With its ground troops forced to pull back in Ukraine and regroup, and its Black Sea flagship sunk, Russia’s military failings are mounting. No country is paying closer attention than China to how a smaller and outgunned force has badly bloodied what was thought to be one of the world’s most powerful armies. China, like Russia, has been ambitiously reforming its Soviet-style military and experts say leader Xi Jinping will be carefully parsing the weaknesses exposed by the invasion of Ukraine as they might apply to his own People’s Liberation Army and his designs on the self-governed island of Taiwan. “The big question Xi and the PLA leadership must be asking in light of Russian operations in Ukraine is whether a military that has undergone extensive reform and modernization will be able to execute operations that are far more complex than those Russia has undertaken during its invasion of Ukraine,” said M. Taylor Fravel, director of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Russia’s armed forces have undergone an extensive process of reform and investment for more than a decade, with lessons learned in combat in Georgia, Chechnya, Syria and its annexation of Crimea helping guide the process. The Ukrainian invasion, however, has exposed weaknesses from the top down. Experts have been collectively stunned that Russia invaded Ukraine with seemingly little preparation and lack of focus — a campaign along multiple, poorly-coordinated axes that has failed to effectively combine air and land operations. Soldiers have been running out of food, and vehicles have been breaking down. With losses mounting, Moscow has pulled its bloodied forces away from the capital, Kyiv, to regroup. Last week, the guided-missile cruiser Moskva sank after Ukraine said it hit the ship with missiles; Russia blamed the sinking on a fire on board. “It’s very hard to see success at any level in the way that Russia has prosecuted the campaign,” said Euan Graham, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies based in Singapore. Also Read: China-renews calls for peace talks to end Russia-Ukraine war President Vladimir Putin, who has been closely involved in Russia’s military reform, did not even appoint an overall commander for the operation until about a week ago, apparently expecting a quick victory and grossly misjudging Ukrainian resistance, Graham said. “It’s a very personal war on his part,” Graham said. “And I think the expectation that this would be a cakewalk is obviously the biggest single failure.” Putin’s decisions raise the question of whether he was given accurate assessments of the progress of military reform and Ukrainian abilities, or was just told what he wanted to hear. Xi, also an authoritarian leader who has taken a personal role in China’s military reform, could now be wondering the same, Fravel said. “Xi specifically may also wonder whether he is receiving accurate reports about the PLA’s likely effectiveness in a high intensity conflict,” he said. China has had no recent major conflict by which to gauge its military prowess, having fought its last significant engagement in 1979 against Vietnam, said David Chen, a senior consultant with CENTRA Technology, a U.S.-based government services firm. “The wakeup call for (China’s) Central Military Commission is that there are more unknown factors involved in any such campaign than they may have anticipated,” Chen said. “Russia’s experience in Ukraine has shown that what may seem plausible on paper at the Academy of Military Science or National Defense University becomes much more complicated in the real world.” Xi, the son of a revolutionary commander who spent time in uniform himself, began undertaking military reforms in 2015, three years after assuming leadership of the Central Military Commission. Total troop strength was reduced by 300,000 to just under 2 million, the number of officers cut by a third and a greater emphasis given to non-commissioned officers to lead in the field. China’s military has a tradition of respect for initiative from lower-ranking soldiers dating from its revolutionary origins, said Yue Gang, a Beijing-based military analyst. By contrast, Russian forces in Ukraine have shown weaknesses where decisions have had to be made on the front lines, he said. “Chinese soldiers are encouraged to put forward their thoughts and views when discussing how to fight,” Yue said. China’s seven military districts have been reorganized into five theater commands, the number of group armies reduced and the logistics system reorganized to boost efficiency. The ratio of support to combat units was increased and a greater emphasis placed on more mobile and amphibious units. Xi has also sought to end rampant corruption in the military, going after two former top generals shortly after taking power. One was sentenced to life in prison and the other died before his case was concluded. China’s military is highly opaque and outside the purview of civilian judges and corruption investigators, so it’s difficult to know how thoroughly the organization has been exorcised of practices such as the selling of commissions and kickbacks on defense contracts. For Xi, the military’s primary mission remains to protect the ruling Communist Party, and he has followed his predecessors in fighting back hard against efforts to have the military shift its ultimate loyalty to the nation. Xi’s overriding political focus could mean the lessons he draws from the Ukraine conflict are off base, Graham said. “Xi Jinping will always apply a political