Aerial view of the Pentagon
247 — The US military believes Ukraine has everything it needs to be successful on the battlefield, Pentagon deputy spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told reporters Tuesday.
“We count the losses. We know there will be casualties on the battlefield. That’s the unfortunate part of this war, but we saw how the Ukrainians overcame it from the start,” Singh replied to a question about Ukrainian losses of men and equipment.
“We know it’s going to be a tough fight. We know it will take time,” Singh added. “We are confident that the Ukrainians have what they need they have the fighting power they have the ability to successfully conduct their counteroffensive.”
Singh’s comments came after two weeks of intense fighting on the Zaporozhye front in which Westerntrained Ukrainian brigades failed to reach Russia’s main line of defense, Moscow said, losing thousands of men and hundreds of armored vehicles in the process. Losses included Germanmade Leopard and USmade Bradley tanks.
On Monday, the New York Times reported that some cemeteries in western Ukraine were clearing old graves to make way for new burials amid “what seemed like countless burials.”
PROCEED TO RECOMMENDATIONS
Ukraine’s Deputy Defense Minister Anna Malyar said on Tuesday that it was “quite difficult” for troops to advance, but the success of the operation should not be measured by territorial gains. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg acknowledged that the Ukrainians face “difficult terrain” and “solid Russian resistance”.
Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced that Ukraine had lost more than 600 armored vehicles, including 186 tanks, in less than two weeks of fighting and “can’t last a war like this very long” given supplies from Russia alone the West takes into account.
At this rate, Ukraine will lose its attacking capabilities by July, Russian lawmaker Andrei Kartapolov said in a television appearance on Tuesday.
“All the tactics they used didn’t work,” he said on Solovyov Live. The Ukrainian military, he added, has already lost about 20,000 of the 50,000 soldiers said to have been trained for the offensive, with 900 killed and wounded in the past 24 hours.
Kartapolov commanded the Russian Expeditionary Force in Syria between December 2016 and March 2017 and oversaw the second liberation of Palmyra. He retired in 2021 with the rank of fourstar general and is currently the Chairman of the State Duma Defense Committee.