Tonight, Russia is celebrating after a major win on the battlefield in Ukraine. New video from the key town of Avdiivka shows Russian troops raising their country's flag just hours after Ukrainian forces were forced to retreat there. The Eastern town in the Donetsk region has been the focus of intense battles between Ukrainian and Russian forces over the last decade. The defeat comes as Ukraine's forces battle a larger and better equipped Russian military with multiple towns along the front lines now in danger of falling. You can see it right there. Let's turn to our panel of experts now. Cnn Global Affairs Correspondent Analyst Kimberly Dozier and CNN contributor and former CNN Moscow Bureau Chief, Jill Doherty. Kim, let me start with you. We were just showing this map a few moments ago. What is the significance of this city falling to Russian forces, and what might be in store next?

Well, the city is pretty much leveled, according to reports from there. So they're not gaining much in terms of a town where they can win the hearts and minds, but it will make it easier for them to supply the Donbas region, according to Ukrainian military officials. But the general who's now in charge of Ukraine, he was the guy who took so much criticism for holding on to Bahmut for so long at such great cost in troops's lives. Right now, he's gone into conservation mode, both of ammunition and of those precious boots on the ground. Ukraine is talking about bringing in something like half a million new soldiers to replace losses. And so he's got to play it carefully, play it more safely. And that meant giving up Abdiivka and sending a message to the West that their lack of aid is hurting already.

Yeah. I mean, Jill, is this the moment Putin has been waiting for? I mean, for so long, as we all have been talking about what's been going on in Ukraine, we've been talking about one embarrassing loss after another for Vladimir Putin in Russia. The tide is starting to turn at a critical moment, and the US is just not there helping the Ukrainians right now.

Yeah. I mean, I think Vladimir Putin is emboldened. There's no question. Avdiivka is not, as Kim was saying, it's not an important town, even in the long range significance of this. But Putin now looks at Ukraine. The Ukrainians are running, literally running a lot of ammunition. He looks at the political field within his own country. He's up for re-election in less than a month, and his main political opponent is out of the way, dead. Then he looks at the US Congress, which is continuing with a small group of people stopping it not to be able to give the financial help that the Ukrainians need. At this point, I think, and judging by the video that we saw a couple of days ago, he's looking pretty happy and again, pretty emboldened.

And, Kim, we know that the Europeans have stepped up. And I'm just curious, might that be able to put a bandaid on this until the US and the Congress gets its act together? Or are we reaching potentially a very dire moment for the Ukrainians? What's your sense of it?

Well, here's the problem. Yes, the Europeans have stepped up. Ukraine is minting deals one-on-one with individual countries, Germany, France, the Baltic Nations, all pledging amounts of support. The problem is it takes them more than a year in France, more than a year in Germany, to turn around 155 millimeter artillery shells, one of the main things that are needed on the battlefield. And the US can turn them out faster and has more supplies of them waiting in the warehouses that can still be sent over. So that's why US support is so crucial. The US still has the lion's share of the supplies that are available right now. But without money budgeted by Congress, the Pentagon can't send them to Keith.

Yeah, and just to follow up on that, Kim, I mean, help a guy like me or for the viewers out there who just aren't following this day by day and understand the minutiae of it, what happened to the talk of the tanks? What happened to the talk of the F-16s and the Training of the pilots. Are those things just not happening? Is it just not happening fast enough?

Some of the training is still going on, but those are all things where they were always going to take months, if not more than a year, for instance, for the F-16 pilot training to have a result on the battlefield. Those are the strategic things that would have helped if Zelensky had them early on, when Russia was still unprepared and they could have had some massive victories on the battlefield. But the problem now is Russia has secured its supply lines, and Russia has secured its numbers of troops going in. Russia is four times the size of Ukraine, so it can just keep pouring the bodies in, something Ukraine can't afford to do. And technology was supposed to make up for that disadvantage.

And, Jill, I do want to talk about the death of Alexei Navalny. I mean, all weekend long, we've been seeing these arrests taking place in Russia. I mean, I keep coming back to this image, and I'm not trying to put the control room on the spot, of Russian police shoving this man's face in the snow just for coming out and trying to observe the death of this very popular opposition figure in Russia. Here it is. We're showing it to our viewers right now. They've been detaining people yet again in Russia simply for trying... It's astonishing to see this, and the Russians just get away with it, and this is Putin's Russia now. He's in total control.

Yeah, those pictures are really shocking. The latest figures that I saw, there are approximately, I think it was about 360, 366 people who've been arrested all across the country. And they're not even protests. These are people who are coming out, for the most part, with flowers and laying them in various places. And in some cases, the police just simply arrest them, detain them, but they're taking photographs, they're taking fingerprints. And in other cases, they have groups of civilian dressed people who come in and grab the flowers. It's really just a horrible thing to watch. So I think the people who are doing this are extraordinarily brave, because we already know that if they oppose the war and they were to come out on the streets, they would be in prison very quickly. So even to do this has to... You have to have bravery to do that. And I'll tell you, Jim, I've been looking at the social media, and there's a lot of anger expressed by those these Russians who are saying, Whose streets are these anyway? They're ours. So this is a mood that I think the Kremlin might be worried about.

Yeah, I just have to wonder, we're watching these images here in the United States. Do the Russians themselves, do the Russian people get to see these images and absorb what they're witnessing? Putin, once again, clamping down in this fashion. Just for people wanting to observe the loss of this very charismatic figure.

Well, Jim, if they have VPNs, they can. And some of this is on their phones. So there are ways of seeing this, no question, because the Russians are the ones who are posting it. So they're getting the message. It's the question of what can they do about it.

All right, Kim and Jill, thank you so much. A very troubling weekend on this beat. Thanks a lot for your time.