solution because he’s not a military specialist or an economic specialist,” Graham said. “I think the military lessons have to go through a political filter, so I’m not sure that China will take the lessons that are abundant and on show for everyone to see.” The stated goal of China’s military reform is to “fight and win wars” against a “strong enemy” — a euphemism widely understood to refer to the United States. China has pumped huge amounts of money into new equipment, has initiated more realistic training exercises with force-on-force scenarios, and sought to reform its fighting doctrine by studying American engagements in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kosovo. Gen. David Berger, the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, said in a forum in Australia last week that Beijing would be watching the Ukraine conflict closely. Also Read: Russia hits Ukrainian cities pours more troops into war “I don’t know what lessons they will learn but ... they’re focused on learning, without a doubt, because they’ve been doing that for the last 15 years,” he said. Berger stressed the need for strong coalitions in the Pacific as a way to keep China’s ambitions toward Taiwan in check. China claims Taiwan as its own, and controlling the island is a key component of Beijing’s political and military thinking. In October, Xi again reiterated that “reunification of the nation must be realized, and will definitely be realized.” Washington’s longstanding policy has been to provide political and military support for Taiwan, while not explicitly promising to defend it from a Chinese attack. Like Putin’s assessment of Ukraine, Xi’s China does not appear to believe that Taiwan would try to put up much of a fight. Beijing routinely blames its problems with the island on a small group of hardcore independence advocates and their American supporters.The entirely state-controlled Chinese media, meanwhile, draws on the imagined narrative that Taiwan would not willingly go to battle against what it describes as their fellow Chinese. Now, the quick response by many nations to impose tough, coordinated sanctions on Russia after its attack on Ukraine, and the willingness to supply Ukraine with high-tech weaponry could make Xi rethink his approach to Taiwan, Fravel said. With “the rapid response by advanced industrialized states, and the unity they have demonstrated, Xi is likely to be more cautious over Taiwan and less emboldened,” he said. Conversely, the Ukraine experience could prompt China to accelerate its timetable on Taiwan with a more limited attack, such as seizing an outlying island, as a real-world test of its own military, Chen said. “A sensible course would be to mature the PLA’s joint institutions and procedures through ever more rigorous exercises,” Chen said. “But as the world has witnessed, a central leader with a specific ambition and a shortening timeline may short-circuit the process in reckless fashion.”  

The battered port city of Mariupol appeared on the brink of falling to Russian forces Sunday after seven weeks under siege, a development that what would give Moscow a crucial success in Ukraine following Russia's failure to storm the capital and the loss of its Black Sea flagship. The Russian military estimated that about 2,500 Ukrainian fighters holding out at a hulking steel plant with a warren of underground passageways provided the last pocket of resistance in Mariupol. Russia gave a deadline for their surrender, saying those who put down their weapons were “guaranteed to keep their lives,” but the Ukrainians did not submit. Also read:Russia strikes Ukraine's big cities, bears down on Mariupol "All those who will continue resistance will be destroyed,” Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov, the Russian Defense Ministry's spokesman, said. He said intercepted communications indicated there were about 400 foreign mercenaries along with the Ukrainian troops at the Azovstal steel mill, a claim that couldn’t be independently verified. Seizing Mariupol would free up Russian forces to weaken and encircle Ukrainian soldiers forces in eastern Ukraine, where Russia has focused its war aims for now and is deploying personnel and equipment withdrawn from the north after a botched attempt to take Kyiv. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar described Mariupol as a “shield defending Ukraine” as Russian troops prepare for a full-scale offensive in Donbas, the country’s eastern industrial heartland where Moscow-backed separatists already control some territory. In a reminder that no part of Ukraine was immune until the war ends, Russian forces carried out new missile strikes Sunday near Kyiv and elsewhere in an apparent effort to weaken Ukraine’s military capacity before the anticipated assault in the east. After the humiliating loss of the flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, Russia’s military command vowed Friday to step up missile strikes on the capital. The Russian military said Sunday that it had attacked an ammunition plant near Kyiv overnight with precision-guided missiles, the third such strike in as many days. Russia renewed attacks on Kyiv after accusing Ukrainian forces of airstrikes on Russian territory that wounded seven people and damaged about 100 residential buildings in Bryansk, a region bordering Ukraine. Ukrainian officials have not confirmed hitting targets in Russia. