After weeks of rumors, waiting and maneuvers aimed at disorienting the enemy, preparations for the Ukrainian counteroffensive seem to be intensifying. On Monday morning, the Russian Defense Ministry announced that it had repelled a major assault on five sectors of the front southwest of the city of Donetsk. According to Wagner militia leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, Ukrainian troops have also recently regained ground on the northern and southwestern edges of Bakhmut. The Kiev authorities confirm that they have undertaken "offensive actions", while relativizing their scope. "The Bakhmut sector remains the epicenter of hostilities," Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Monday. We are moving forward on a fairly broad front and we are achieving successes."
These operations come at a time when the Ukrainian authorities are working to make their adversary dizzy. On 27 May, General Valery Zaluzhny, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, declared sibyllinely: "The time has come to take back what belongs to us." In an interview with the Wall Street Journal over the weekend, President Volodymyr Zelensky indicated that his army is ready to go on the attack, before clarifying: "I don't know how long it will take. To be honest, it can happen in several different ways." On Sunday, the Defense Ministry released a video featuring soldiers in combat gear, in which it urged against publicizing the details of the upcoming counteroffensive. "Plans need silence," urge the authors of the message, before warning: "We will not announce the beginning..."
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On the border between Ukraine and Russia, two groups of Russian anti-Putin fighters and a unit of Polish volunteers have stepped up their harassment operations against the Belgorod region. Late last week, intensive shelling targeted Chebekino, a Russian town of about 40,000 inhabitants located about ten kilometers from the border, damaging many buildings, killing at least four people and leading to the evacuation of several thousand civilians. On Sunday, Russia's Freedom Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps also conducted an incursion into the village of Novaya Tavolzhanka. Video footage in support, they claimed to have captured a dozen Russian soldiers and said they were ready to negotiate their exchange with the governor of the region.
Liar pokeur
These two units, based in Kiev, are equipped by the Ukrainian army. But they ensure that they conduct their operations on Russian soil in complete autonomy. Their stated goal is not only to help Ukraine drive the Russian army out of its territory, but also to overthrow the regime of Vladimir Putin. Three weeks ago, they carried out a 24-hour raid in three villages in the Belgorod region before retreating under Russian army fire.
These limited incursions are ostensibly intended to sow trouble among the civilian population, but also to force the enemy to repatriate part of the forces deployed in Ukraine to guard its border. "Ukraine thus artificially inflates the mileage of the contact areas to be monitored, reinforcing the logic of imposed dilemma," notes military analyst Joseph Henrotin, editor-in-chief of the specialized journal DSI. "The discordant response to these raids suggests that the Russian authorities have not yet decided on the response to them," said the American think tank Institue for the Study of War, which highlights their destabilizing effect.
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It is difficult, in this game of lying poker, to know whether the reconnaissance operations undertaken by the Ukrainian army constitute the beginning of the counter-offensive - or, simply, the continuation of a laborious work of "modeling" aimed at identifying the weak points of the opposing device. "The enemy has not achieved its objectives," said the Russian Ministry of Defense, which released images of destroyed Ukrainian tanks. Moscow says Ukrainian forces were inflicted on Sunday near Neskuchne, in the Donetsk region, and Novodarivka, near Zaporizhzhya.
New "attempts to break through Russian defenses" also took place on Monday near the town of Novodonetske, not far from Vuhledar. The Russian army, for its part, has reportedly regained some ground in recent days in the north of Donbass, near Kupiansk.