It's been a month since Russian troops invaded Ukraine, and despite making some rapid early gains, their advancement on some key cities, including the capital of Kyiv, has slowed.
While there's a growing picture that Russia's assault on Ukraine has not gone to plan, the country continues to use its air power to obliterate cities and target civilians to push Ukraine into submission.
So where is this war going? Here are a few things to watch out for in the coming weeks.
Russia could intensify its bombing campaign
Experts are warning that the more Russia takes a hit on the ground, the more likely it is to intensify its aerial bombing campaign and the use of other "standoff" weapons that put Russian soldiers in less danger.
There is little reliable information coming out of either Ukraine or Russia on death tolls, but a report in a Russian tabloid on Monday suggested that the Russian side had lost nearly 10,000 soldiers and that another 16,000 had been injured.
The Komsomolskaya Pravda website removed the numbers later in the day, claiming the numbers only appeared in the first place because it had been hacked. CNN could not verify the numbers, but the death toll is closer to what US intelligence agencies have been reporting.
And in the region of southern Mykolaiv, local authorities are mulling what do with hundreds of Russian corpses.
Such losses, if proven to be true, would explain both the stall in ground movement and the uptick in aerial bombing of key cities and other standoff attacks. A senior US defense official, for example, said Russia has begun firing on the southern city of Mariupol from ships in the Sea of Azov.
"Russia still has capabilities and reserves, and there's going to be an uptick in intensity as it makes an effort to bring in more troops," Jeffrey Mankoff, a distinguished research fellow at the US National Defense University's Institute for National Strategic Studies, told CNN.
Russia may try to encircle Ukrainian fighters in the east
There is a lot of talk about the Russian war effort stalling, but whether or not that's true comes down to what Moscow's objectives were in the first place. And even that's hard to know for sure, as the country's public justification for its invasion is clear propaganda, as evidenced by Russian President Vladimir Putin's call for the "denazification of Ukraine," for example.
It's likely that Russia is, at the very least, trying to absorb parts of eastern Ukraine. Areas like Donetsk and Luhansk, which make up the Donbas region, have been controlled by Russian-backed separatists since 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea, and while Russia's ambitions may stretch beyond Donbas, it's still likely a central focus, experts say.
While there is a lot of attention on Russia's push toward Kyiv, most of the Ukrainian army remains near Donetsk and Luhansk, where they are grouped as the Joint Forces Operation. The movement of Russian troops suggest they are trying to encircle the JFO on three axes, and this is likely to be Russia's main focus. That's clear by looking at the sophistication of the kind of troops being sent there, said Sam Cranny-Evans, a research analyst with the Royal United Services Institute.
"The Southern Military District — in Donetsk, Luhansk, Mariupol, Berdyansk, Melitopol — these are the best troops in the Russian army. And they always work. They're designed to fight NATO," Cranny-Evans told CNN.
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