Gromov’s statement is the first accurate information provided by Ukrainian authorities about a shock counter-offensive in the northeast that Russian troops appear to be unfairly holding, while attention has focused on a separate Ukrainian effort to retake land around the southern port of Kherson and isolating Russian troops there.
Although the counterattack in Kharkiv has been covered by Russian and Ukrainian bloggers and witnesses posting on social media in recent days, the Ukrainian leadership and military command have declined to comment publicly. On Wednesday night, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said only: “This week we have good news from the Kharkiv region,” but warned that “now is not the time to name the settlements where the Ukrainian flag has returned.”
On Thursday, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told Germany that while Russian forces continue to “brutally bombard Ukrainian cities and civilians with missiles and artillery fire”, Ukrainian forces have “started their counter-offensive in the south of their country”. .
“The face of war is changing,” he added, without giving any detailed assessment of the operation.
The Russian Ministry of Defense refrained from commenting on the situation regarding the northeastern counteroffensive of Ukraine. However, a key Russian protagonist in the 2014 uprising in Ukraine’s eastern Donbass region, Igor Girkin, said Kyiv “has achieved operational success in its main line of attack,” referring to the Kharkiv operations.
The lightning advance of Ukrainian troops is underway northwest of Izyum, a town with a pre-war population of 46,000 that is of strategic logistical importance to Russia’s operations in Donbas.
According to the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv region are “likely taking advantage of the redeployment of Russian forces” to the south “to launch an opportunistic but highly effective counterattack.”
Meanwhile, top Ukrainian military officials on Wednesday released their long-term forecasts for war with Russia, including possible future scenarios.
Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and Mykhailo Zabrodskyi, first deputy chairman of the National Security, Defense and Intelligence Committee of the Ukrainian parliament, believe the war will continue until 2023.
According to their analysis, Russian troops are still chasing openings to sweep into the south of the country and seize the key ports of Odessa and Mykolaiv – effectively turning Ukraine into a landlocked country and depriving it of its ability to export through the Black Sea Sea.
“Revised plans to gain control of Kiev and the threat of a new invasion from the territory of the Republic of Belarus cannot be ruled out either,” Zaluzhnyi and Zabrodskyi said.
They argued that Ukraine’s strategic goal next year should be to liberate Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, which “was and remains the base for supply routes to the southern strategic flank of Russian aggression.”
“It is reasonable to assume that we are planning for 2023 an operation or a series of operations to reclaim the peninsula,” they said, adding that such a push would require a huge force. “Preparing an offensive campaign requires Ukraine to form one or more operational (operational-strategic) force groups consisting of 10 to 20 combined arms brigades, depending on the intent and ambitions of the Ukrainian command.”
Closely watching Russian President Vladimir Putin’s possible reaction, the Ukrainians also sketched a more worrisome scenario of the Kremlin resorting to tactical nuclear weapons.
“It is hard to imagine that even nuclear strikes will allow Russia to break Ukraine’s will to resist. But the resulting threat to the whole of Europe cannot be ignored. “The possibility of the world’s leading powers being directly involved in a ‘limited’ nuclear conflict, bringing the prospect of World War III closer, cannot be completely ruled out,” the two wrote.
