Ukrainian intelligence and open-source data indicate that Russian President Vladimir Putin has no plans to end the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said. "There are no signs that peace or diplomatic efforts are being considered at all. On the contrary, there is ample evidence that they are preparing a new offensive,” Zelensky added.
A little earlier, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced that Ukraine’s Western allies had lifted the ban on using long-range weapons against targets in Russia.
Increasingly powerful strikes and shifts along the front
Zelensky’s address comes after several days of extremely intense Russian attacks on Ukraine and responses from Ukrainian forces.
According to the Ukrainian General Staff, the country continues to be under pressure on the front line. The army’s report from Monday evening mentioned 141 Russian offensives during the day. More than a third of them – 53 – were launched by Russian troops in the Pokrovsk region. The city, which had a pre-war population of about 60,000, is considered strategically important because of its location and has been under attack by Russian forces for months. Pokrovsk is now almost completely destroyed. However, the Russians have made little progress there.
Military analysts have also observed a shift of Russian military equipment towards Sumy Oblast. The decision by the Russian military command to redirect units away from this effort suggests that the Russian military may try to simultaneously continue the advance in Donetsk Oblast and create a buffer zone in the northern Chernihiv, Sumy and Kharkiv Oblasts, notes the American think tank "Institute for the Study of War" (ISW).
Putin recently organized a meeting with Russian officials at which the idea of creating a buffer zone at least 25 km wide in the northern part of Sumy Oblast was raised, and in May 2024 Putin has ordered Russian forces to create a buffer zone in the northern part of the Kharkiv region, ISW recalls. Thus, the Russian president wants to justify his claims to Ukrainian territory beyond Russia's long-standing claims to Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson regions.
Permission to use long-range weapons
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France no longer impose “any restrictions on the range” of Ukraine's ability to use the long-range weapons that these countries have provided, and noted that Ukraine could direct weapons at military positions in Russia. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded that such "potential solutions" would be "quite dangerous" and "contradict attempts at peace."
Peskov's statement is part of Russia's ongoing efforts to persuade Western countries to end their military support for Ukraine, which Russian President Vladimir Putin himself has explicitly stated as a condition for starting talks on a full ceasefire. Allowing Ukraine to strike military depots and air bases in Russia threatens Russia's ability to continue its campaign of strikes deep inside Ukraine, especially as Moscow seeks to demoralize Ukrainian society through increasingly large and frequent strikes that disproportionately hit civilian areas.
The Kremlin's ongoing cognitive warfare efforts aimed at preventing future Western military aid to Ukraine are rooted in fear and a recognition that Russia's only real hope of defeating Ukraine is to isolate it from its allies, ISW notes.