(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 favor of Kyiv, with the receipt of a “significant quantity of weapons and equipment” from its allies, including the F-16 planes, supposed 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 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.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has, for several months, continually requested systems to protect the Ukrainian skies from his Western partners, but these have been arriving in dribs and drabs.
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 cuts would worsen until the end of July, after 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 Kudrytskyi, head 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.
