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Official says Kyiv is seeking to ‘stretch the enemy’ and western partners were ‘indirectly’ involved
Thousands of Ukrainian troops are taking part in an incursion aiming to destabilise Russia by showing up the country’s weaknesses, a top official from Ukraine has said as the assault entered its sixth day.
“We are on the offensive. The aim is to stretch the positions of the enemy, to inflict maximum losses and to destabilise the situation in Russia as they are unable to protect their own border,” the security official said on condition of anonymity.
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After days of official silence, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, acknowledged the offensive for the first time on Saturday, saying that Kyiv was “pushing the war into the aggressor’s territory”.
Frankly, just getting to fight in an area of the front where you can set all the terms must be very liberating. Sure, they could have deployed those troops to the east, where they’d slowly get ground down trying to stop the Russians from inching forward. But being able to go back to some maneuver warfare, take significant numbers of prisoners and make Putin look bad is definitely nice.
This action will probably reduce pressure on the defensive lines in Ukraine, too, as Putin has to redeploy troops the defend Kursk and any supply lines that run through it.
Although Ukraine is being very quiet about all of this, if you listen to the interviews and read between the lines it basically sounds like they were saying the original point of the incursion was to cutoff supply lines. It also seemed that the mission has evolved after the original goal was accomplished…