(Paris) The war in Ukraine has entered its “third stage”, and the current Ukrainian military successes will have a “snowball effect” until the defeat of the Russian army, said Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov in an interview with World Monday.
Posted at 6:14 a.m.
Updated at 6:18 a.m.
“The counter-offensive campaign is the third stage,” Reznikov said as Kyiv forces are advancing rapidly through the eastern and southern parts of the country and claim to have recaptured 3,000 square km of territory since early September.
“The first step in the war was to deter the Russians. The second was to establish a balance between them and us on the front, to stabilize the front, and to test their capacities of resilience”, described the minister.
“Our staff designed a plan based on the weapons we received from our partners; we began by using Himars mobile artillery systems to cut the enemy’s logistic support lines, destroy their fuel, ammunition depots, etc. It was this third stage of the war that began in the South and in the North, in the districts of Kherson and Kharkiv,” he explains.
Ukraine’s objectives are the liberation of all occupied territories, “including Crimea (annexed in 2014, editor’s note), Luhansk and Donetsk (in eastern Donbass, editor’s note)”. “Our border guards will set up their posts on the Russian-Ukrainian border, where it was in 1991,” he says.
In addition to the “total liberation” of Ukrainian territories, Kyiv is calling for an “absolutely clear roadmap on the payment of reparations by the Russians and on the establishment of their responsibility for the war crimes” committed since the start of the invasion on February 24.
Asked about the possibility of a long war, Mr. Reznikiv refuses to make any predictions, but assures us: “It’s going to be like a snowball, it’s going to start rolling, rolling, rolling, and it’s going to become more and more bigger, bigger and bigger… And we will see the second army in the world beat a retreat”.