The top-ranking US military officer said time is running short before bad weather hampers Ukraine’s ground operations for the rest of the year, even as Kyiv vowed to push on with its bid to liberate occupied territory from Russia.
There are “probably about 30 to 45 days’ worth of fighting weather left,” General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the BBC in an interview.
For now, “there’s still heavy fighting going on,” Milley said. Ukraine is “progressing at a very steady pace through the Russian front lines.”
Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, said Saturday that the counteroffensive will continue as the weather worsens, although “it is harder to fight in the cold.”
Russia has more than 420,000 troops stationed in the areas of Ukraine it occupies, including Crimea, Ukraine’s military intelligence service estimated, without saying how it derived the figure.
Those numbers are “powerful,” Vadym Skibitskyi, a representative of the service, told the annual Yalta European Strategy forum in Kyiv, organized by billionaire Victor Pinchuk’s Foundation.
The figure doesn’t include “special forces” supporting the security of Moscow-installed occupation authorities, he said — including those running elections this weekend deemed illegal under international law and condemned as “shams” by the US.
Russia annexed Ukraine’s Black Sea peninsula of Crimea in 2014 and four more regions - Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson - as part of its full-scale invasion launched in February 2022. Beyond Crimea, the Kremlin doesn’t fully control any of the regions.
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Kyiv’s ground counteroffensive started in early June. It has progressed slowly after Kremlin troops spent months building multi-layered defense lines, including minefields, ditches and cement blockades known as dragon’s teeth.
“It’s a very complex set of defensive preparations that the Ukrainians are fighting through,” Milley said in an interview with a Jordanian TV station in late August.
Oleksandr Tarnavskyi, the Ukrainian general leading the southern counteroffensive, told the Guardian this month that Russia devoted 60% of its time and resources into building the first defensive line and only 20% each into the second and third lines - highlighting the importance of punching through the first line.
Read more: Ukraine’s Slow Counteroffensive Boosts Putin and Worries Allies
Ukrainian forces are trying to advance toward the south of the Zaporizhzhia region to split Russian troop formations and cut some off them from Crimea.
“Russia turned Crimea into powerful military base,” Skibitskyi said. “Russia is actively using the Crimean peninsula for supplying personnel, military equipment and weapons to its troops in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions,” as well as as a launching ground for missile attacks.
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Russia is also still aiming to reach the administrative borders of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions and is conducting active hostilities near Kupyansk, Lyman and Maryinka to that end, according to Skibitskyi.
The Russian contingent there “includes tanks, armored vehicles, artillery systems and multiple rocket launchers,” he added.
Overall, Russia’s use of anti-tank weapons and “massive” deployment of drones has limited the effectiveness of Ukraine’s armored vehicles, forcing much of the counteroffensive to be done on foot, Budanov said.
(Recasts with Milley comments)
