Ukraine Readies Force To Knock Moscow Out of Occupied South

Reports of a looming stalemate in embattled Ukraine may be off the mark, as the country is said to be preparing to mobilize its forces with the aim of ejecting Russia from the southern coastal areas it has seized and occupied since its invasion in February. Ukraine’s defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, told the Times of London that President Zelensky has given the order to retake the strategically vital southern flank, which can be understood to include the Russian-occupied Black Sea ports of Kherson and Mariupol. The development sounds a note of cautious optimism after another violent weekend in Ukraine, during which Russian missile strikes killed at least 18 people in the eastern Donetsk region. There was also rocket fire on Kharkiv, and on Monday morning local authorities at the shipbuilding city of Mykolaiv reported explosions from a half dozen Russian missiles. “West’s Ukraine Strategy Will Mean a Prolonged, Bloody Stalemate,” a headline in the Wall Street Journal said. Yet while such takes are fast becoming common in coverage of the war, Mr. Resnikov’s disclosure undercuts some of that pessimism. “The president has given the order to the supreme military chief to draw up plans,” he said.As the manpower and materiel come together, it is likely that the status quo in southern Ukraine will not endure. Mr. Resnikov said that Ukraine has approximately 700,000 in the armed forces “and when you add the national guard, police, border guard, we are around a million strong.” The defense minister was also upbeat on the continuity of British support in the wake of Prime Minister Johnson’s resignation last week. He noted that British soldiers are already training two battalions of Ukrainian soldiers in England as part of Mr. Johnson’s pledge to train 10,000 troops every 120 days and spoke of a “great relationship” with the British defense secretary, Ben Wallace. Tellingly, he said that Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs, Dymtro Kuleba, “is speaking with Liz Truss,” the British foreign secretary and a leading contender for the prime minister post. “I saw in London a lot of Ukrainian flags in all official buildings and unofficial buildings too,” he said. Mr. Resnikov affirmed that Mr. Wallace’s support was crucial in helping “to shift the approach from providing Soviet equipment to NATO-standard 155mm artillery, guided multiple launch rocket systems and high-tech drones,” and said that the intensity of the war is rapidly depleting Soviet-era stockpiles. That is an ongoing development: As recently as Friday, the Telegraph reported, Ukrainian forces took out at least five Russian arms depots behind the frontline between Donetsk and Luhansk, using long-range artillery systems supplied by both London and Washington. “It was a long process, a month and a half, but we got a result. Ukraine had a Soviet-era armed forces with 30-year-old weapons. We changed this in three months,” he said.As for the recent Ukrainian retreats from the cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in the eastern Luhansk region, Mr. Resnikov characterized these as tactical losses necessary to save lives rather than strategic defeats. Mr. Zelensky has previously said that Ukraine was losing as many as 200 men a day.The need for speed looms large. While Ukraine has by and large been satisfied with the steadfast support from NATO partners, “Each day we’re waiting for howitzers,” Mr. Resnikov said, “we can lose a hundred soldiers.” If Western countries are ramping up the flow of modern weaponry to Ukraine it is chiefly because, in the defense minister’s estimation, Ukraine proved it can fight. As for a summer of stalemate in Ukraine, beefed up manpower and a lot of gusto on the ground point to some turning of tides.

Ukraine Readies Force To Knock Moscow Out of Occupied South

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