Ukraine judged on Monday that Russia was intensifying its attacks on the Eastern Front to “maximize the exhaustion of Ukrainian troops”, before the arrival of Western military aid, in particular F-16 fighter planes.
Russian forces have, in recent months, gained ground in the border regions of Donetsk and Kharkiv, thanks to a shortage of men and ammunition in Ukraine.
“The command of the Russian troops is currently doing everything possible to increase and expand the intensity of hostilities in order to maximize the exhaustion of our troops,” announced Oleksandr Syrsky, the head of the Ukrainian army, on his Telegram channel.
According to the latter, Moscow is aware that “time will play a role” in kyiv’s favor, with the receipt of a “significant quantity of weapons and equipment” from its allies, including American F-16 fighters, supposed to strengthen Ukrainian air defense.
The Ukrainian commander specifies that Russian forces are concentrating their efforts in the surroundings of “Kupiansk, Pokorvsk, Kurakhové and Vremivka”, located on the Eastern front, while “fierce fighting” continues in the East and South.
The prosecutor of the southern region of Kherson, partially occupied by Moscow, announced Monday that a 50-year-old man had been killed by an “explosive dropped from a drone.”
The same day, nine people were injured in a Russian bombing that hit the Poltava region, in the center-east of the country, according to Filip Pronin, its governor.
“Today the enemy bombed civilian infrastructure in the Poltava region,” the official said on his Telegram channel, explaining that “several buildings were damaged.”
The Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has for several months been constantly asking his Western partners for systems to protect the Ukrainian skies, but these are only arriving in trickles.
He also estimated in May in an interview with AFP that his country needed “120 to 130” F-16 combat planes or other modern aircraft, “so that Russia does not have superiority in the air” .