The Russians are spending big on infrastructure to absorb occupied Ukraine

Armies rarely measure their success by the roads they've paved or the rail lines they've laid down — but that may be the metric Russia is using in occupied portions of Ukraine, where major infrastructure projects are underway or are being planned.

Over the last few months, Moscow-based media have reported on the construction of a new railway line between Rostov-on-Don in Russia, near the Sea of Azov and the border with Ukraine, and Yakymivka, about 10 kilometres north of the Crimean peninsula.

Experts in both Europe and North America describe it, and other potential public works projects, as part of a far-reaching attempt by the Kremlin to bind the territory it has captured more closely to Russia — something to which western nations backing Ukraine need to pay close attention.

Although details are scarce, the new rail line would mainly go through occupied Ukrainian territory — the southern regions of Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia — and past the key cities of Mariupol and Melitopol.

The Russian and Ukrainian armies may be locked in a death struggle with little movement of the frontlines, but the bricks and mortar work behind those lines (and the economic consolidation that comes with it) is becoming increasingly important, said one expert.

«I think Putin can still win the war, in the post-fighting period,» said Matthew Schmidt, an expert on Eastern Europe at the University of New Haven Connecticut.

«If Ukraine doesn't become a modernized, economically stable and prosperous country, then eventually Putin can exert the kind of political control over Ukraine that he was trying to do by military means and failed to do.»

Schmidt said the consolidation underscores how «countries like Canada and the United States have to absolutely come