Russia is moving reserves from its amphibious assault battalions to the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine to try to capture the city of Kupyansk, home to an important logistics hub that could be the starting point for a wider offensive in the west, a news agency reported on Saturday. Agerpres reports EFE with reference to the Ukrainian military.

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), an American think tank, also noted on Saturday in its daily assessment of developments on the Ukrainian front that Russian troops are continuing their offensive near Kupyansk and have advanced along that stretch of the front.

After Russian troops returned to the offensive following a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer, Moscow now aims not only to occupy the four regions in eastern and southeastern Ukraine that it annexed on paper, but only partially, according to an analysis by German daily Bild controls them (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia), but also advance to the northeast of Kharkiv Oblast to the Oskil River and the Dnipropetrovsk Region, south of Kharkiv.

Thus, Russia’s goal, according to the same analysis, would be to create a wide security zone over the next 36 months that would prevent Kyiv from threatening Russian territory. This strategy also includes an ongoing offensive against the city of Kupyansk, located less than 50 kilometers from the Russian border.

Differences between Kyiv and Washington regarding military strategy

During this time, the American press again began to write about the existence of differences between Kyiv, which is preparing a new counteroffensive after the failure of the summer one, and Washington, which recommended focusing on preserving the territory under its control. .

The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, Dmytro Kuleba, reacted to these reports with an article in which he qualifies as a “mistake” any possible negotiations with the President of Russia, Volodymyr Putin, and further believes, like the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, that “there is no doubt that victory (Ukraine) it is possible”, but on the condition that Europe and the USA provide Ukraine with all the necessary military support and quickly develop its defense and industrial potential.

“Adequate military assistance, including aircraft, drones, air defenses, artillery ammunition, long-range weapons so we can strike beyond enemy lines; the rapid development of the industrial potential of the United States and Europe, as well as Ukraine, to meet the needs of the Ukrainian army and supplement the American and European arsenals (reduced due to the aid provided to Ukraine),” he noted. Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.

He believes that a possible ceasefire will only allow the Russian army to consolidate its positions with new impenetrable minefields, which played an important role in the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

This failure of the counteroffensive created friction, on the one hand, between President Zelenskyi and the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, General Valery Zaluzhny, and on the other hand, between Kyiv and Washington, each of which had a different vision of how to approach the counteroffensive, until the West was able to satisfy Kyiv’s demands on arms and ammunition shipments, the Washington Post reported in an analysis published last week.

The American officers who, together with the British, participated in the planning of the counteroffensive, were sure that a massive frontal attack of mechanized troops in one direction in the direction of the city of Melitopol would make it possible to decisively break through the Russian lines. The Ukrainian army resorted to a massive mechanized attack, but in three directions, as proposed by the United States, plus two more in the direction of the cities of Berdyansk and Bakhmut, hoping that in this way it would force the Russian army to disperse its forces. But after four days of mechanized offensive operations, the battlefield was littered with destroyed Ukrainian military equipment, including American Bradley armored personnel carriers, German Leopard tanks and minefields, and the high number of dead and wounded Ukrainian soldiers undermined the morale of the troops.

Faced with such a situation, in order to stop the loss of life among the Ukrainian troops and not to lose all Western equipment – about 60% of the Ukrainian heavy weapons that were used in the counteroffensive had already been destroyed or damaged – General Zaluzhnyi changed his tactics and ordered to attack the infantry in small groups of about 10 soldiers, the idea was not approved by the Pentagon.

In the end, the initial plan for the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops to the Sea of ​​Azov in 60-90 days was not fulfilled. Ukrainian troops have advanced only about 20 kilometers through minefields and liberated an area of ​​only about 200 square kilometers, and now they are once again taking up defenses in some areas of the front.

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