As the Kremlin works to regain the war’s momentum and retake the rest of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, Ukrainian forces are preparing for an impending large-scale Russian invasion.
Despite having different timelines, Ukrainian officials have increased their warnings about an impending Russian offensive in recent days.
In the Donbas and southern regions, where it presently controls up to 20% of Ukrainian territory, Russia’s invasion forces are poised to launch a new attack later this month, according to Oleksiy Reznikov, Ukraine’s minister of defence.
The assault is anticipated to occur about a year after Russian President Vladimir Putin began his full-scale invasion on February 24 and before the recent pledge of new western tanks and other weapons.
Reznikov remarked at a news conference in Kyiv, “Of course, we expect possible offensives from the Russians. They like symbolism.”
Despite the fact that the government would not have contemporary tanks and other cutting-edge equipment by then, he continued, it had “amassed resources and reserves which we can deploy and with which we can push back.”
In his weekly address on Saturday night, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy declared that Ukraine was approaching a period when, “the occupier throws more and more of its forces to break our defences.”
According to Andriy Chernyak, a representative of Ukraine’s military intelligence, Putin had instructed his armed forces to capture Donetsk and Luhansk entirely by March.
The area around Bakhmut has seen a lot of combat lately as Ukrainian soldiers desperately try to keep Russia from capturing the city.
Reznikov minimised the likelihood that Russia would succeed in retaking Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, but he did not completely rule it out either.
According to him, Russia is now assembling sizable strike forces from Belarus in the north and the north-east region of Kharkiv.
READ MORE: Revealed: Vladimir Putin’s promise about Volodymyr Zelensky