- Author, Hugo Bachega
- Role, BBC News
- Reporting from Kiev
Oleksii Reznikov said he believed Russia was trying to muster forces and weapons for a new offensive in the south and east.
According to the Ukrainian Defense Minister, Ukraine has become a de facto member of the NATO alliance. Western countries, which once feared that military assistance would be seen as an escalation from Russia, have changed their “thinking approach”.
In an interview with the BBC, Oleksii Reznikov said he was sure Ukraine would receive long-sought weapons, including tanks and fighter jets, as Ukraine and Russia appear to be preparing for more. new offensives in the spring.
“This concern about the next level of escalation, for me, is kind of a protocol,” Reznikov explained.
“Ukraine as a country, and the Ukrainian Armed Forces, have become [un] member of NATO. De facto, not de jure (by law). Because we have weapons, and we know how to use them.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has presented his invasion of Ukraine as an existential battle against Western countries that want to weaken Russia.
Russian figures have claimed they are fighting NATO in Ukraine because the West has supplied the country with weapons in what they call a war of aggression.
For years, Ukraine has sought to join the military alliance between the United States, Canada and 28 European countries, which President Vladimir Putin has described as a security threat to Russia.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has pushed for early membership, but it’s unclear whether alliance members will seriously consider full membership even after the war ends, despite pledges of support .
Article 5 of the NATO treaty stipulates that an armed attack against one member must be considered an attack against all.
Mr. Reznikov, however, denied that his comments were considered controversial, not only by Russia, but possibly also by NATO itself, since the alliance had taken steps not to be considered a party to the conflict.
“Why [cela serait] controversial ? It’s the truth. It’s a fact,” Reznikov said. “I’m sure that in the near future we will become a member of NATO, de jure.”
Photo credit, Archyde.com
Soledar, a small town in the eastern Donetsk region, is the scene of the most intense fighting of the war.
The defense minister spoke in the capital, Kyiv, as Ukrainian and Russian forces continued to fight for the small town of Soledar in the eastern Donetsk region in some of the most intense battles of the war which has been going on for almost 11 months.
The Russian offensive is led by the mercenary Wagner Group, whose founder, Putin’s longtime ally Yevgeny Prigozhin, has become a vocal critic of the Russian military’s performance in Ukraine.
On Tuesday, Mr. Prigozhin claimed that his fighters had taken control of the city, a claim that was denied by Ukraine and, remarkably, by the Kremlin, in what was seen as a rebuff to Mr. Prigozhin.
The situation in Soledar was “very difficult”, Mr Reznikov said, but “under control”. He said Wagner fighters were being used in “wave after wave after wave” of attacks, resulting in a high death toll, and that Mr Prigozhin was interested in the possible economic benefits of taking the city, which is home to the most major salt mines in Europe.
“They will make money from blood,” he said.
Soledar is about 10 km from Bakhmut, a strategic town where Ukrainian and Russian forces have been engaged in a months-long war of attrition that has caused massive destruction and heavy casualties on both sides. There, Wagner mercenaries were also deployed in large numbers, and Mr. Prigozhin reportedly made the capture of Bakhmut a personal goal.
The group, Mr. Reznikov said, “must provide some kind of evidence to declare that it is better than the regular armed forces of the Russian Federation.” If captured, Bakhmut could pave the way for a Russian push towards Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, two Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk, an area that has been a key target for President Putin.
Any gain would, more than anything else, be of extreme symbolic value to Russia. They would come after a series of humiliating setbacks, including a chaotic withdrawal from the northeastern Kharkiv region and the withdrawal from the southern city of Kherson, the only regional capital that Russian forces have known during the war. war.
Mr Reznikov claimed that “about 500 or 600” Russian fighters were killed every day in the country, while Ukraine lost a tenth, figures which could not be independently verified. He thinks Russia could try to gather “forces, ammunition and weapons” for an offensive from the areas it already occupies in the south and east.
Ukraine, meanwhile, needed time to regroup and rearm while awaiting the delivery of Western weapons. “Spring is the best time to refresh the movement for all parties,” he said. “We understand that they will be ready to start and, surely, we have to be ready to start”.
However, he did not repeat the claim that Russia could be planning another invasion from Belarus, a warning that was dismissed by the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency. Movement from the north, Mr. Reznikov pointed out, “would take a long time and they [les Russes] have no resources”.
Mr Reznikov spoke a day after the Russian Defense Ministry replaced the commander of its forces in Ukraine, a surprise announcement that was seen as a sign of a power struggle. General Valery Gerasimov, one of the architects of last year’s invasion, would take over the post held by General Sergei Surovikin, who was appointed in October.
According to Mr. Reznikov, this change is the result of the “conflict between Mr. Prigozhin and the armed forces of the Russian Federation”. General Surovikin oversaw recent brutal attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure which, according to Mr Reznikov, have “depleted stockpiles of missiles [russes] without any results”, repeating a Ukrainian claim that “they are out of missiles”.
As Poland and Britain revealed plans to deliver battle tanks for the first time, Reznikov said he was certain Ukraine would receive “tanks, fighter jets or jets , as well as long-range weapons to hit targets 300 km away”, because “things are changing” in Western countries.
He dismissed concerns that the announcements could trigger a Russian response, despite now-familiar threats from Moscow. “I have a war in my country,” he said. “They are hitting my cities, my hospital, my kindergartens, my schools. They have killed a lot of civilians, a lot of civilians. This is an army of rapists, murderers and looters. What is the next level of escalation ?”
Additional reporting by Mohamed Madi, Hanna Tsyba and Robbie Wright.