The Russian military has continued its unsuccessful attempts to encircle Kyiv and capture Kharkiv. The Russians continued to attack piecemeal, committing a few battalion tactical groups at a time rather than concentrating overwhelming force to achieve decisive effects. Russian commanders appear to prefer opening up new lines of advance for regiment-sized operations but have been unable to achieve meaningful synergies between efforts along different axes toward the same objectives. They have also continued conducting operations in southern Ukraine along three diverging axes rather than concentrating on one or attempting mutually supporting efforts. These failures of basic operational art—long a strong suit of the Soviet military and heavily studied at Russian military academies—remain inexplicable as does the Russian military’s failure to gain air superiority or at least to ground the Ukrainian Air Force. The Russian conventional military continues to underperform badly, although it may still wear down and defeat the conventional Ukrainian military by sheer force of numbers and brutality. Initial indications that Russia is mobilizing reinforcements from as far away as the Pacific Ocean are concerning in this respect. Those indications also suggest, however, that the Russian General Staff has concluded that the forces it initially concentrated for the invasion of Ukraine will be insufficient to achieve Moscow’s military objectives.
Russian forces opened a new line of advance from Belarus south toward Zhytomyr Oblast, west of Kyiv, as Russian forces attempting to encircle Kyiv from the northwest were driven further west by determined Ukrainian resistance and counterattacks. Russian forces will struggle to complete an encirclement of Kyiv at all if they have to advance along ring roads as far from the city center as those they are now using.
The Ukrainian military indicates that a regiment-sized Russian formation will try to envelop or bypass Kharkiv in the coming days.
Russia has not achieved air superiority over Ukraine as of March 3. The Ukrainian Air Force continues operating a week after the invasion began, with the Ukrainian General Staff reporting that Ukrainian Su-24s and Su-25s conducted airstrikes in Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv, and Kharkiv oblasts in the last 24 hours.
The Ukrainian General Staff additionally published photos on March 2 of a Russian plan Ukrainian forces captured from a battalion of the Black Sea Fleet’s 810th Naval Infantry Brigade.[34] The plans stated that Putin authorized a Russian invasion of Ukraine on January 18, planned at that time to run from February 20 to March 6. The BTG reportedly planned to conduct an amphibious landing at Stepanovka, on the Sea of Azov, before operating with elements of the 58th CAA and 117th Naval Infantry Regiment to surround and seize Melitopol. No such landing occurred.
The mayor of Kherson confirmed that no Ukrainian forces remain in the city and that "for the Ukrainian flag to continue flying over us" he negotiated several conditions with Russian forces, including a strict curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. and forbidding civilians from walking in groups larger than two or confronting Russian forces.