In a sweeping new prediction, a top Ukrainian general says Russia’s war on Ukraine will be finished by year’s end, with a turning point favoring Ukraine coming as soon as the second part of August. Major General Kyrylo Budanov, who heads Ukraine’s military intelligence division, also told Sky News that a coup to oust Vladimir Putin is already under way and that the Russian leader is seriously ill with cancer. 

Earlier this year, the Sky report noted, General Budanov correctly predicted when Russia would launch its invasion of Ukraine. 

“Most of the active combat actions will have finished by the end of this year,” the general told a Sky reporter in an interview that aired today. “As a result, we will renew Ukrainian power in all our territories that we have lost including Donbas and the Crimea.” In the general’s estimation, “The breaking point will be in the second part of August.”

Recent battlefield events lend credence to claims of an eventual Ukrainian victory. Of the Russian army’s failure to cross the Siverskyy Donets river, the general said: “I can confirm that they suffered heavy losses in manpower and armor and I can say that when the artillery strikes happened many of the crews abandoned their equipment.” According to Western media reports, Russia lost as many 70 tanks and perhaps up to 1,000 men in the botched river crossing in eastern Ukraine earlier this week, wherein artillerymen of Ukraine’s 17th tank brigade blasted a makeshift pontoon bridge to pieces.

He also said, without exaggeration, that Russian forces have been pushed back almost to the border around Kharkiv. The Guardian newspaper reported that Ukraine “has won the battle of Kharkiv, analysts say, as Kyiv warns of ‘long phase of war.’” Not only did that battle represent the Ukrainian army’s fastest advance since Russian troops beat a retreat from the Kyiv region more than a month ago, the paper reported, but according to an assessment from the Institute for the Study of War, Russian troops did not even attempt to hold their lines against the Ukrainian troops counter-attacking around the city. 

In a video address on Friday, President Zelensky said, “The gradual liberation of the Kharkiv region proves that we will not leave anyone to the enemy,” though he also said that “no one today can predict how long this war will last.”

Mr. Zelensky said Ukraine on Friday shot down the 200th Russian aircraft of the war and noted Russia’s heavy losses of tanks, armored vehicles, helicopters, and drones. “And for what? So that the Lenin statue can stand for a bit longer in temporarily occupied Genichesk? There is and can be no other result for Russia.”

Russian forces in April restored a statue of Lenin at the town in Ukraine’s southern Kherson region. The statue may be in better health than the Russian president, about whom cancer rumors have swirled in recent weeks. The Kremlin has been consistently silent about all aspects of Mr. Putin’s personal life, but General Budanov asserts that he is “very sick.”

The Ukrainian general also said that Russia’s setbacks did not surprise him. “We know everything about our enemy. We know about their plans almost as they’re being made,” he told Sky. “We have been fighting Russia for eight years and we can say that this highly publicized Russian power is a myth … it is a horde of people with weapons.”

Of course, Moscow is still wielding those weapons wherever it can. The Russians are actively trying to build up “multi-layered” defenses around Zaporizhia, Ukrinform reported on Saturday.  According to the general staff of the Ukrainian armed forces, the Kremlin’s aim is “to establish full control over the territory of Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson regions and ensure the stability of the land corridor with the temporarily occupied Crimea.” 

To that end, Russian forces were “firing on Ukrainian positions along the entire line of contact and at Ukraine’s rear in Eastern Operational Zone, being most active in the Slobozhansky and Donetsk directions.”

Russian state media reported that the Ukrainian defense minister, Alexei Reznikov, recently announced plans “to replenish the ranks of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with a million people,” but it was not immediately possible to confirm such a claim.

Attack on Odessa Imminent?

According to a broadcast from Radio Svoboda, the Russian service of Radio Free Europe, all submarines belonging to the Russian Black Sea Fleet have gone to sea and all berths in the southern bay of Sevastopol — the chief base of the Russian navy — are currently empty. 

In a tweet early Saturday, a correspondent for French newspaper Le Monde, Emmanuel Grynszpan, says this could be a signal of an impending attack on Odessa.