Ukraine has a six-month window in which to wrest the initiative on the battlefield from Russia and strengthen its position for peace talks. A top Ukrainian military commander said this, predicting that a turning point is imminent after more than four years of war, writes Dan Peleshchuk for Reuters.
Russian forces have made significant progress since their full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, but their progress has slowed this year. Ukrainian troops are increasing pressure on the battlefield to try to push them back.
Brigadier General Andriy Biletsky, commander of Ukraine's Third Army Corps, one of Ukraine's most respected fighting forces, told Reuters he believed the Russian army was exhausted and unable to make major breakthroughs.
If the Ukrainian military can build and maintain momentum for several months, they could seize the initiative on the front line and force Russia to abandon its plans for the last part of Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine that it has not yet occupied, he said.
"I believe the next six to nine months are a turning point," Biletsky said at an undisclosed underground location in the northeastern Kharkiv region. "More precisely, I think the next six are the most critical," he said.
The question of who controls Donetsk is a stumbling block in the stalled U.S.-backed peace talks. Russia wants the entire region, and Ukraine refuses to withdraw from territory that Moscow's troops have not captured.
"We need to identify areas where we can improve our positions, take some strategic points, and then talk to the Russians from a position of strength, not weakness, for a truly stable ceasefire," said Biletsky, a right-wing political leader who founded the battle-hardened Azov battalion and now commands tens of thousands of soldiers. He said that from a military perspective, it was realistic.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to achieve victory in Ukraine and said this month that he believed the war was coming to an end.
Russia’s progress has been hampered by billionaire Elon Musk’s decision to deny Moscow’s forces access to his Starlink satellite internet service. Meanwhile, Kiev has stepped up medium-range drone attacks on Russian air defenses and logistics, helping more long-range strikes reach Russian oil and military facilities.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said last week that Ukraine had regained nearly 600 square kilometers of territory by 2026. Reuters was unable to confirm that. Moscow currently controls almost a fifth of Ukraine.
Assessing the military situation, John Helin of the Finland-based conflict analysis group Black Bird echoed Biletsky, saying fatigue was a problem for Russian forces, while Ukraine's military efforts were hampered by manpower shortages. "It seems that four or five months into this year, it is much more likely that the Russians will be exhausted before the Ukrainian problems reach a critical point," he said.
The US-based Institute for the Study of War reported that Kiev's forces are now "actively challenging the positional nature of the war" and could soon be capable of conducting limited mechanized attacks.
Russian troops are advancing towards the "Fortress Belt" in eastern Ukraine, where fighting is raging in the strategically important town of Konstantinovka, its southern edge. The constellation of heavily fortified towns is a bulwark of Ukraine’s defenses. Taking it would put Russia in a position to threaten the rest of Donbas.
Biletsky, whose forces hold more than a tenth of the total front line, said his troops were holding the flank around Slavyansk, the northern bastion of the belt, forcing Russia to attack the city head-on.
Such costly attacks have helped to exhaust Russian forces and have led to heavy losses among field commanders, he said, in what he described as a professional degradation of Moscow’s military. "The lack of personnel no longer allows them to advance in the way they did, for example, a year ago," Biletsky noted.
Biletsky believes it is too early to draw conclusions from Kiev’s recent success, but that Ukraine can benefit from it by continuing medium-range attacks and advancing cautiously. Moscow is "radically losing" in battlefield communications due to Musk's measures against the use of Starlink, claims Biletsky.
But he described the countries as equals in emerging technologies - with Ukraine leading in unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and heavy bombers, and Russia winning the race for optical drones that cannot be jammed.
As a potential blueprint for a modernized Ukrainian army, his corps is leading efforts to transform training and integrate new technologies such as UAVs as a key part of its combat strategy. Biletsky's units are leading the way in deploying stealthy suicide drones and robots armed with machine guns or rocket launchers to replace a significant portion of the infantry, with a goal of 30 percent by 2027.
The next "revolution" will allow commanders to organize more "creative" combined assault operations while preserving valuable troops, Biletsky said. "This will happen this year and I think we will show how our corps is a shining example of this", he added.