The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army, Valery Zaluzhny, said on Thursday he expected a new Russian attack on Kyiv in the very first months of 2023, while the fighting has been concentrated for several months in the East and the South. from Ukraine.
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“A very important strategic task for us is to create reserves and prepare for war, which can take place in February, at best in March, and in the worst case at the end of January,” Zalouzhny said in a statement. interview with the British weekly The Economist.
“I have no doubt that they will try again to take Kyiv,” he said.
The commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian army affirmed, in this interview, “to have made all the calculations: how many tanks, artillery we need and so on” to repel this possible offensive.
At the end of February, the Russian army had launched the invasion of Ukraine, with the objective of quickly taking Kyiv by its troops launched in particular from neighboring Belarus, to the north.
The Russian forces had been kept a few tens of kilometers from the Ukrainian capital, before withdrawing completely from the region at the end of March-beginning of April, a victory for the Ukrainian army.
For Mr. Zaloujny, another current “problem” for his army is to “hold the line” of the current front, which extends from South to East, “and not to lose any more ground”, after having chased the Russians in September from the Kharkiv region (northeast) and Kherson in early November (south).
According to the head of the Ukrainian army, the Russians have also been bombing the country’s energy infrastructure since October after a series of humiliating setbacks, because “they need time” to “gather their human and military resources” in order to a new major offensive in the coming months.
The national energy network is “on a wire”, he also noted to The Economist, judging “possible” that it will be completely out of use by new Russian missile and drone strikes.
These strikes cause major power outages across the country on a daily basis, leaving several million Ukrainians in the cold and in the dark, in the middle of winter.