but you don t do that if things are going well. all of the shows that russia s trying to dig in for the long term, their best strategy at this point, having escaped together a lot to do it. they put forward a strong front but they are quite weak underneath. the question for ukraine is at the weekend have to visually crack, there is the moment when ukraine can commit its reserves. it does around ten reserve brigades, it hasn t committed to the fight yet, they are increasingly well trained but once it finds them in, it doesn t have much else, so for ukraine it is about the right moment to commit weight of forces, take a lot of losses at that stage but do enough to effectively win the war, at least put themselves in a strong position. that is the calculus. russia tried to stop them from doing that, were down ukraine and western support and hope the front lines don t move over the rest of the year. in order to really do show that they are staying and not negotiating are getting out all
a rude reminder in kherson today of the wider war coming to a key phase, people trying to rescue those stranded by flooding come under russian artillery fire. if the flooding has achieved anything of military value, it s to deny the ukrainians a possible route of advance south of the dnipro. it s moot whether they ever planned to do that, but attention anyway is now fixed further east. the key fighting of the counter offensive launched at the start of this week is an attempt to drive southwards towards melitopol in this area between zaporizhzhia and vuhledar, and also fighting around bakhmut in the north east. if we zoom in, we can get a sense of an advance that s taken place around zaporizhzhia. drone video released by the russians this week shows pieces of equipment associated with ukraine s western trained reserve brigades being fed into the battle.
weapons to begin it, but another thing is to ensure sustainability of supplies in order to be able to continue as long as it is needed. rather surreally, given the incursion at belgorod, president putin has been filmed talking transport policy today with officials. hackers, meanwhile, cut into broadcasts in parts of western russia with a deep fake putin announcing martial law. so the offensive will push around 40,000 troops in a dozen brigades, carefully held back by the ukrainians, into weak points in the russian line. the west is feeding ukraine intelligence about where to direct its attacks, and has equipped nine of those reserve brigades. but even so, many in whitehall believe that s not enough to guarantee ukrainian success. throughout recent months, russia has exploited its
in toward the center of the country and could possibly try to surround troops in the east. the ukrainian troops. also we know that belarus, they could join this fight as well with their troops. an is it your expectation that the troops coming in from belarus would go toward the capital to try to encircle kyiv or as we ve seen the increase in attacks out west that they would head toward lviv? my assessment is that they re going to be used anywhere they d be used in the west. we re only talking about 20,000 troops here. about two enhanced brigades, maybe two reserve brigades. they have a poor reputation in the military community. the other thing is command and control, how is this going to work? are they going to report to the russians? how are they going to integrate what they re doing? in the american army, we fight as a combined arms team.