The United States Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, affirmed this Thursday, April 7, that the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, gave up taking kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, to focus on the separatist areas of Donbas.
“Putin thought that he could quickly take control of Ukraine, quickly take control of the capital. He was wrong,” he said. Austin during a hearing in the US Congress.
“I think that Putin has given up his efforts to capture the capital and is now focusing on the south and east of the country,” he added before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
However, the outcome of the war, which promises to be a long one, remains uncertain, said US Chief of Staff General Mark Milley.
“It will be a long-term job,” he said. “There is still a big battle ahead in the southeast, where the Russians intend to concentrate forces and continue their attack. So it remains to be seen how this will end,” he added.
Ukraine has received about 60,000 anti-tank systems from the United States and its allies, and the Ukrainian Army uses anti-personnel mines that force Russian soldiers to fight in areas where they are most vulnerable, General Milley said at the same hearing.
The West has also provided the Ukrainians with some 25,000 anti-aircraft systems of various kinds that have prevented Russia from taking control of Ukrainian airspace, the military man added.
Milley also pointed out that the Ukrainian Army is now asking for tanks and artillery to repel the next Russian offensive.
“The terrain (in the southeast) is different from the north. It is much more open and conducive to shielding operations from both sides,” he explained. “They could use more tanks and artillery, and that’s what they ask for,” he explained.
The defense minister appeared to acknowledge that the United States believed, at least at the beginning of the conflict, that Ukraine would not be able to regain control of the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk in Donbas, which is now Moscow’s declared target.
“We provide them with intelligence to conduct operations,” including in Donbas, he said.
But when asked explicitly by Cotton if this intelligence referred to the areas controlled since 2014 by pro-Russian separatists, he acknowledged that the instructions given to military analysts so far “were not clear.”
“We want to make sure that is clear to our forces,” he added. “That is the goal of today’s new instructions.”
US intelligence services had predicted war in Ukraine with remarkable accuracy, but had not anticipated fierce Ukrainian resistance. They feared that kyiv would fall within 48 hours and that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, would be immediately deposed and replaced by a pro-Russian regime.
Russia suffers defeat at the UN
The UN General Assembly suspended Russia from the Human Rights Council for the invasion of Ukraine, which denounced a new massacre in the kyiv region and asked for weapons to resist an imminent Russian offensive in the east of the country.
Russia considered that suspension to be “illegal”. The Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, instead expressed his gratitude and stated that “war criminals” cannot be represented in that UN body.
Meanwhile, the withdrawal of Russian troops from the kyiv region continues to reveal the ravages of the war. In Borodianka, northwest of the capital, 26 bodies were found in just two bombed-out buildings, Ukrainian authorities reported.
Zelensky denounced a situation in that city “much more horrible than in Bucha”, where dozens of bodies in civilian clothes were found scattered around the city over the weekend. Ukraine attributes the deaths to the occupation forces, but Russia says they were staged.
*With information from AFP.
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