Speaking to French media on Wednesday, Ukrainian defense minister Oleksii Reznikov said Russia had 500,000 troops ready for an assault in the coming weeks, nearly double the number Putin announced he was mobilizing in September.
“Officially, they announced 300,000, but when we see the troops at the borders, according to our assessments it is much more,” he said.
Ukrainian officials have been issuing growing warnings, but Reznikov’s comments are the most detailed description yet of what Kyiv sees as an imminent threat.
Reznikov — who was in Paris to press the French government for weapons — said Russia was likely to attack from either the east or the south.
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In the east, Ukrainian commanders face an agonizing choice of whether to withdraw from the city of Bakhmut or hold their positions despite punishing losses and the growing risk of encirclement in a bitter fight that has taken on symbolic as well as strategic importance.
“As their main forces are concentrated in the east, we do expect them to begin an offensive there, perhaps around Bakhmut,” Sak said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy offered a similar assessment in his nightly video address. “The situation has become tougher” in the area, Zelenskyy said.
“The enemy is trying to achieve at least something now to show that Russia has some chances on the anniversary of the invasion,” he added.
In the south, Russia’s forces are arrayed along the eastern bank of the Dnipro River and within striking distance of the crucial city of Kherson. The regional capital was the first major city to fall to Russian troops in the early days of the war, but they were forced into an embarrassing retreat in November to more defensible positions over the river.
Andrii Yermak, Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, said Thursday he had briefed Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser, and Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, about the threat of a new offensive.
“There was an exchange of views regarding the possible actions of the enemy in the near future,” Yermak said on Twitter.
In the weeks before Russia’s full-scale invasion, the U.S. declassified and made public intelligence showing the scale of Putin’s military build-up on Ukraine’s borders. So far, the U.S. has not publicly released intelligence about a possible new offensive.
Russia’s military plans are a closely-guarded secret.
But Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said his diplomats would try to compete with and overshadow pro-Ukraine public events in Western cities on the anniversary of the war.
“Our diplomats will do everything to ensure that any mayhem planned for the anniversary of the special military operation at the end of February in New York and elsewhere — the West is now actively planning it along with the Kyiv regime — so that these events were not the only ones to grab the international community’s attention,” Lavrov said Thursday.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
