2023-06-05 19:45:11
Russia confirms that Ukraine has started its long-awaited counteroffensive. Muscovite media affirm that the attack has begun in the east and south of the country, in the Donetsk region, with the participation of dozens of armored vehicles. Among them are the first Leopard tanks supplied by the West, the weapon considered to be the spearhead of this entire operation aimed at recovering the invaded land. The United States had already warned this morning of the existence of indications that kyiv had ordered a large-scale reconquest to be launched after intelligence services detected movement at various points on the front since Sunday.
The main battles this Monday are concentrated, according to this information, in the surroundings of Zaporizhia, Melitopol and Ugledar. These are three important points to separate the Russian troops defending the region, fortified with trenches, defenses and minefields. In Ugledar, the Kremlin has counted up to thirty Ukrainian units in combat. It can be presumed that the troops have taken advantage of the prevailing bad weather to advance without being located, since, among other variables, fog, wind and rain have prevented Russian surveillance drones from flying.
The Government of kyiv imposed since yesterday, Sunday, the information silence after rumors began to circulate about the existence of strong battles in the south of the region. Some fighting that would have intensified at dawn. The Kremlin itself has admitted these facts and assured that it had repelled the assault in an operation that resulted in the death of 250 Ukrainian soldiers and the destruction of dozens of armored vehicles and tanks. The spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, Igor Konashenkov, assured that they fought “in total six mechanized battalions and two tanks” by the Ukrainian armed forces. “The enemy’s goal was to break through our defenses in the most vulnerable sector of the front, as believed by the Ukrainian forces,” Konashenkov added. Zelensky’s cabinet denied this information and alluded to a “psychological-information operation”, without giving any other type of detail, which would have cost the lives of 410 Russians.
The Pentagon, for its part, woke up this morning convinced that Kiev was on the verge of a counterattack. The images from the satellites that monitor the front reveal the existence of different confrontations centered on the line that runs south of Donetsk, where all analysts have agreed for months that the offensive would begin.
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The latest Russian hypothesis speaks of a fan operation that could have three axes. The first would be to encircle Ugledar and advance so that the Ukrainians divide the entire Donetsk Oblast into two halves. Another option would be to cut communication between the Russian border and the Crimean peninsula. And a third is to directly attack Zaporizhia, Melitopol and later pocket the Russians who defend Kherson. The strategists recognize the difficulties of the national army to retake the lost positions. Russia has consolidated a network of presumably very solid fortifications and has distributed hundreds and hundreds of surveillance drones along the line of contact, in whose management they have acquired skill at forced marches. To that Ukraine puts before a force of thousands of soldiers, many of them considered elite after going through the training of the NATO military, and an arsenal that has “the necessary weapons” for a counteroffensive.
At the moment, all are indications. The Ukrainian blackout on the counteroffensive has been absolute since Sunday to avoid providing data to the enemy. Apparently, military intelligence would have been searching for months for the weak points of the front.
The Kremlin has also detected a clear advance of the Ukrainians towards Bakhmut, the city that Wagner’s mercenaries took a couple of weeks ago. After several days in almost total calm, with hardly any daily skirmishes, the General Staff in Kiev confirmed this progress this afternoon by noting that their snipers have occupied the tall buildings on the outskirts of the city, from where it is easier to decimate the invaders and limit their movements.
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