The Pentagon warned Thursday that despite the successes of Ukrainian forces in Kharkiv, the Russian army is managing to tighten its control over Donbass and the south of the country, which means that the conflict could last for a long time.
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Russian forces continue to have problems with cohesion, troop morale and logistics, a senior US Department of Defense official told reporters, without confirming the purges within the Russian military command mentioned by London.
But “we will remain very cautious in our predictions,” he added.
“We are absolutely determined to do everything to help the Ukrainians defend themselves, including by training them in the use of the capacities that we provide to them”, continued this senior official who requested anonymity.
“They behave very well on the battlefield, they don’t have cohesion problems, they don’t have command problems, their logistics and supply are really historic,” he added.
AFP
“But the Russians still have at their disposal a significant part of the capacities which they had amassed since the autumn” on the borders of Ukraine, he underlined.
“Fighting ability is not enough to win a war: you have to have the will to fight, you need a good command,” he noted. But despite all this, “we continue to believe that this conflict will last”.
The Russian army, which is now focusing its efforts on southern Ukraine to build a land bridge linking Russian territory with the Crimean peninsula annexed in 2014, took control of the port of Mariupol after the surrender of Ukrainian soldiers who were defending the site of Azovstal.