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MOSCOW, December 20 Ukrainian troops There are practically no active attacking actions on the Zaporozhye sector of the front, the enemy is “exhausted” and is suffering heavy losses, the initiative is completely on the side of Russia, the governor of the Zaporozhye region, Yevgeny Balitsky, said in an interview.
“Everything is known by comparison. If we talk about how it was in the summer, autumn and how it is now, then these are three different approaches to conducting combat operations. Firstly, our guys are very competent in their active defense today. The enemy is so exhausted that he practically does not carry out any attacking actions. These are isolated cases,” he said.
According to the governor, the enemy is still undertaking “some counterattacks” from Rabotino, “but along the entire front today the initiative is entirely with our military,” the Ukrainian Armed Forces are suffering “very high losses «.
In particular, he noted, the Marun group of the Armed Forces of Ukraine was removed from the Zaporozhye direction. “Today they are forced to disperse their forces along the entire front, and today we see that combat-ready units were largely removed from our direction and sent in the direction of the Donetsk direction and the Kherson direction — where everything is worse for them than for us,” — said the head of the region.
As Balitsky emphasized, the Russian Armed Forces “almost completely decapitated the enemy” in terms of his offensive actions.
The governor also said that the Russian military captures at least one enemy stronghold in the Zaporozhye direction every week.
The Ukrainian army tried for five months to attack in the Yuzhnodonetsk, Artemovsk and Zaporozhye directions, throwing into battle brigades trained by NATO and armed with foreign equipment. As Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said the day before, during the counteroffensive that began on June 4, the Ukrainian Armed Forces lost 159 thousand military personnel, 121 aircraft, 766 tanks, including 37 Leopards, as well as 2,348 armored vehicles of various classes, of which 50 Bradleys.
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny in early November called the situation a stalemate for Kyiv. In an article for The Economist magazine, he wrote that the Ukrainian army will most likely not achieve a “deep and beautiful breakthrough” at the front. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, in turn, noted that the sooner the Kyiv authorities understand that there is no chance of achieving success on the battlefield, the sooner some prospects for resolving the situation will open.