WESTERN PERSPECTIVE

Ukraine says Russians fail to advance but are well dug in

Russian forces have made no headway along the front lines, but are entrenched in heavily mined areas they control, making it difficult for Ukrainian troops to move east and south, Ukrainian officials said on Wednesday.

Russian accounts of the fighting on the frontline said 12 Ukrainian attacks had been repelled in Donetsk region - a focal point of Russian advances for months.

Much of Russian military activity focused on air attacks that damaged grain infrastructure in Ukraine's Danube port of Izmail. Russia's Defence Ministry also said its forces had destroyed a Ukrainian naval drone that tried to attack a Russian warship escorting a civilian vessel in the Black Sea.

Ukrainian forces launched a drive in June to retake occupied areas and have been pressing southward toward the Sea of Azov to sever a land bridge between occupied eastern Ukraine and the Russian-annexed Crimean peninsula.

Kyiv also says it has retaken areas near Bakhmut, an eastern city seized by Russian forces in May after months of battles.

Deputy Ukrainian Defence Minister Hanna Maliar said Russian forces had "tried quite persistently to halt our advance in the Bakhmut sector. Without success."

Russian forces, she wrote on the Telegram messaging app, were beefing up reserves and equipment in three areas further north, where heavy fighting has also been reported in recent weeks.

Oleksiy Danilov, the Secretary of Ukraine's Security Council, said Russian forces had ample time in months of occupation to prepare defences and lay extensive minefields.

"The enemy has prepared very thoroughly for these events," he told national television. "The number of mines on the territory that our troops have retaken is utterly mad. On average, there are three, four, five mines per square metre."Danilov restated assertions by President Volodymyr Zeleskiy that the advances, while slower than hoped, could not be rushed as human lives were at stake.

"No one can set deadlines for us, except ourselves... there is no fixed schedule," he said. "I have never used the term counter-offensive. There are military operations and they are complex difficult and depend on many factors."

Russia's Defence Minister, in its account of the fighting,

said Ukrainian forces had made unsuccessful attempts to advance in several sectors in both southern and northern parts of Donetsk region.

It also said Russian forces had launched strikes on towns around Bakhmut, including Kurdyumovka on the city's southern fringes and Chasiv Yar, the first major town to the west.

** Ukrainians forced to become Russian citizens, US-backed research finds

Ukrainians living in Russian-occupied territory are being forced to assume Russian citizenship or face harsh retaliation, including possible deportation or detention, U.S.-backed research published on Wednesday said.

Yale University researchers said that as part of a plan by Moscow to assert authority over Ukrainians, residents of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions are being targeted by a systematic effort to strip them of Ukrainian identity.

A series of decrees signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin compel Ukrainians to get Russian passports, in violation of international humanitarian law, the report said.

The Kremlin has consistently denied allegations of war crimes in Ukraine by forces taking part in a "special military operation" it says was launched to "de-Nazify" its neighbour and protect Russia.

Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin said in May that Moscow has given passports to almost 1.5 million people living in the annexed parts of Ukraine's Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions since last October.

Ukrainians in occupied territory who do not seek Russian citizenship "are subjected to threats, intimidation, restrictions on humanitarian aid and basic necessities, and possible detention or deportation – all designed to force them to become Russian citizens," the report said.

"What is concerning here is that it represents, basically, a violation of the Hague and Geneva Conventions," said Executive Director Nathaniel Raymond of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health. "It is very widespread and very ongoing."

Ukrainians in areas under Russian control have no choice but to accept a Russian passport if they want to survive, or they face potential detention and, as the team has documented, deportation into Russia if they fail to comply," Raymond said.

Responsibility lies at the Kremlin with Putin, who has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC) on charges of deporting Ukrainian children and occupation authorities, he said.

The Kremlin has said that the ICC's decision to issue an arrest warrant for Putin is a sign of the "clear hostility" that exists against Russia and against Putin personally.

The report was released as part of the Conflict Observatory program, with the support of the U.S. State Department and conducted by research partner the Yale School of Public Health's Humanitarian Research Lab.

RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE

West’s plan to cancel Russia going nowhere — Putin

The policy of the Kiev regime and its Western handlers, who seek to destroy everything related to Russia, has no future, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with members of the government.

Touching upon the integration of Russia’s new regions into Russian culture, Putin pointed out, "Strictly speaking, the inhabitants of those new regions have never left this space, as they cherish their native language and have a great interest in Russia’s great heritage of literature. I know that they love the works of our prominent compatriots."

"And this is despite all the attempts of the current Ukrainian authorities to ban Russian classics and contemporary books, to remove them from shops and libraries, and on top of that, to wipe them out. Both they and their Western handlers daydream about doing this to everything or everyone who thinks, speaks or reads in Russian," the president stated.

In his opinion, "such a policy has never had and will never have any future."

"And the people have responded unambiguously," the president said, recalling how people from the four regions had voted on joining Russia.

"The Russian lands of Donbass and Novorossiya since time immemorial have returned home, have come back into the fold. We are rebuilding them step by step, establishing peaceful life in the liberated territories, including in the cultural and educational fields," Putin said.

