The head of Ukraine’s military intelligence said his country will continue to fight until Russian forces are expelled from all of its territory, including Crimea and other areas that Moscow actually captured in 2014.
Major General Kirillo Budanov, 36, one of the architects of the country’s war effort, said in an interview with the newspaper:The Wall Street Journal“To accelerate Kyiv’s counterattack, Ukraine urgently needs medium and long-range missile systems, large-caliber artillery, and attack aircraft to balance the Russian forces.
He called on Western countries to hand over more shipments of these heavy weapons to his country. “We have already started an offensive at certain points, but a large-scale attack without these weapons would be very difficult,” Budanov said.
With peace negotiations between Moscow and Kiev stalled, the Ukrainian army pushed Russian forces back into the northeastern Kharkiv region, retaking a series of villages in recent days.
General Budanov said the army would shift its focus in the coming months to driving Russia out of the areas it had occupied in the south of the country as well as the eastern Donbass region.
On Thursday, the US Congress agreed to give Ukraine an additional $6 billion in military aid and $8.8 billion in economic aid to the Ukrainian government. In recent weeks, Washington has also delivered about 90 howitzers, the first large shipment of heavy weapons.
General Budanov estimated that at the current stage of the war, after Russia withdrew from Kyiv and other parts of northern Ukraine to focus on the capture of Donbass, Moscow had amassed 93 tactical battalions with about 141,000 soldiers, and these numbers include fighters from the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics that Moscow established outside Donbass in 2014.
Russia has also made slow but steady gains in the Donbass in recent days, particularly near the town of Popasna in the Luhansk region.
“They succeed in taking control of some areas and fail in others, but this does not matter at all because Russia will lose in the end and Ukraine will regain all its temporarily lost territory. It will do it by force, only by force, because there is no other way,” said the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence.
strategic defeat
General Budanov said the KGB operates a large network of agents in Russia and closely monitors President Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian leaders.
He pointed out that US intelligence briefed Kyiv on detailed information about the Russian invasion plans before the start of the war, and said that Ukraine had access to the deliberations that took place in Moscow through its own sources. “We had all their plans,” he continued.
It is believed that Russia has enough to continue the fighting until the end of the year at least. But he said the war was already a strategic defeat for Russia and its leader, Putin.
He continued, “Putin has reached a complete dead end. He cannot stop the war or win it. He cannot win for objective reasons. To stop this, he must admit that Russia is not at all the strong and great country that he wants to portray.”
Budanov emphasized that Putin faces a threat from within Russia once his inability to defeat Ukraine becomes clear. “If they (the Russians) finally realize that the Tsar is not as great as he pretends, this is a step toward destroying the state of Russia today,” he said.