Russia is building a force of 100,000 soldiers to attack the northern sector of the frontline as Ukrainian commanders start to admit that their counter-offensive has stalled.
Senior military officials believe the attack may be a diversionary tactic to draw Ukrainians away from the counter-offensive.
Col Serhi Cherevaty, a Ukrainian army spokesman, said that Russia had also ordered Storm-Z ex-convict battalions to prepare for battle and was firing more than 500 shells per day at Ukrainian forces around Kupyansk.
“The enemy has concentrated a very powerful group,” he said. “More than 100,000 personnel, more than 900 tanks, more than 550 artillery systems and 370 rocket salvo systems.”
Kupyansk is a town in the northeastern Kharkiv region of Ukraine. Ukrainian forces recaptured the town, which previously had a population of 25,000 people, in September last year.
Col Cherevaty’s assessment that Russian forces were preparing to attack in the north was confirmed by senior Ukrainian military officials.
Hanna Malyar, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, said that the Kupyansk attack may be a diversionary tactic used to lift pressure on sectors of the battlefield where Ukraine has been taking ground.
“As soon as we seize the operational initiative and start moving forward, the enemy immediately activates in other directions to distract and drag in our forces,” she said.
Russian news agencies claimed, without providing any evidence, that Russian forces had advanced up to one mile towards Kupyansk. Russian military bloggers, often well-plugged in and well-followed, were less exuberant and said that Russian forces had failed to cross the Oskol River near Kupyansk but that they had recaptured the village of Novoselovskoye.
There has been a shift in the language used by Ukrainian commanders over the past few weeks.
Their optimism at the start of their counter-offensive six weeks ago and promises of cutting off Russian forces with a lightning strike towards the Sea of Azov have faded.
Instead, they started talking about slow but steady progress against well dug-in Russian defences and have now begun to describe how the counter-offensive has stalled with only an area half the size of Rutland recaptured. Most of these gains have been around Bakhmut and a handful of villages in the southern Zaporizhzhia region.
‘Advance not going as fast as we would like’
Col-Gen Alexander Syrsky, the overall commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, told the BBC’s Today programme on Tuesday that Russian strongholds were holding back his forces’ advances.
“Our advance is really not going as fast as we would like,” he said.
However, the US’s top general said on Tuesday that Ukraine’s counter-offensive was “far from a failure”, but that the fight ahead would be long and bloody.
“I think there’s a lot of fighting left to go and I’ll stay with what we said before: This is going to be long. It’s going be hard. It’s going to be bloody,” Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, said.
In its morning intelligence briefing, the British Ministry of Defence confirmed that Russian forces were massing in the north of the frontline, sucking in resources from Ukraine and Russia.
It also said that other than a small bridgehead across the Dnipro River south of Kherson City and advances around Bakhmut, Ukrainian forces had struggled to break Russia’s defences.
“In the south, Ukraine continues to attack at least two axes, but is unlikely to have yet broken into Russia’s primary defensive lines,” it said.
In Crimea, the occupying pro-Russia authorities said that their air defences had fought off an attack by Ukraine involving 28 drones, one of the biggest of the war, the day after two alleged Ukraine waterborne drones badly damaged the 12-mile bridge that connects the peninsula to mainland Russia.
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Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, had promised a retaliation to the alleged bridge attack and the Ukrainian cities of Mykoliav and Odesa both reported missile and drone attacks overnight. One grain storage silo was damaged in Odesa.
Source: https://www.telegraph.co.uk