Russia’s military strategy in Ukraine

While winning the battle for the southern port city of mariupol would be seen as a major strategic success for Russia giving it control over much of Ukraine’s south coast our security correspondent Gordon Carrera has this assessment of the Russian advance Russian military strategy has changed since the war began when they first invaded nearly a month ago the Russian forces came in broadly on three fronts from the north from the south and from the east the aim seems to have been for lightning strikes to take key cities but instead they met fiercer resistance than they expected and that strategy effectively failed so what's happened since then well if we look at the capital Kiev they’ve been trying to encircle the city but they've not managed that entirely and it doesn't look like they've got the combat power to go in and take the heavily defended capital so instead we've seen these kind of missile strikes on it but the Russians are regrouping and bringing in reinforcements if we next look at the south they have made more progress here and we've heard a lot in recent days about Mario Paul and you can see the strategic importance of that city because it would allow the Russians to connect up some of the territory they control and they've effectively been laying siege to that city inflicting some pretty terrible Devastation if we then move on to the east what you can see is that there's been Fighting Here in hakes which has been pretty intense and one of the concerns there is that Russian forces could drive then in from multiple Directions and then they'd be able to surround a Ukrainian fighting force which is here and potentially cut it off now we've also seen strikes all the way over here around la Viv what that looks to be is the Russians targeting the military infrastructure which supports Ukraine including the supply routes for it so overall what we get from this is a sense of a war of attrition in which the Russians are trying to pound some of the cities trying to do as much damage as they can to the Ukrainian military what all that points to is potentially a long haul and many casualties including civilian casualties.