Battle For The Donbas: Russia Hits Ukraine Railway Stations To Disrupt Western Arms Shipments

Russia has launched airstrikes at five railway stations in Ukraine, in a bid to disrupt arms supplies from the West. This comes hours after Moscow warned U.S. and allies against supplying arms to Ukraine, warning that these deliveries were inflaming the conflict.

According to Ukraine’s military command, Russia was trying to bomb rail infrastructure to disrupt arms supplies from foreign countries. “They are trying to destroy the supply routes of military-technical assistance from partner states. To do this, they focus strikes on railway junctions,” it wrote in a Facebook post.

Despite that, the flow of weapons and artillery, including tanks and armored vehicles, began arriving in Ukraine as Russia launches a full-scale assault on Donbas. The U.S. secretaries of State and Defense promised Kyiv hundreds of millions more in military aid for the coming fight.

"We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine," Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters in Poland Monday. "It had already lost a lot of military capability and a lot of its troops, quite frankly, and we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability," Austin was quoted by Politico.

Last week, the US. approved another $800 million weapons package which includes 72 155mm howitzers, 72 armored vehicles to tow them, 144,000 rounds of ammunition, and 121 "Phoenix Ghost" tactical drones recently developed by the US Air Force specifically to address Ukraine's needs. The howitzers have already reached Ukraine at an "unimaginable speed."

But, Russia's bombing of the railway facility has made protecting supply crucial. "The fight for Donbas will be won or lost primarily on logistics: weapons, equipment and ammunition. There have to be uninterrupted supply lines from the U.S. and NATO," Mick Mulroy, a former top Pentagon official and retired CIA paramilitary officer and Marine, told Politico.

The flow of weapons to the war-torn country has put Ukraine on an equal footing with Russia. "Ukraine is taking in “a lot of new Western new equipment, maybe more than the Russians have been capable of moving into the country themselves, so the imbalance in equipment that we saw in the early phases of the war is starting to equalize,” said Dmitry Gorenburg, a Russia specialist at nonprofit research institute CNA, told the news outlet.

But, evading Russia's radar while moving the artillery over the Polish border won't be easy. But, this too is a challenge for Russia as they are wary of testing Ukraine’s air defenses

"[Russia’s] stockpiles aren’t necessarily large when it comes to weapons such as Kalibr and Iskander precision missiles. They are using them up, and they don’t want to use them all because that would weaken their ability to fight NATO in the near future," Gorenburg said.