After the Russian commander Alexander Khodakovsky and his Vostok battalion suffered a painful defeat in Ukrainian Urozhaine, he has come to some startling insights. “Can we beat Ukraine with our army? No, not now and not in the near future,” he concludes in an extensive post on Telegram.
In the Donetsk region, Ukrainian units took control of the village of Urozhaine earlier this week. Khodakovsky’s Vostok battalion suffered a heavy defeat. The debacle prompted the Russian commander to make some striking reflections.
“When I think about our fate in this war, we will not creep forward slowly as the Ukrainians are doing now and destroy all the cities in our path as we did in Bachmut. And I don’t foresee easy occupation of cities either,” he reports on Telegram.
“truce”
“However, we may enter a phase most unfavorable for Ukraine: a phase of neither peace nor war.” He therefore suggests freezing the conflict along the current front lines. Khodakovsky decides that the most likely outcome of the war is some form of “truce”.
According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), Chodakovsky “reintroduced a narrative that had largely fallen dormant since the Wagner group’s rebellion.”
In April, Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin already declared that Russia should freeze the war in Ukraine to create conditions for a future victory without peace negotiations.
The US think tank says that “Russian sources have regularly claimed that a faction within the Kremlin is interested in freezing the war along today’s front lines for similar reasons, as well as concerns about domestic political stability and the economic fallout of the war. ”
ISW experts believe that Chodakovsky’s comments show that recent Ukrainian advances could significantly weaken confidence in Russian defenses along the broader front in southern Ukraine.
Ukrainian progress
Ukrainian forces made progress this week in retaking territory around the Russian-controlled town of Bachmut in the east of the country. “Three square kilometers have been liberated in the past week,” Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maljar said in a statement.
Since the counter-offensive started about ten weeks ago, the Ukrainian soldiers around Bachmut have recaptured a total of about 40 square kilometers. “Heavy fighting” is also taking place in the regions of Kharkiv and Luhansk, around Kupyansk and Lyman.
Further south, in the Donetsk region, Ukrainian units are under control, according to the village of Urozhaine, the deputy minister confirmed. There is also heavy fighting south of neighboring villages and it recaptured Staromajorsk two weeks ago.
The deputy minister also confirmed that Ukrainian troops are active on the Russian-occupied bank of the Dnieper in the Kherson region. However, the area is not under control.
Ukraine has been trying to fend off a Russian invasion for more than 17 months. With support from the West, the Ukrainian army launched a counter-offensive about ten weeks ago to retake territory in the east, but the results have so far fallen short of expectations.
ANALYSIS. How Putin’s backstabbing friends don’t even find a pact with the devil too far to get in each other’s way (+)
Will the Ukrainian counter-offensive enter a new phase with the arrival of the 82nd brigade? “I would have preferred not to see them appear for a while” (+)
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