Fighting is now “reduced pace” while Ukrainian and Russian troops dug in for the winter

Since withdrawing from Kherson in southern Ukraine in November, Russian forces have dug in along the left bank of the Dnipro River and the intensity of the fighting has eased.

Both sides have instead focused on preparing for the frigid winter conditions.

“We’re already seeing a kind of reduced pace of conflict,” Ms. Haines told the Reagan National Defense Forum in California. “We anticipate that likely to be the case in the coming months.”

The US has accused Russia of arming the winter by bombing most of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure to undermine civilian morale, although Ms Haines said the tactic would fail.

Her analysis agrees with independent commentators, who have said that ordinary Ukrainians have hardened since February’s Russian invasion and will be able to weather a freezing winter.

As for Putin, Ms. Haines said he was surprised by the Russian army’s failure to capture Kyiv in February and the various weaknesses in his military, but that he has now improved his intelligence systems.

These failures were blamed for convincing Putin that the Ukrainian leadership would quickly collapse and its people would capitulate.

“I think he’s becoming more informed about the challenges the military faces, but it’s still not clear to us that he has a full picture of how challenged they are at this point,” she said. “We see lack of ammunition, morale, supply issues, logistics, a whole host of concerns that they face.”

Driven from the battlefields, the Russian military has increasingly resorted to firing missiles at targets in Ukraine, but Ms Haines said it has now fired so many that it is unable to replace them quickly enough .

“That’s why you effectively see them going to other countries to try and get ammunition,” she said. “We pointed out that their precision ammunition runs out much faster in many ways.”

Reports over the weekend confirmed Ms Haines’ analysis that the pace of fighting in Ukraine had slowed, with the exception of Bakhmut in Donetsk, which was almost entirely destroyed.

Britain’s Defense Ministry said that although the eastern Ukrainian city was of little strategic value to Russia, its capture had become a matter of prestige for the Kremlin.

“The campaign was disproportionately expensive,” a Defense Department spokesman said.

As Moscow bombs Ukraine’s power grid, leaving millions of homes without electricity and heating, many ordinary Russians face a bleak winter of their own as central heating repairmen have been mobilized to fight on the front lines

In Astrakhan, near Russia’s remote Caspian Sea coast, residents took to social media to complain that maintenance workers were being sent to Ukraine to grapple with an engineering unit even though they were needed to keep central heating running keep.

“We have reached out to the military registration and enlistment offices and officials and explained that the heating season is coming soon and we need people, but we never received a clear answer,” a resident told the Telegram channel We Can Explain.

The Soviet-built polluting urban power plants produce hot water and then pump it through massive pipes into apartment blocks that thaw the frozen ground they run over or under.

In Siberia, temperatures can drop to -40°C, meaning that malfunctioning heating systems can be deadly.

The Kremlin’s mobilization order in September conscripted 320,000 men into the Russian army, but three or four times as many fled abroad. This has left Russia with a labor shortage.

A survey by the Gaidar Institute in Moscow found that a third of Russian industries are now short of workers.

Plans have been made to recruit additional workers from Central Asia to fill the shortage, but until then, many households will face freezing temperatures.

It comes as Russia inflicted “colossal” damage to Ukraine’s power grid, officials said, leading to rolling power outages that could last into March.