Senior US military officials said Ukraine faces an uphill battle in the ongoing counter-offensive against Russian forces and that the campaign to take back territory will likely come “at great cost”.
The US assessment of the Kiev counter-offensive came as Chechen fighters said they had been deployed to Russia’s Belgorod region, bordering Ukraine, to prevent attacks by pro-Ukrainian Russian partisan groups and as Ukrainian military officials advanced along the frontline at various locations on Thursday. reported.
“Ukraine has started their attack and they are making steady progress. This is a very difficult fight. It is a very violent battle, likely to be time consuming and costly,” General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Thursday.
Milley said after a meeting of the US-led contact group of some 50 countries that provide military aid to Ukraine that it was far too early to “make estimates” of how long the Ukrainian counter-offensive could last.
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told the meeting that Kiev needed both short- and long-term support as the war was a “marathon, not a sprint” and Ukraine needed even more weapons.
Austin also said Ukraine still had enough firepower left to carry out its counter-offensive, despite Russia’s initial losses.
Moscow has played video footage of German Leopard tanks and US-donated Bradley fighting vehicles, which it says were captured at the start of Ukraine’s push to take back territory from Russia.
“I think the Russians showed us [those] the same five vehicles about 1,000 times from 10 different angles,” Austin said of the video clips. “But frankly, the Ukrainians still have a lot of fighting ability, fighting power,” he said.
“This is a war, so we know there will be battle damage on both sides,” and more important was Kiev’s ability to repair damaged equipment, Austin said.
“This will continue to be a tough fight as we expect, and I believe the element that performs best in terms of sustainability will likely have the advantage at the end of the day,” he added.
The Ukrainian counter-offensive is in its early stages and military experts say decisive battles are still ahead.
Ukraine has so far captured at least seven settlements and recaptured 100 square kilometers (38 square miles) of territory in two major attacks in the south, Ukrainian Brigadier General Oleksii Hromov said on Thursday.
“We are ready to keep fighting to free our territory, even with our bare hands,” he said. The Ukrainian army on the southern front had advanced up to 7 km in the area along the Mokry Yali, as well as up to 3 km along another axis further west near the village of Mala Tokmachka, Ukrainian military officials said.
“Our units and troops are moving forward despite fierce fighting [and] air and artillery superiority of the enemy,” Valeriy Shershen, a spokesman for the military sector of Tavria in southern Ukraine, told Ukrainian television. Advances were also reported in the east around the devastated city of Bakhmut, which Moscow seized last month.
But the great test of Ukraine’s offensive is still ahead as Ukrainian forces have yet to reach the toughest Russian defenses, which lie behind the front line. Kiev is said to have prepared an attack force of about 12 brigades of thousands of soldiers each, most of them using newly arrived Western armored vehicles.
The Washington, D.C.-based think tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), said on Friday that current operations by Ukrainian forces “create the conditions for broader Ukrainian counteroffensive objectives that are not readily apparent.”
The current fighting “therefore represents the first phase of an ongoing counter-offensive,” the ISW said.
3/ In particular, the UKR Tavrisk Group of Forces Press Center reported on 15 June that UKR troops were up to a kilometer in the #Vulhedar area, and Tavrisk commander Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi stated that Ukrainian forces continue to advance in this area.
— ISW (@TheStudyofWar) June 16, 2023
Russian President Vladimir Putin this week insisted that Russian forces inflicted 10 times more casualties on Ukrainians than they could bear and that the Kiev offensive was a failure.
Chechen ruler Ramzan Kadyrov also said on Thursday that fighters from the “Zapad-Akhmat” battalion had been deployed to Russia’s Belgorod region near the site of a cross-border attack in May by Russian-speaking pro-Ukrainian fighters.
“Residents of the areas adjacent to the border with Ukraine can rest easy… Anyone who trespasses into our borders will receive a lightning-fast response,” Kadyrov said in a message on the Telegram messaging app.