Ukrainian troops have advanced up to 50 kilometers into Russian-occupied territory in the northeastern Kharkiv region and recaptured more than 20 villages, Brigadier General Oleksiy Gromov said on Thursday.
Gromov’s statement is the first precise information provided by the Ukrainian authorities on a shock counteroffensive in the northeast that appears to have wrong-footed Russian troops, while attention was focused on a separate Ukrainian drive to claw back land around the southern port of Kherson and isolate Russian troops there.
Although the Kharkiv counteroffensive has been covered by Russian and Ukrainian bloggers and witnesses posting on social media in the past few days, the Ukrainian leadership and military command had refused to comment publicly. On Wednesday night, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said only: “This week we have good news from the Kharkiv region” but cautioned that “now is not the time to name the settlements to which the Ukrainian flag has returned.”
On Thursday, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in Germany that, while Russian forces continue “to cruelly bombard Ukrainian cities and civilians with missiles and artillery fire,” Ukrainian forces had “begun their counteroffensive in the south of their country.”
“The face of the war is changing,” he added, without providing any detailed assessment of the operation.
Russia’s defense ministry has avoided commenting on the situation regarding Ukraine’s northeastern counteroffensive. However, a key Russian protagonist in the 2014 Kremlin-backed insurgency in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, Igor Girkin, said on Thursday that Kyiv “has achieved operational success in the main direction of its attack,” referring to the Kharkiv operations.
The lightning advance of Ukrainian troops is underway northwest of Izyum, a town with a pre-war population of 46,000, which has strategic logistical importance for Russia’s operations in Donbas.
According to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War think tank, Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv region “are likely exploiting Russian force reallocation” to the south “to conduct an opportunistic yet highly effective counteroffensive”.
Meanwhile, top Ukrainian military officials published on Wednesday their long-term forecast for the war with Russia, including with possible future scenarios.
Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and Mykhailo Zabrodskyi, first deputy chairman of the National Security, Defense, and Intelligence Committee of Ukraine’s parliament, believe the war will continue into 2023.
According to their analysis, Russian troops are still hunting for openings to sweep across the south of country and seize the key ports of Odesa and Mykolaiv — effectively turning Ukraine into a landlocked country and robbing it of its ability to export across the Black Sea.
“Revisited plans to gain control of Kyiv and the threat of renewed invasion from the territory of the Republic of Belarus cannot be ruled out either,” Zaluzhnyi and Zabrodskyi said.
They argued that Ukraine’s strategic goal next year should be the liberation of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, which “was and remains the basis for supply routes on the southern strategic flank of Russian aggression.”
“It is logical to assume planning for 2023 an operation or a series of operations to regain the peninsula,” they said, adding that such a push will require massive force. “Preparation of an offensive campaign demands that Ukraine sets up one or more operational (operational-strategic) groupings of forces consisting of 10 to 20 combined arms brigades, depending on the intent and ambitions of the Ukrainian command.”
With a close eye on the potential reaction from Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Ukrainians also sketched out a more alarming scenario of the Kremlin resorting to tactical nuclear weapons.
“It is hard to imagine that even nuclear strikes will allow Russia to break Ukraine’s will to resist. But the threat that will emerge for the whole of Europe cannot be ignored. The possibility of direct involvement of the world’s leading powers in a ‘limited’ nuclear conflict, bringing closer the prospect of World War 3, cannot be completely ruled out either,” the two wrote.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiZmh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LnBvbGl0aWNvLmV1L2FydGljbGUvdWtyYWluaWFuZS1wdXNoLTUwa20tcGFzdC1ydXNzaWEtZnJvbnRsaW5lcy1pbi1ub3J0aGVhc3QtZ2VuZXJhbC1zYXlzL9IBAA?oc=5
2022-09-08 18:12:12Z
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