ODESSA, UKRAINE — Vladimir Putin is taking full advantage of the expanding war in the Middle East to launch a major offensive in Ukraine, coordinating ground assaults along the front with missile and drone strikes against main cities, as the world takes little notice and the Biden administration fights Congress over which appropriations bill should include urgently needed aid for Kyiv.

The port of Odessa came under renewed attack this week, following a period of relative calm in which it was believed that the Russian fleet had been chased out of the Black Sea. Hypersonic missiles that allow virtually no lead time for air raid warnings or AAA batteries to train sites hit several targets along the sea front, including a grain storage complex and loading docks about a kilometer from my hotel.

The orange glow from explosions lit up nearby buildings amid the crossfire of tracer rounds directed against low-flying Shahed drones as a warehouse went up in smoke on Sunday night. Missiles hit Odessa’s national museum in the historic city center and seriously damaged a Liberian-flagged cargo ship entering the port, killing at least one member of the crew.

About 500 miles away in Donetsk, a Ukrainian soldier was telling Reuters that Russian artillery fire hadn’t been so intense since last year. The latest attacks had started about a month ago, around the first week of October, he said. According to Western intelligence reports, North Korea has supplied about 1 million artillery rounds for Russia’s offensive, replenishing stocks depleted in fighting Ukraine’s “counter-offensive” last summer. The new alliance between Putin and Kim Jong Un was sealed at a meeting in Vladivostok in September, when the preparations for current operations were also laid out in concert with Iran, which has similarly merged sectors in its defense industry with Russia’s.

Just as Israel’s war on Hamas heated up in Gaza, an army that has been notably slow to mobilize and adapt to changing battlefield conditions had several brigades readily deployed and ready to launch human wave assaults against well-entrenched Ukrainian positions in Avdiivka in central Donetsk. Russian attacks were simultaneously launched in Bakhmut to counter Ukrainian attempts to encircle the city that Russia captured last winter at the cost of 50,000 lives; against Kupyansk, a northeastern city liberated by Ukraine a year ago; and in Verbove, the “elbow” connecting the eastern and southern sectors of Ukraine’s front line.

Ukrainian military analysts interpret Russia’s moves as attempts to “reconsolidate” positions in parts of the front left exposed or weakened by Ukraine’s summer offensive. They talk of a “new phase” of “positional warfare,” as defined by Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, in a recent essay.

Capturing Avdiivka — the main target of Russia’s new offensive, during which it has already lost hundreds of tanks, and possibly thousands of men, in what Russian military bloggers are starting to call “Bakhmut 2.0” — would significantly strengthen Russia’s frail logistical lines by gaining it control of the town’s key railway crossing.

But Russia’s current offensive can’t be interpreted in purely tactical terms. War refugees are starting to pour into Odessa from neighboring Kherson, which straddles the Dnieper River. Russia withdrew from the western side of the river a year ago and began intense shelling of mostly civilian areas some weeks ago.

According to Ukraine’s interior ministry, Kherson was targeted with 87 guided aerial bombs on Sunday, the largest number to hit the region since the war began. The main targets were apartment blocks and houses. “I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, there were only explosions,” said one elderly woman at a refugee center told The American Spectator.

Ukrainian authorities can’t explain Russia’s sudden interest in Kherson. There is little of strategic significance there. Ukrainian marines conducting deep reconnaissance operations along the Russian-controlled east bank of the Dnieper don’t report observing the type of preparations or troop concentrations that would normally precede a major land offensive, which, in Kherson, would involve complex and risky river crossings.

“The only discernible reason for the intensifying bombardment is to punish and cause suffering to the civilian population,” says one military spokesman, who explained that that the marines are starting to land armored vehicles to attack Russian artillery and mortar positions that lack infantry and tank protection, with most such units being deployed in Avdiivka.

Kherson could well be a prelude to what awaits the rest of Ukraine this winter, when the world will be too busy condemning Israel’s efforts to eliminate Russia’s genocidal terrorist ally, Hamas, to spare much indignation for the Kremlin. South Africa and other countries that have recalled their diplomats from Tel Aviv are announcing no such measures regarding Moscow.

According to Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR), Russia is waiting for temperatures to drop below zero to unleash a new campaign of massive bombardments against Ukraine’s energy grid, similar to last winter. But this year, Russia has a more plentiful supply of precision-guided missiles, strike drones, and loitering munitions to hurl at Ukraine. Much of the $61.4 billion package that the Pentagon has before Congress is for defensive purposes.

Ukraine is developing a significant and innovative domestic arms industry, producing a variety of high-tech wonder weapons, such as sea drones, with ranges of up to 800 miles. These have broken Russian naval attempts to blockade its sea ports and allowed the country to resume grain exports, which have been nearing 50 percent of prewar levels.

But only the U.S. can guarantee a steady supply of missiles for Patriot, NASSAM, Hawk, and other air defense systems on which Ukraine will increasingly depend to counter Onyx, Iskander, Kinzhal, and other hypersonic missiles that Russia is producing in ever greater volume.

Reports circulated this week that the much-awaited American F-16 fighter jets were starting to arrive by ground transport in disassembled parts to avoid detection and facilitate their basing at secret locations. Some are going to neighboring Romania, where Ukrainian pilots will undergo training.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu warned that Russia’s latest Su-34 and Su-35 fighters will “knock the F-16s out of the sky in 20 days.” The main F-16 donors, Denmark and the Netherlands, have promised to deliver 40 of them.

Retired army Col. Igor Kozyi, who served as Ukraine’s representative on NATO’s planning staff, says that the F-16s are essential to counter Russian air superiority but worries that it may be too little too late. “They would have provided excellent weapons platforms to target Russian fortifications and rear positions to support our counteroffensive this summer,” he told The American Spectator.

Sophisticated demining equipment that would have proved critical some months back has also just started arriving, such as a system mounted on the Abrams tank chassis capable of clearing wide paths through the thick mine fields that have been the Ukrainian army’s main impediment to breaching Russian defenses. Thousands of Ukrainian lives were expended in manual mine clearings to penetrate the first line of Russian trenches in Robotyne last summer.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has complained about an apparent “disconnect” between Ukrainian battlefield requirements and NATO timetables. The Biden administration’s current refusal to peg aid for Kyiv to a Republican-sponsored bill appropriating funds for U.S. border protection is sadly indicative that a president who got the U.S. routed from Afghanistan and stumbled into two wars could now be driving toward another disaster in Ukraine.