From Donbass to Zaporizhzhia: Putin’s goals and the Ukrainian counter-offensive

In the late 1920s, the German writer Erich Paul Remarque delivered the sense and dimension of the 1914-1918 trench warfare atrocity to a historical novel – Nothing new on the Western front – destined to enter the collective imagination of subsequent generations who had not experienced that war. The war that is fought in Donbass between Russians and Ukrainians of that atrocious fixity shares the stakes of advancing or retreating a few kilometers, the physical and psychological dimension of the trench, but is fought with deadly modern weapons that allow to tear apart the enemy tens of kilometers away without even hearing their screams.