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As Ukraine prepares to mobilize tens of thousands of men to address a critical shortage of soldiers amid intensified Russian attacks, Ukrainian commanders in the field say they are bracing for most of the new troops to arrive with poor training. Ukrainian commanders have long griped about lackluster preparation for recruits at training centers. But with Russia on the offensive, the persistent complaints are a reminder that a newly adopted mobilization law intended to widen the pool of draft-eligible men is just one step in solving the military’s personnel problems. An influx of conscripts under the new law is still...

As Russia steps up airstrikes and once again advances on the battlefield in Ukraine more than two years into its bloody invasion, there is no end to the fighting in sight. And President Volodymyr Zelensky’s options for what to do next — much less how to win the war — range from bad to worse. Zelensky has said Ukraine will accept nothing less than the return of all its territory, including land that Russia has controlled since 2014. But with the battle lines changing little in the last year, militarily retaking the swaths of east and south Ukraine that Russia...

KYIV — As Russia steps up airstrikes and once again advances on the battlefield in Ukraine more than two years into its bloody invasion, there is no end to the fighting in sight. And President Volodymyr Zelensky’s options for what to do next — much less how to win the war — range from bad to worse. Zelensky has said Ukraine will accept nothing less than the return of all its territory, including land that Russia has controlled since 2014. But with the battle lines changing little in the last year, militarily retaking the swaths of east and south Ukraine...

The Ukrainian military is facing a critical shortage of infantry, leading to exhaustion and diminished morale on the front line, military personnel in the field said this week — a perilous new dynamic for Kyiv nearly two years into the grinding, bloody war with Russia. In interviews across the front line in recent days, nearly a dozen soldiers and commanders told The Washington Post that personnel deficits were their most critical problem now, as Russia has regained the offensive initiative on the battlefield and is stepping up its attacks. One battalion commander in a mechanized brigade fighting in eastern Ukraine...

Ukraine’s challenges in massing troops, ammunition and equipment could cause its military to fall “well short” of Kyiv’s original goals for an anticipated counteroffensive aimed at retaking Russian-occupied areas this spring, according to U.S. intelligence assessments contained in a growing leak of classified documents revealing Washington’s misgivings about the state of the war. -snip- The document forecasting only modest success in Ukraine’s forthcoming counteroffensive indicates that Kyiv’s strategy revolves around reclaiming contested areas in the east while pushing south in a bid to sever Russia’s land bridge to Crimea, the peninsula Moscow illegally annexed in 2014 and now uses as...

DNIPROPETROVSK REGION, Ukraine — The quality of Ukraine’s military force, once considered a substantial advantage over Russia, has been degraded by a year of casualties that have taken many of the most experienced fighters off the battlefield, leading some Ukrainian officials to question Kyiv’s readiness to mount a much-anticipated spring offensive. U.S. and European officials have estimated that as many as 120,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed or wounded since the start of Russia’s invasion early last year, compared with about 200,000 on the Russian side, which has a much larger military and roughly triple the population from which to...

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian officials said they require coordinates provided or confirmed by the United States and its allies for the vast majority of strikes using its advanced U.S.-provided rocket systems, a previously undisclosed practice that reveals a deeper and more operationally active role for the Pentagon in the war. The disclosure, confirmed by three senior Ukrainian officials and a senior U.S. official, comes after months of Kyiv’s forces pounding Russian targets — including headquarters, ammunition depots and barracks — on Ukrainian soil with the U.S.-provided High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, and other similar precision-guided weapons such as...

After weeks of fighting for scraps of territory on the war’s bloodiest front, Oleh, a 21-year-old Ukrainian company commander, was summoned suddenly last August, along with thousands of other soldiers, to an obscure rendezvous point in the Kharkiv region. At his last position, relentless Russian artillery fire had stalked his men’s every step. But here, in a patch of villages, farmland and streams in Ukraine’s northeast, the quiet was deeply alarming. “The silence bothered me the most,” Oleh said. “It seemed off. How could this be?” Even more unsettling were the orders his superiors handed down: to charge as far...

When there’s a Russian corpse that needs collecting, Capt. Anton gets the call. Sometimes, he’ll receive a text with coordinates of where the body is located. Other times, people offer to lead him to the site. After single-handedly bagging more than 250 dead enemy soldiers, Anton has created something of a reputation in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region. Rather than spending time and energy searching for corpses, he can now work off referrals. Last weekend, he followed a car of soldiers down a dirt road in Tsyrkuny, a village outside of Kharkiv. At the edge of a field was a decayed...

A hail of shrapnel from kamikaze drones ripped through the tent where off-duty Ukrainian border guards were sleeping near a crossing with Belarus, three hours north of Ukraine’s capital. Viktor Derevyanko woke to scalding pain, his body burning. Blood spilled from his hand as he tried to wipe his face. A piece of metal had traveled through his arm and stomach and into the muscle around his heart. “I couldn’t get my bearings,” said Derevyanko, the deputy head of the unit. “Only on the third explosion did I manage to fall out of bed and try to find at least...

KYIV, Ukraine — A powerful attack on a Russian air base in occupied Crimea was the work of Ukrainian special forces, a Ukrainian government official told The Washington Post on Wednesday, suggesting an increasingly important role for covert forces operating deep behind enemy lines as the country expands efforts to expel Russian troops. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter, did not disclose details of how Tuesday’s attack was carried out. The attack marks a significant escalation in the nearly six-month-old war, demonstrating a new ability by...

ST. PETERSBURG —Less than two weeks from a first face-to-face with President Biden in Geneva, Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday criticized the U.S. prosecution of rioters who took part in the January attack on the Capitol, calling it an example of American "double standards."...That differed from Biden’s preview of the summit last week, when he said he would press Putin on human rights abuses such as Russia’s treatment of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny. In response, the Kremlin has attempted to draw an equivalency to the U.S. treatment of the Capitol rioters. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called it...