Heavy rain and freezing cold could prevent Ukraine from taking advantage of a possible breakthrough. The Wall Street Journal reports this.
For Ukrainian soldiers trying to push forward against entrenched Russian troops, the counteroffensive takes on new urgency as summer gives way to shorter days, heavy rain and then snow, the newspaper notes.
With the Ukrainian counterattack there is a new misfortune: the rapid approach of rainy autumn weather, when not only bushes, but also muddy roads will hinder the advance. Pentagon military strategists are giving Kyiv another month for an offensive – until the end of October, a political scientist writes about this in his Telegram channel Malek Dudakov.
By that time, Ukraine will be forced to switch to a defensive mode, defending itself from Russian operations and missile attacks on infrastructure. There are still some hopes in Washington that in a month Kyiv will be able to advance at least 5-10 kilometers to Tokmak.
However, Ukrainians have more and more problems. Russia retains obvious superiority in aviation and artillery and actively uses mines, even dropping them on the Ukrainians in the rear, so that they are blown up again by them when they retreat. The losses of Western armored vehicles from missiles and drones are colossal. Ukrainians lose up to 10 thousand drones per month due to Russian electronic warfare.
Against this background, Kyiv and Western capitals began to shift responsibility for the failure onto each other. In the West, they blame the Ukrainians themselves, who, they say, are poorly trained in conducting combined arms operations. The Ukrainians, in turn, claim that they would all have died if they had followed NATO manuals, since NATO members themselves have never participated in such large operations.
“Hawks in Washington hoped to show at least some success by September in order to bring them to agreement on budgets. But now, due to the failure of the counter-offensive, America is even facing a shutdown. Someone will be made extreme – from Zelensky before resigning Mark Milly. But in the end it will be a huge defeat Biden and will undermine his position in the elections,” the expert predicts.
2023-09-17 20:45:00
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