(Kyiv) Ukraine ruled 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, including F-16 fighter jets.
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,” Oleksandr Syrsky, the head of the Ukrainian army, announced 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 vicinity of “Kopiansk, Pokorvsk, Kurakhové and Vremivka”, located on the Eastern Front, while “fierce fighting” continues in the East and South.
The prosecutor of the southern Kherson region, 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 shelled civilian infrastructure in the Poltava region,” the official said on his Telegram channel, explaining that “several buildings were damaged.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has, for several months, continually requested systems to protect the Ukrainian skies from his Western partners, but these only arrive in trickles.
He also estimated in May in an interview with AFP that his country needed “120 to 130” F-16 fighter planes or other modern aircraft, “so that Russia does not have superiority in the air” .
Ukraine announced on Monday that power outages would worsen until the end of July, following a series of Russian strikes on its energy infrastructure.
Moscow has launched a bombing campaign in recent months, targeting Ukraine’s main electricity production and distribution centers and destroying, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky, half of the country’s energy capacity.
“In the coming weeks, the situation will be much more difficult than it is today,” warned Volodymyr Kudrytskiï, director of the national operator, Ukrenergo.
According to the energy supplier, maintenance work at nuclear power plants, bad weather and insufficient electricity imports will intensify already existing shortages, forecasting up to 12 hours of outages per day.
Mr. Kudrytskiy specified that this “situation will continue until the end of July.”
Kyiv had been forced to call on its European neighbors to import electricity to make up for the deficits in the damaged network.
Energy security and the restoration of Ukraine’s electricity grid was one of 10 points in President Zelensky’s peace plan, discussed at the peace summit in Switzerland last weekend, to which Russia was not invited.
The first campaign of Russian strikes specifically targeting energy sites left millions of Ukrainians without power, water and heating in freezing temperatures in the winter of 2022-2023.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday appointed 12 new deputy defense ministers, including a cousin, in the midst of a purge targeting generals and officials arrested for corruption following the departure of the historic Sergei Shoigu.
The first wave of changes came in mid-May, when the Kremlin leader, a few days after his inauguration for a fifth term, replaced Mr Shoigu, in office since 2012, with an economist with no military experience, Andrei Belousov.
Vladimir Putin had justified this surprise cabinet reshuffle by the need to “optimize” military spending, which has exploded to support the needs of the army in Ukraine.
Since then, at least five generals or officials, including relatives of the former minister, have been arrested for corruption, illustrating the rise in power of technocrats within the Kremlin’s military apparatus.
Among the twelve deputy ministers appointed Monday by presidential decree, there is notably Anna Tsiviliova, a cousin of Vladimir Putin, under European and British sanctions. However, the relationship has not been officially confirmed in Russia.
She was until then at the head of the important Defenders of the Fatherland Fund, set up in 2023 by the Russian president, whose aim is officially “to provide personalized social support to veterans” of the conflict in Ukraine and “ to the families of soldiers who died or died as a result of their injuries.”
Ms. Tsiviliova will notably be responsible for all issues relating to social assistance for military personnel and their housing, according to the Ministry of Defense.
