The ukrainian troops They seek to advance inch by inch on the southern front in an attempt to get more results before the arrival of bad weather, while the Russian Army accumulates more than 420,000 troops on the ground to stop the Ukrainian counteroffensive.
“What we need is to recover our land,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in an interview with CNN.
Zelensky’s statements come amid reports of progress by Ukrainian forces in the direction of Novoprokopivka, west of Verbove and south of Robotine, a triangle of key villages for the future access of Kiev forces to Tokmak, important railway junction in the south.
“Ukraine will not turn back, it will not leave its own land. We will never do it,” added Zelensky, who reiterated that the war will be long because a frozen conflict does not equal peace.
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Why is the counteroffensive slowing down?
The Ukrainian president admitted the slowdown of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which explained by Russia’s air superiority and the slowness in the delivery of Western weapons.
“Some things are on the way. Many people say the counteroffensive is too slow, but some things are on the way,” he insisted.
In this sense, He assured that he will speak again with American partners about the need to supply kyiv with long-range missiles ATACMS, which it hopes to receive already this fall.
In any case, the war will not have a happy ending, Zelensky said.
“This is not a movie that lasts an hour and a half. (…) There will be no ‘happy ending’. We have lost a lot of people,” he said.
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Meanwhile, the Deputy Minister of Defense of Ukraine, Hanna Maliar, announced that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has managed to recover 4.8 kilometers in the last week of territory in the southwest of Donetsk and neighboring Zaporizhzhia.
Maliar explained that with the recovery of that territory, the Ukrainian forces that attack in these two segments of the front They have liberated a total of 256.5 kilometers since Ukraine began its counteroffensive at the beginning of last June.
(Also: Ukraine admits that Russian air superiority ‘slows down’ its army’s counteroffensive)
Meanwhile, Ukrainian military intelligence (GUR) announced this Monday that it had regained control of four oil and gas extraction platforms near the coast of the annexed Crimean peninsula.
The so-called “Boiko towers” were in the hands of the Russians since 2015, according to kyiv, where they claimed to be closer to recovering the peninsula with this new operation in the Black Sea.
Why can the weather affect the counteroffensive?
Given the opinion of senior US officials that Ukraine has between 30 and 45 days to push its counteroffensive before weather conditions worsen, The head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Kirilo Budánov, assured that bad weather will not prevent Kiev from continuing with its plans.
“In the fall of last year the war actions did not stop. This year it will be the same,” he asserted and promised that the offensive “in all directions will continue.”
The American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) also wrote in its daily report that “cold and wet weather will affect” actions in the war.
“Seasonally heavy rains and intense mud in late autumn will slow land movements on both sides, and low temperatures impose a variety of logistical challenges,” the ISW said.
The institute, however, clarified that “while climate considerations will affect Ukrainian counteroffensive operations, they will not impose a definitive end to them.”
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Russia, for its part, would have concentrated nearly 420,000 soldiers in the occupied territories to stop Kiev. and launch an offensive of its own, according to Ukrainian sources.
Moscow thus seeks to take “revenge” and recover part of the territories liberated by Ukraine last year, as is the case of vast areas in the Kharkov region, according to Ukrainian Defense.
In addition, Russian forces pursue the goal of controlling the Donetsk and Lugansk regions in their entirety, one of the main tasks of their military intervention in Ukraine, they indicated in the GUR.
EFE
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