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said a Saturday strike on what Russia’s Defense Ministry identified as an armored vehicle plant killed one person and wounded several. He advised residents who fled the city earlier in the war not to return. The Russian military also claimed Sunday to have destroyed Ukrainian air defense radars in the east, near Sievierodonetsk, as well as several ammunition depots elsewhere. Explosions were reported overnight in Kramatorsk, an eastern city where rockets killed at least 57 people at a train station crowded with civilians trying to evacuate before the expected Russian offensive. The ongoing siege and relentless bombardment of Mariupol has come at a terrible cost, with officials estimating Russians had killed at least 21,000 people. Just 120,000 people remain in the city, out of a prewar population of 450,000. Malyar, the deputy defense minister, said the Russians have continued to hit Mariupol with airstrikes and could be getting ready for an amphibious landing to beef up their ground forces. Capturing the city with a land area about half the size of Hong Kong’s would mark Russia's first palpable success after two months of fighting and help reassure the Russian public amid the worsening economic situation from Western sanctions. It would allow Russia to secure a land corridor to the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014, and deprive Ukraine of a major port and prized industrial assets. Mariupol's seizure also would make more troops available for a new offensive in the east, which if successful, would give Russian President Vladimir Putin a position of strength from which to pressure Ukraine into making concessions. So far, tunnels at the sprawling Azovstal steel mill, which covers an area of more than 11 square kilometers (over 4.2 square miles), have allowed the defenders to hide and resist until they run out of ammunition. With Russia apparently poised to declare victory, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the city’s fall could scuttle any attempt at a negotiated peace. “The destruction of all our guys in Mariupol — what they are doing now — can put an end to any format of negotiations,” Zelenskyy said in an interview with Ukrainian journalists. In his nightly address to the nation, Zelenskyy called on the West to send more heavy weapons immediately if there is any chance of saving the city, adding Russia “is deliberately trying to destroy everyone who is there.” Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer, who met with Putin in Moscow this week — the first European leader to do so since the invasion began Feb. 24 — said the Russian president is “in his own war logic” on Ukraine. In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Nehammer said he thinks Putin believes he is winning the war and “we have to look in his eyes and we have to confront him with that, what we see in Ukraine.’’ Italian Premier Mario Draghi called Ukraine’s continued resistance to Russia’s invasion “heroic,” depriving Russia of what it had expected to be a speedy victory. “What awaits us is a war of resistance, prolonged violence with destruction that will continue,'' Draghi told Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera in an interview published Sunday. "There is no sign that the Ukraine population can accept a Russian occupation.” Also read:Russia renews strikes on Ukraine capital, hits other cities Like Mariupol, the northeast city of Kharkiv has been an ongoing target of Russian aggression since the early days of the invasion and has seen conditions deteriorate ahead of the eastern offensive. Multiple rockets struck the center of the Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, on Sunday, according to Associated Press journalists who were there. At least two people were killed and four others were injured, though the scale of the attack suggested the toll could rise. The barrage slammed into apartment buildings and left broken glass, debris and the part of at least one rocket scattered on the street. Firefighters and residents scrambled to douse flames in several apartments that caught fire. On Saturday, three people were killed and 34 wounded when an explosion believed to have been caused by a missile went off near an outdoor market, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said. Local officials said 10 people died in rocket attacks on residential areas of Kharkiv on Friday. Nate Mook, a member of the World Central Kitchen NGO run by celebrity chef José Andrés, said in a tweet that four workers in Kharkiv were wounded by a strike. Andrés tweeted that staff members were unnerved but safe. Zelenskyy estimated that 2,500 to 3,000 Ukrainian troops have died in the war, and about 10,000 have been wounded. The office of Ukraine’s prosecutor general said Saturday that at least 200 children have been killed, and more than 360 wounded. Despite the war still raging, Zelenskyy spoke in his nightly address about Ukraine's plans for a memorial to honor the dead and the sacrifices of the Ukrainian people. One proposal is to tell the story of the destroyed bridge near the capital that people used to escape, “to remind all generations of our people of the brutal and senseless invasion Ukraine has been able to fend off,'' he said. Pope Francis made an anguished Easter Sunday plea for peace in the “senseless” war in Ukraine. “May there be peace for war-torn Ukraine, so sorely tried by the violence and destruction of this cruel and senseless war into which it was dragged,” Francis said, without mentioning Putin's decision to invade Ukraine on Feb. 24. “Please, please, let us not get used to war,″ Francis pleaded.