Ukraine makes gains against Russia and tells skeptics to ‘shut up’
Joel Gehrke
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Russia’s occupation forces are wearing down in the face of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, according to Estonia’s military intelligence unit.
“Its reserves are limited, there’s not much left,” Col. Margo Grosberg, who commands the Estonian Defense Forces Intelligence Center, said Friday.
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That assessment, from a front-line NATO member-state with a long-standing focus on threats from Russia, dovetails with recent reports that Ukrainian forces in Zaporizhzhia, one of the four partially occupied regions of eastern Ukraine, have made an initial breach of Russia’s primary fortification line. Their advance has helped to renew international optimism about the counteroffensive as Ukrainian officials simmer with frustration at Western pessimism about their progress.
“I would recommend all critics to shut up,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told reporters Friday while traveling in Spain. “Come to Ukraine and try to liberate one square centimeter by themselves.”
The counteroffensive has come at a high cost for Ukrainian troops, who have had to confront a thicket of land mines under the shadow of Russian drone attacks and artillery fire. Yet their incremental progress has reached an acute phase near Robotyne and Verbove, according to reports from the ground and private-sector geospatial intelligence analysts, forcing Russian commanders to cannibalize their own defenses elsewhere in a bid to plug the hole.
“This action demonstrates quite a high level of risk-taking by Russia,” Grosberg said.
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That front-line clash is underway as Ukrainian leaders try to put additional military and psychological pressure on their enemies through an intensifying series of drone strikes against targets deep inside Russia. “We are working from the territory of Russia,” Ukrainian Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov told the “War Zone.”
The defense intelligence chief claimed that the attack on a Russian air base in Pskov destroyed two military transport planes and left two others “seriously damaged.” And Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky raised the specter of more attacks in Russia by boasting about the development of long-range Ukrainian missiles.
Yet the eyes of military observers around the world are drawn especially to Zaporizhzhia, a crucial region in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s drive to establish a “land bridge” from Russia to Crimea, which the Kremlin annexed from Ukraine following the surreptitious invasion that started the war in 2014.
“Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhzhia Oblast and reportedly advanced on August 31,” the Institute for the Study of War assessed in its latest update on front-line developments. “A Russian milblogger claimed that the current composition of the Russian multi-echeloned defensive layer does not allow Russian forces to conduct counterattacks against the flanks of Ukrainian advances as quickly as they could when defending further northwest of their current positions.”
President Joe Biden’s team expressed cautious optimism. “We have noted that over the last 72 hours or so, some notable progress by Ukrainian armed forces on that southern line of advance coming out of the Zaporizhzhia area, and they have achieved some success against that second line of Russian defenses,” White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters.
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Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, suggested that anyone “criticizing the slow pace of counteroffensive equals to spitting into the face of Ukrainian soldier who sacrifices his life every day.” And he proposed, instead, that countries such as Germany join France and the United Kingdom in shipping long-range missiles to Ukraine.
“It will help our counterdefensive, and therefore, it will help to end the war sooner,” he said.