The war continues, even as there are delays in a number of areas ranging from delivering and transferring arms to the ability of Russia to declare victory. Attacks and counter attacks dominate the news as Zelensky speaks of difficult losses in Severodonetsk and in the Kharkiv region.
(RFE/RL) -- Ukrainian forces are suffering painful losses in the fight against Russian troops in the east of the country as they await the delivery of promised weapons from Western countries...
Key Takeaways
- Russian military authorities are pursuing options to increase the available pool of eligible recruits to account for continued personnel losses in Ukraine.
- Russian forces are continuing to fight for control of the Azot industrial plant and have destroyed all bridges between Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, likely to isolate the remaining Ukrainian defenders within the city from critical lines of communication.
- Russian forces continue to prepare for offensive operations southeast of Izyum and west of Lyman toward Slovyansk.
- Russian forces are continuing offensive operations to the east of Bakhmut near the T1302 highway to cut Ukrainian lines of communication to Severodonetsk-Lysychansk.
- Russian forces continued offensive operations to push Ukrainian troops away from frontlines northeast of Kharkiv City.
- Ukrainian counterattacks have forced Russian troops on the Southern Axis to take up and strengthen defensive positions.
- Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said the outcome of the battle for the Donbas region will determine the course of the war, adding that Ukraine’s forces are suffering “painful losses” in Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk. The battle for Luhansk’s Sievierodonetsk is now the biggest fight in Ukraine as its defenders try to repel a fierce Russian onslaught in the twin eastern cities.
- Russia has told Ukrainian forces holed up in Sievierodonetsk’s Azot chemical plant to lay down their arms by early Wednesday. Fighters should “stop their senseless resistance and lay down arms” from 8am Moscow time (5am GMT), Mikhail Mizintsev, head of Russia’s national defence management centre told the Interfax news agency.
- Russia said it would set up a humanitarian corridor on Wednesday for trapped civilians seeking to flee intense fighting in the devastated east Ukraine city of Sievierodonetsk. Serhiy Haidai, governor of Luhansk region, said about 500 civilians, 40 of them children, were sheltering from heavy Russian attacks in the Azot chemical plant in the city.
- Zelenskiy repeated his call for the west to step up the provision of heavy weapons to Ukraine. Ukraine’s deputy defence minister Hanna Malyar said the country had received only 10% of what it asked for and there was no path to victory without the aid: “No matter how hard Ukraine tries, no matter how professional our army is, without the help of western partners we will not be able to win this war”. Zelenskiy added that Ukraine does not have enough anti-missile systems to shoot down Russian projectiles targeting its cities. “Our country does not have enough of them ... there can be no justification in delays in providing them.”
- Nato must build out “even higher readiness” and strengthen its weapons capabilities along its eastern border, the military alliance’s chief said on Tuesday ahead of a summit in Madrid at the end of the month. Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance needed a “more robust and combat-ready forward presence and an even higher readiness and more pre-positioned equipment and supplies.”
www.theguardian.com/...
Subordinate Main Effort—Southern Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk oblasts (Russian objective: Encircle Ukrainian forces in eastern Ukraine and capture the entirety of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)
Russian forces continued ground assaults within Severodonetsk and fought for control of the Azot industrial plant on June 14.[7] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces moved two battalion tactical groups (BTGs) to the north of Severodonetsk around Kremmina and Rubizhne (in Luhansk Oblast), but as ISW has previously assessed, these BTGs are unlikely to be functioning at full combat capacity.[8] A Russian Telegram channel additionally claimed that Russian forces have encircled Ukrainian troops within the Azot industrial plant, rendering evacuation or withdrawal from the plant impossible, though ISW cannot independently confirm this claim.[9] Russian forces have reportedly destroyed all three bridges spanning the Siverskyi Donets River from Severodonetsk to Lysychansk, indicating that Russian forces likely seek to isolate Ukrainian defenders in Severodonetsk from their critical lines of communication to complete the encirclement of the city, at the cost of preventing Russian forces from easily crossing the river themselves once they capture Severodonetsk.[10] Russian forces conducted continual artillery strikes against Severodonetsk-Lysychansk and the surrounding settlements of Privillya and Borivske.[11]
www.understandingwar.org/...
