The Kremlin is already planning for an offensive next spring — and tightening grip on the area they call New Russia.
At the start of this year, on the Orthodox Christmas Eve, Russian engineers working in occupied Ukraine received an unwanted present.
Four months earlier, in September, they had begun building a railway bridge over the Kalmius river, about 35 miles north of the port city of Mariupol. On January 6 Kyiv’s forces bombarded and destroyed it.
The attack, near a little village called Hranitne, received little attention. But in staging it, the Ukrainians were trying to stop a new front that President Putin has opened in his war against their country.
Over the past year Russia has embarked on a huge railway building programme that aims to link Crimea through the territories it has seized from Ukraine since it invaded in February 2022 with Donetsk, the largest city in Donbas, and with Rostov-on-Don, a major regional hub just over the border in Russia.
“The railway is an element in Russia’s logistical preparations for their anticipated strategic offensive in spring 2025,” said Michael Clarke, former director and now distinguished fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.
Crimea has been the main base for the Kremlin’s military operations in southern Ukraine, but the bridge linking the eastern side of the peninsula to the Russian mainland is vulnerable to attack from the Ukrainians, even if Putin’s forces are increasingly thwarting their efforts.
The new rail link, which hugs the north coast of the Sea of Azov, will be easier to defend and add capacity. “This rail line is a way to make Crimea a bit less vulnerable,” Clarke added. “If the bridge gets cut, you put more on the new rail line.” It will also speed up the transit time for supplies to and from the peninsula.
Longer term, however, the new line appears further proof of Putin’s “imperial project” — to hold on permanently to a swathe of eastern Ukraine now referred to in Kremlin propaganda as Novorossiya (New Russia), a term that was coined in 1764 after the area was seized by Catherine the Great but which disappeared from maps during the Soviet era.
As a sign of his intent, Mikhail Mishustin, Putin’s prime minister, signed a decree last May establishing a new entity, Railways of Novorossiya, which merged train operations in Donetsk and Luhansk, which the Russians have occupied since 2014, with territory more recently occupied in neighbouring Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
The link, built out of a mix of new and existing track, runs south of existing lines, deeper into Russian occupied territory, with logistical hubs in Volnovakha, Mariupol, Berdyansk and Melitopol. Yevgeny Balitsky, head of the Zaporizhzhia region, said last month that even a single track with diesel trains would be enough to solve the Russian military’s problems.
During a rally in Red Square on March 18, to celebrate his re-election as president and to mark the tenth anniversary of Russia’s seizure of Crimea, Putin announced that a section from Rostov-on-Don through Mariupol to Berdyansk — about 150 miles long — had been completed.
“We will continue this work, and soon trains will ride all the way to Crimea, and this will be another alternative route, in addition to the Crimean bridge,” he said. The peninsula nevertheless lies a further 200 miles along the coast to the southwest.
The Ukrainians are clearly concerned about the implications of the new line, which its military intelligence service has described as a “serious challenge” and “an important target” for their armed forces. The new line “is almost complete, and it could pose a serious problem for us”, Kyrylo Budanov, the service’s chief, told Ukrainian state television last month.
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ILLUSTRATION BY RUSSEL HERNEMAN
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