** Ukraine giving up on Western battle tactics – NYT

The Ukrainian military is abandoning the battle tactics of its Western trainers and returning to a strategy of longer-range stand-offs against Russian forces, the New York Times reported on Wednesday. However, it remains unclear whether Kiev has enough ammunition to sustain such a plan.

Since it began in early June, Ukraine’s ongoing counteroffensive has been acknowledged by officials in Washington and Kiev as disappointingly slow at best, and a failure at worst. Attacking through Russian minefields without air support, Ukraine’s Western-supplied tanks and armored vehicles have been picked off by Russian aviation and artillery, and Moscow estimates that the offensive has cost Kiev at least 30,000 men.

At the forefront of the offensive were Ukraine’s nine NATO-trained brigades, one of which – the 47th Mechanized Brigade – reportedly lost 30% of its American-made Bradley Infantry Fighting vehicles in two weeks.

In response to these losses, “Ukrainian military commanders have changed tactics, focusing on wearing down the Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles instead of plunging into minefields under fire,” the New York Times wrote, citing “US officials and independent analysts.”

With training times limited, the Ukrainians struggled to put NATO-standard combined arms tactics into practice, the newspaper noted, citing incidents where one Ukrainian unit strayed from a safe path into a minefield, and another where an infantry unit failed to follow an artillery bombardment with an assault on Russian lines, giving the Russian defenders adequate time to prepare a counterattack.

American military planners began training Ukrainian troops in maneuver warfare in a bid to conserve ammunition. “As they place more emphasis on maneuver… there’s a good chance that they’ll require less artillery munitions,” US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin explained in February. 

Although NATO military doctrine typically assumes that maneuver warfare will be conducted after Western forces have established air superiority, Ukraine launched its counteroffensive lacking this critical component of the strategy. Nevertheless, Western officials and media outlets heralded Ukraine’s new NATO playbook as a “hidden advantage” that would help “give Ukrainian forces the agility and speed they need to overcome Russia’s preferred war of attrition and to recapture Russian-occupied territory,” according to Foreign Affairs magazine.

The fact that this did not happen “raises questions about the quality of the training the Ukrainians received from the West and about whether tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons…have been successful in transforming the Ukrainian military into a NATO-standard fighting force,”the Times wrote.

With the Ukrainian military apparently returning to an artillery-heavy fighting style, the issue of ammunition will likely return to the forefront. US stockpiles are already depleted to the point where Washington is sending cluster munitions instead of NATO-standard 155mm shells, and the Times stated that by burning through its limited ammo, Ukraine risks “disadvantage” in a “war of attrition.”

** US frustrated with Zelensky – CNBC

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky’s conduct is a source of annoyance in Washington, CNBC reported on Wednesday. Zelensky angers his American backers by ignoring their orders and issuing ever-greater demands, anonymous officials told the network.

Zelensky lashed out at NATO leadership before the bloc's summit in Lithuania last month, claiming it was “unprecedented and absurd” that the US-led bloc hadn’t offered Ukraine a timeline for membership. His outburst “did not really resonate well in Washington,” an anonymous source “with knowledge of the matter” told the American broadcaster. “The US administration was very annoyed.”

The incident drew sharp criticism from the normally-supportive UK, and left Washington so “furious” that it considered withdrawing its support for Ukraine’s eventual membership, the Washington Post reported.

CNBC’s source said that the pre-summit incident was one of several clashes between Washington and Kiev that have taken place since the conflict with Russia began last year. 

“So the US is strongly advising Ukraine not to do certain things, but Kiev does them anyway, brushing aside or not addressing US concerns,” the source said. “And [then] they come at the United States, or Washington or the Biden administration, complaining about not being involved in NATO talks.”

The battle for the Donbass city of Artyomovsk (known as Bakhmut in Ukraine) was a source of major tension between Zelensky and the US, pro-Ukraine military analyst Konrad Muzyka told CNBC.

“The Americans were encouraging, to put it mildly, the Ukrainians not to fight certain battles in the way that Russia wanted them to fight, as it could have long-term consequences in terms of manpower losses and artillery ammunition expenditure,” Muzyka explained. However, Zelensky insisted on trying to defend the city in the face of mounting casualties, before Wagner Group fighters declared it captured in May.

“The result is that they’ve lost a lot of men,” Muzyka said. “They expended a lot of artillery munitions, which would otherwise be used for this counteroffensive, and lastly, they burned out a lot of barrels for their guns, meaning they are unable to fully support their forces in the Bakhmut area.”

By the time Kiev did launch its counteroffensive against Russian forces in June, the US knew the Ukrainian military was unprepared. Zelensky first insisted that his troops would penetrate Russian lines and cut Russian forces’ access to Crimea. When the battle began to slow as Washington knew it would, he then lashed out at his Western patrons for apparently not providing enough weapons and ammunition to ensure success. 

“As long as the war continues, nothing can be enough,” Zelensky told Brazil’s Globo News broadcaster last week.