© REUTERS/Valentyn OgirenkoMajor General Kyrylo Budanov, chief of the Military Intelligence of Ukraine, speaks during an interview with Reuters, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine July 6, 2023.
Ukraine launched a much-vaunted counteroffensive this summer that has retaken more than a dozen villages in the south and east over three months, but has been complicated by vast minefields and heavily entrenched Russian forces.
Comment: It was initially called their 'spring counter offensive', except they didn't launch it until summer, and there was nothing 'counter' about it.
"Combat actions will continue in one way or another. In the cold, wet and mud, it is more difficult to fight. Fighting will continue. The counteroffensive will continue," Budanov said.
Comment: He's not concerned about the weather because he'll be in a comfortable office, meanwhile recruiters are scouring the streets of Ukraine, and even enlisting foreign nations to deport unwilling, and often unable, men, for their meat grinder: Poland begins extraditing Ukrainian men who fled conscription
The comments, made at a conference in Kyiv hosted by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation, offer the strongest indication to date that Ukraine does not plan to halt its push when the weather turns later this year.
The West supplied billions of dollars of military equipment and trained up thousands of Ukrainian fighters for the counteroffensive to help Kyiv try to regain territory.
But the slow progress of the counteroffensive has sparked concerns among Kyiv's supporters that the West could struggle to maintain the scale of military aid to keep Ukraine battling on at the same intensity.
Vadym Skibytskyi, an official from Ukraine's military spy agency, said earlier on Saturday that Russia currently had 420,000 servicemen inside Ukraine.
The push in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, now centred around the villages of Robotyne and Verbove, is seen as a crucial part of an operation that seeks to split Russia's occupying forces in half in the south, but remains far from that goal.
"Our counteroffensive is happening in several directions," Budanov said, acknowledging that progress had been slower than he had wanted and describing the situation as difficult.
Comment: Colonel Douglas MacGregor has stated that at least 400,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed in action, and that the village of Robotyne, which the Kiev junta are proclaiming as the evidence of 'progress', was sparsely populated to begin with and is of little interest to Russia.
Apart from the huge concentration of Russian mines, he identified the large of number of small Russian "kamikadze" drones as a key factor that had slowed Ukraine's progress so far.
Russia, which launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, has said that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed.
Comment: Even the propaganda peddlers are preparing the ground for the public to accept that Ukraine, and in effect the US, and the West, have lost this proxy war: Ukraine's army is running out of men, and time - UK Telegraph
Ukraine and its backers in the US are desperate to revive their offensive and, in turn, seem to feel that their only real option is to try to drag another NATO member into the fray: Romania 'categorically' rejects Ukraine's claim Russian drone fell on their territory, allegation is made hours before meeting to discuss grain deal