Apparently the warnings issued by Ukrainian generals in mid-December about Russia’s intention to carry out a new major offensive in the first weeks of the year, in order to make it coincide with the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, on 24 February, they are more and more real. According to the country’s Defense Minister, Oleksii Reznikov, Moscow has prepared a large contingent of troops on the border that far exceeds the number of 300,000 recruited soldiers announced during the partial mobilization in September. The real size could be closer to 500,000, he has assured in statements to the French television channel BFM TV.
“We do not underestimate our enemy – Reznikov warned – officially, they announced 300,000, but when we see the troops on the borders, according to our assessments, there are many more”. The estimates have not been confirmed by any other source.
“We see that (the Russians) are preparing for more war, that they are mobilizing more soldiers, more than 200,000 and potentially even more than that,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters during a visit to South Korea. South on Monday. “They are actively acquiring new weapons, more ammunition, increasing their own production, but also acquiring more weapons from other authoritarian states like Iran and North Korea.”
After weeks of a stalemate war around Bakhmut, in the eastern province of Donetsk, Kyiv estimates that this new Russian campaign is already underway. With this new impetus, the Kremlin intends to turn the war around, whose last great victories were won by the Ukrainians with the recapture of Kherson in November and Kharkiv province in September. “I think Russia really wants some kind of big payback. And I think it has already started,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Monday.
The president, who will meet on Friday with the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, insisted last night on the looming threat. The situation “is getting even more dire” for Ukraine’s forces in the nation’s east because Russia wants something to show its people as the war nears its one-year anniversary.
After meeting with senior military officials, the president reported that “there is a significant increase in the offensive actions of the occupiers on the front,” he added. Zelensky noted on Monday that Russian efforts to win the war are “intensifying” by the minute, particularly in Donetsk. There, the mercenaries of the Wagner group have managed to gain control of two towns near Bakhmut while they continue their advance to encircle the city, where the bloodiest fighting of the invasion has been taking place for months. “Every day there are new groups of professional military or an increase in the number of Wagner fighters,” Zelensky said.
The representative of the Main Directorate of Military Intelligence (GUR) of Ukraine, Andriy Yusov, confirmed yesterday that the country is on the verge of a more active phase of the battle, which will take place during February and March. Yusov stressed that the poor state of Russian military equipment will force the army to mass more soldiers to outnumber the Ukrainians in order to have any chance at the front.
Ukrainian Colonel Serhiy Hrabskyi also calculated on Wednesday that Russia does not have enough troops to carry out an attack along Ukraine’s 1,500-kilometer front line, so it should focus its efforts on seizing the Donetsk oblasts. and Luhansk, in the east, with the possibility of an isolated attack in the south, in order to distract the Ukrainian forces, according to his statements to the Ukrainian public radio station Suspilny.
Still, it’s impossible to know for sure how the Kremlin will ultimately deploy its tens of thousands of new soldiers across its neighboring country. The head of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksii Danilov, did not rule out “any scenario in the next two or three weeks – he told Sky News last Tuesday – the main battles are yet to come.”
