After weeks of announcements and mysteries, Ukraine is ready to launch its counter-offensive, Volodymyr Zelensky said on Saturday. "We are ready" to retake the territories occupied by Russia, insisted the Ukrainian president in an interview published by the Wall Street Journal. "I don't know how long it will take. To be honest, things can unfold in different, completely different ways. But we will do it and we are ready," he said.
Last month, the warlord, who has not given up on Russia for fifteen months and the start of the Russian offensive on its territory, said that Ukraine must wait for the arrival of new Western armored vehicles before launching its spring counteroffensive. He embarked on a diplomatic campaign to secure more military aid and weapons from the West as well as its support, in case the operation was more difficult than hoped.
Undermining Russian morale
A long period of dry weather in parts of Ukraine has raised hopes of an imminent counteroffensive. In recent weeks, Ukraine has stepped up its strikes on Russian ammunition depots and logistics routes. The incursions into Russian territory were probably intended to undermine the morale of the Kremlin troops, aware of having bogged down at multiple points of the front in the Donbass.
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But the counteroffensive will be "dangerous" without increased Western help to counter Russian air attacks, Zelensky argues in the interview. "Everyone knows that a counter-offensive without air superiority is very dangerous," he said. Zelensky wants to get more weapons comparable to the US Patriot surface-to-air missile system. "One weapon deprives Russia of its ability to intimidate tens of millions of people: the Patriot missiles," he said.
In the run-up to the NATO summit to be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, next month, he said he understood that it was not possible for his country to join the Atlantic Alliance during the Russian invasion. "We don't want to be a member of NATO during the war," he said, two days after saying that "doubts" about Ukrainian NATO membership were weakening Europe. "But tell me how many lives a sentence is worth at the Vilnius summit?" "If we are not recognized and if we do not receive a signal in Vilnius" (with a view to a possible and future membership, Editor's note) "I think it is useless for Ukraine to participate in this summit."
Although Russia unilaterally annexed four Ukrainian areas last September – Donetsk, Luhansk, the Kherson region and the Mariupol region – Russian forces occupy only part of these territories, which the Ukrainian Defence Forces are fighting over them. In 2014, Russia also invested in Crimea.