#Russia "has had more progress in the south" of
#Ukraine, per
@DOD_Policy
Russian gains-"To some degree that is true although the gains on any given day really measured in blocks" he says "They are not large, sweeping breakthroughs of Ukrainian defenses"
"There are significant casualties, but that is true on both sides" per
@DOD_Policy at
#CNAS2022 on
#Russia-
#Ukraine fighting
"The Ukrainians are taking casualties, The Russians are taking a lot of casualties, as well, & the front lines are not moving very much"
Vladimir Putin - "Our sense is that he has not changed his overall objectives" in
#Ukraine, per
@DOD_Policy
"He has been forced to recognize that they have to narrow their operational objectives to focusing on the east..."
#Putin in last few weeks, "There's a little bit of him saying the quiet out loud as it relate to his imperial ambitions" per
@DOD_Policy "I still think he has designs on a significant portion of
#Ukraine if not the whole country"
"I do not think he can achieve those objectives"
"The sense of the
#Ukrainian anxiety abt the artillery duel [in eastern
#Ukraine] is palpable" per
@DOD_Policy
"It is true that the
#Russia|ns have significantly more artillery capability" Kahl adds, saying that's bcs Ukraine was dependent on
#Soviet era artillery systems
"It's become more difficult" to resupply
#Ukraine with the artillery needed for those
#Soviet era systems" per
@DOD_Policy "So we made the transition to
@NatP standard artillery systems..."
On
#HIMAR systems, "the
#Ukrainians are completing training as we speak" per
@DOD_Policy "We expect those systems to et into the fight soon"
Inside
#Russia, "there are indications of more grumbling & finger-pointing" per
@DOD_Policy at
#CNAS2022
"I'm sure nobody relishes having to go in & brief
#Putin on how things are going"
"At the same time, Vladimir
#Putin controls the information ecosystem in
#Russia...Russian nationalism is real & there has been a rally around the flag effect" per
@DOD_Policy
"Putin, looking at his internal poll numbers, probably feels relatively confident in where he stands"
"Our goal is not regime change in
#Russia" per
@DOD_Policy
"Our goal... is to make sure
#Ukraine can defend itself" he says "That we give Ukraine the ability to strengthen their position at the bargaining table when inevitably the 2 sides sit down to talk abt how this all ends"
US also aiming ti impose a cost on
#Russia "to send a message to
#Putin that he shouldn't do this again & to send a message to other would-be aggressors that there would be a real cost if they try to this"
US National Defense Strategy - unclassified version could be released "in the coming weeks or months" per
@DOD_Policy
Will be at same time as the release of the National Security Strategy, per Kahl
#Russia or
#China bigger threat to the US?
"China is really the only country w/both the intent & the capability to systemically challenge the
#UnitedStates" per
@DOD_Policy at
#CNAS2022 "That is true not just for the moment but for the foreseeable future"
New US national defense strategy "identifies
#Russia essentially as an acute threat" per
@DOD_Policy
"Acute suggests both temporally, it's very immediate & sharp" per Kahl
#China &
#Russia-
#Ukraine
"If I'm sitting in
#Beijing, I think the fundamental question to draw is, if they were to commit an act of aggression sometime in the future, will the world react he way it did when China snuffed out democracy in
#HongKong..." per
@DOD_Policy
"... or will the world react more like they did in the case of
#Ukraine?" per
@DOD_Policy
"It's imperative for the leadership in
#Beijing to understand that where the world is now, the Ukraine scenario is a much more likely outcome"
#China looking at
#Russia-
#Ukraine - "I suspect they are surprised at the quality of US & Western intelligence relative to their own intelligence capabilities" per
@DOD_Policy
"They did not predict that Russia was going to do this...that was an intelligence failure for the PRC"
"I suspect they [
#China] are surprised by the degree to which the US & other democracies were effective in the information domain" per
@DOD_Policy
"[Chinese leadership] is very focused on winning the propaganda contest & shaping the information environment"
"I suspect [
#China] they're taking note of the
#Russia|ns on paper look like th 2nd best military in the world ... & yet the logistical difficulties, the difficulties w/morale" per
@DOD_Policy "and the tenacity of the
#Ukrainians to leverage asymmetric capabilities"
#China "in the midst of a breathtaking expansion of its
#nuclear arsenal" per
@DOD_Policy "Probably tripling or quadrupling its arsenal over the next decade"
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