city in Russia, Putin lashed out at the West and accused it of threatening the world with famine and disaster because of its anti-Russian sanctions, which have pushed up energy and food prices.
He also accused the West of hording Ukrainian grain shipments following a United Nations-brokered deal that opened Black Sea ports in a bid to stave off mass starvation in poorer countries. His claims about shipments were disputed by United Nations data tracking the shipments, according to a Reuters report.
“As they once were colonizers, so they remained inside,” Putin charged. “They think first of all about their skin, about their interests. They don't care.”
He declared that Russia has withstood the West's economic onslaught and vowed it will come out stronger.
“The pandemic has been replaced by new global challenges that pose a threat to the entire world,” Putin said, as reported by Tass, a Russian state news agency. “I'm referring to the Western sanctions frenzy, its aggressive attempts to impose a model of behavior on other countries, depriving them of sovereignty and subjugating them to their will.”
He then attacked the United States as “the catalyst for these processes” and claimed American dominance is ending due to “irreversible, one might say, tectonic changes” brought about by the rise of the Asia-Pacific region.
The war in Ukraine has pushed Russia closer to China and the two are forging a political and military alliance in opposition to the U.S. and its allies. Many political experts warn that a new Cold War era has begun. Russia has moved to funnel more of its oil and natural gas exports to China, India and other developing countries since the outbreak of war and the European Union's imposition of sanctions.
Even as the fighting has gotten worse in recent weeks, neither side has made significant gains in a war that's begun to look more and more like a stalemate. Intense fighting is expected to carry on until the region's harsh winter conditions set in.
According to claims by both sides, the brutal fighting is resulting in the deaths of hundreds of soldiers each day since Ukraine began a counteroffensive to recapture the southern city of Kherson at the end of August.
On Wednesday, Ukraine's defense ministry claimed it had killed about 460 Russian troops in the past day, bringing the total number of purported Russian losses to more than 50,000.
For its part, Russia claimed more than 210 Ukrainian soldiers were slain in the past day during fighting in the south, where Ukraine has struggled to make advances in wide-open terrain north of Kherson. In recent days, each side has boasted of shooting down warplanes, destroying tanks and hitting depots and command centers.
In tandem with the battlefield assaults, Ukraine is carrying out covert attacks behind enemy lines and striking targets along the Russian border and on Russian-held territory with rockets. Russia too continues to strike at targets behind the front lines.
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