© KEYSTONE/AP/ALEXANDER ZEMLIANICHENKO JR
Russia has stepped up air and naval operations in Ukraine in the face of resistance from Ukrainian forces, a senior Pentagon official said Monday. The Ukrainian army continues to slow down the advance of the Russian soldiers.
“Over the past 24 to 48 hours, we have seen an increase in air activity from both sides,” said the senior official, who requested anonymity. “The Russians have carried out more than 300 sorties in the last 24 hours and the Ukrainians have also accelerated the pace of their sorties”, he added, without quantifying the sorties of the Ukrainian aviation, which is much less important than the Russian Air Force.
These operations do not manifest themselves in dogfights, he said. The Russian Air Force tends to fire air-to-surface missiles at Ukrainian targets from Russian or Belarusian airspace. “They don’t venture very far or very long into Ukrainian airspace”, which the Ukrainians defend “with great dexterity”, he said.
Missiles hypersoniques
“We have seen an increase in naval activity in the northern Black Sea,” the US Department of Defense official also said. “The Russians have just over a dozen warships” in this area, including amphibious ships, combat ships, minesweepers and patrol boats. “We believe that at least one of the bombardments of Odessa” comes from this area, he explained.
“We believe it would be wrong to conclude that this is a sign that Odessa is under imminent threat from an amphibious assault,” he said.
The Pentagon is unable to confirm that Russia fired hypersonic missiles at Ukraine as Moscow claimed. But even if that were the case, “from a military point of view, it does not have a great practical interest” to use such long-range missiles on such close targets, according to this senior official.
The explanation “might be that they don’t have a lot of precision-guided missiles left and they need to resort to that resource,” he noted. “It is also possible that they are trying to send a message to the West, but also to Ukraine to try to have an advantage at the negotiating table.”
But overall, “what we see is a desperate attempt by the Russians to regain momentum and turn this all in their favor”, he concluded. On the 26th day of the offensive, Russian forces remain stuck 15 km northwest of kyiv and 30 km east of the capital, he noted.