(CNN) — It is the fate of just one town, over a year, but provides a rare insight into Russia’s ill-fated war of choice.
The slow and costly infiltration of Kostyantynivka, key to Moscow’s advance in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas and claimed as occupied by the Russian defense ministry on July 3, lays bare the persistence of the Kremlin’s forces and the devastating casualties they will tolerate to obtain even the smallest of goals.
On July 3, the Ministry of Defense posted a series of videos of Russian troops at various points inside the town’s center, waving Russian flags, to bolster its assertion they had taken the town. The false claim – contradicted by recent videos, testimony from Ukrainian troops, and independent mapping of the frontlines – was one of several made in past months by Russia’s leaders, seeking to suggest their battlefield progress was greater than it is, to perhaps persuade their domestic audience, or counterparts in the White House, that their military campaign had not stalled.
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky swiftly seized on the falsehood, and urged Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet with him in the town to talk peace, if indeed it was under Moscow’s control.
CNN, which has reported in or near Kostyantynivka twice over the past year, has used geolocated videos and testimony, to show the horrific cost and slow pace of the Russian advances that led up to the false claim of the town’s capture. The town’s fate exposes both the dogged, relentless...
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