The Russian offensive in Donbas is on everyone’s lips in Ukraine. Day in and day out, the news coming from the front lines in the eastern provinces of Luhansk y Donetsk follow one another, allowing a glimpse of the immediate intentions of the Kremlin, which are summarized in the conquest of the Bakhmut town before the first anniversary of the start of the war and the subsequent continuation of the advance towards Kramatorsk and Slaviansk, already entered the month of March.
However, from an undisclosed position on the war front in southern Ukraine, Mamuka Mamulashvili, commander of the Georgian Legion, warns, in an exclusive interview with EL PERIÓDICO, from the Prensa Ibérica group, and another Catalan media outlet, that the Russian commanders are concentrating tens of thousands of soldiers in this region to probably launch another attack that will allow them to widen the terrestrial corredor than a Crimea with the Donbasthe main and to date only strategic achievement of the Russian Army in the 12 months of contention
“We estimate that (the Russians) have concentrated about 80,000 menalthough they are not real soldiers, they are recruits from the last mobilization”, points out the commander, at the head of a integrated multinational unit by soldiers of more than about twenty nationalities, from Swedes to Japanese, including in some cases someone born in Russia. “They could launch them against our lines waiting for us to run out of ammunition,” he denounces, paraphrasing kyiv’s repeated accusations about Moscow’s scant respect for the life and integrity of its men. All this, together with the constant skirmishes that are taking place in this part of the war frontThey make Commander Mamulashvili think that Russia is planning attacks here as well. “A few days ago we neutralized a try to break through our lines,” he reports.
Part of the Russian Federation
Putin “has proclaimed that southern Ukraine es integral part of the Russian Federation; we have to show him that it is wrong“, he maintains. And again, he calls on the West to accelerate supplies of weapons, in particular of the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, better known by their acronyms in English HIMARS, whose high precision has made the difference this year of hostilities, forcing the withdrawal of Russian troops from locations where they had consolidated.
The fears of this Georgian soldier are shared by analysts such as David Lewis, professor of Global Politics at the University of Exeter and expert in International Security and Authoritarianism. “We can expect more pressure in the south, where Russia would like to move its defense lines further from Melitopolto expand the Crimean corridor and make it less vulnerable to a Ukrainian counter-offensive,” he recently assured in an email to this newspaper.
Mamulashvili speaks proudly of the Georgian Legion, praising the close ties that have existed between Ukraine and his home country since the years after the breakup of the USSR. “When Russia launched the first aggression against our country, Ukraine was the first to send men to our aid,” he says, referring to the war waged in 1992 and 1993 by the Georgian government army against separatist troops in the region of Abjasiastirred up from the Russian Federation, a conflict that caused about 20,000 civilian deaths and close to 250,000 displaced.
Since then, the enclave has lived in an independent regime in fact not recognized by almost any country in the world. “Georgia knows first-hand what Russian imperialism is, more than 20% of its territory has been taken from it in wars promoted by the Kremlin; for this reason this conflict that is being waged in Ukraine is also ours,” the commander proclaimed. , who does not hide his hope that Russia will come out weakened enough of this conflict so that his country can one day recover its territorial integrity.