Buoyed by the success of its counter-offensive in the Kharkiv region, Ukraine said on Tuesday (13) that it would only stop when it expelled all Russian troops from its territory. Until last week’s attacks, Moscow occupied about 20% of the neighbor it invaded 202 days ago.
It’s a propaganda stunt, of course, but wars are made of that too. “The objective is to liberate the Kharkiv region and beyond: all the territories occupied by the Russian Federation,” Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar told reporters accompanying her on the road to Balaklia, the first strategic town retaken by Kiev in the action. .
Reality can still get in the way. In the early afternoon (early morning in Brazil), a barrage of heavy artillery was recorded at almost every point on the Kharkiv front in the northeast of the country.
While strengthening their position for a long-delayed Ukrainian offensive in the south of the country, in Kherson, the Russians neglected the northeast region of the country, which they had partially occupied since April. Kiev attacked there, with great effectiveness, despite analysts’ caution about its ability to retain gains.
Russian forces retreated, and today they hold a very small portion of Kharkiv. It is there that the toughest battles are taking place, due to mixed reports. But Ukraine’s ambition has limits: in the south, its offensive has gained little and in the east, Russian-speaking Donbass, the Kremlin is in an apparent position of strength.
Thus, Maliar’s speech refers to renewed requests by President Volodymyr Zelensky, made the day before, for the West to send more weapons to Ukraine. The US alone has delivered and pledged more than $15 billion in military aid, nearly four times the Ukrainians’ regular defense budget.
The reason is Kiev’s fears about the European reaction to Vladimir Putin’s threats to leave the continent without Russian gas when the Northern Hemisphere winter arrives in December. Chancellor Dmitro Kuleba delivered this in a post on Tuesday on Twitter: “Disappointing Signs From Germany As Ukraine Needs Leopards [tanques de guerra alemães]. What fears Berlin?”.
Unlike the Americans, the major European economies are far less effusive in the effort to arm the Ukrainians. And the current campaign in the northeast of the country has once again proved the importance of tanks and tanks with infantry support: in small numbers, they have ensured the greatest success of the war for Kiev so far.
In neighboring Donetsk (Donbass), the governor of the still Kiev-controlled portion of the province said he expected an immediate offensive from his countrymen. The assertion seems overly optimistic, in line with the image efforts of the Ukrainians.
On the Russian side, the options narrow for Putin. Pressure among military commentators and white-plate journalists for more aggressive changes in the course of the war has grown so much that even Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov deigned to comment on them.
“Critical points of view, as long as they remain within the law, this is pluralism, but the line is very, very fine and you have to be very careful about it,” he said, without apparent irony, since criticizing the Armed Forces can 15 years in prison in Russia. He was addressing Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and presenter Vladimir Soloviev, who had questioned the country’s military leadership.
The problem for Putin is called human power. Resistance to general mobilization and declaring war, to avoid unpopularity, has hampered Russia since the beginning of what it calls a special military operation.
The issue is reality. “During World War II, someone just had to say ‘the war’ so everyone knew what was being discussed. We had reached the same point in the Russo-Ukrainian war, and that was not what the Russians expected,” he wrote on Tuesday. the pope of American geopolitics, George Friedman, of the consultancy Geopolitical Futures.
The first phase of the conflict failed due to lack of people, bad tactics and poor logistics. The second, focused on Donbass, was more successful. The third, with the Ukrainian initiative, once again highlighted the lack of resources on the ground.
So, as Friedman ponders, as he cannot vacate Ukraine or seek peace now, on pain of making his government unfeasible, Putin is left to think of more effective ways to gather personnel. There are reports that forces gathered in the Far East for exercise Vostok-2022 at the turn of the month have continued training, but none of that is certain at this point.
Peskov sought to minimize the issue. “At the moment, no, there is no discussion about it,” he said, asked about mobilization.
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