The Ukrainian Army continued its gradual advance in the southern region of Zaporizhia on Sunday and assured that it can already hit any part of the Crimean peninsula, while Russian troops unsuccessfully tried to retake the initiative on the Kupyansk front, in northwestern Ukraine. .
Ukrainian forces, according to the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW), have “achieved tactically significant advances” in the western Zaporizhia region.
In their latest report, the ISW experts highlight that both Ukrainian and Russian sources indicate that the Kiev forces are making progress despite the fact that their advance occurs in an area of ??highly prepared defensive lines.
Through the Zaporiyia region and neighboring Jerson runs the overland corridor opened by the Russian Army to link Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014, to mainland Russia, and whose suppression is key to Ukraine’s plans to reclaim the peninsula.
The choice of Zaporiyia as the main axis of the Ukrainian offensive towards the isthmus of the Crimean peninsula is no coincidence, since from the north Kiev’s troops are not in their way with the Dnieper River, than in the neighboring Jershon region separate the Ukrainian forces from the Russians.
Currently the Ukrainian Army can attack any place in Crimea and “reach the enemy absolutely anywhere (on the peninsula),” said the head of Ukraine’s Military Intelligence, Kirilo Budanov, quoted by the official Ukrinform agency.
The Ukrainian authorities assure that their troops would advance faster and suffer fewer casualties if it were not for Russian air superiority, which they hope to neutralize with the arrival of US F-16 fighters, whose first units would arrive in the country at the end of the year or beginning of the year. next.
In his traditional evening message to the population, the President of Ukraine, Volodimir Zelenski, stated this Saturday that the main task of the country’s diplomats is to expand the training missions of pilots abroad and that of the military, speed up the conditioning of the infrastructures.
“And the task of all of us together is to get as close as possible to the moment when the F-16s will help us keep the Russian terrorists out,” the president stressed.
The spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force, Yuri Ignat, stated this Saturday that in addition to the F-16 planes, they need to be equipped with adequate weapons.
“It is necessary not only to train the pilots, but also to provide Ukraine with all kinds of weapons for this plane – missiles, bombs, ammunition – because, in addition to the planes, you need tools to get rid of Russian scrap,” Ignat said. in the national informative telethon.
The Russian Ministry of Defense reported today that it attacked a military airfield near the town of Pinchuki, about 60 kilometers south of Kiev, last night with long-range and high-precision missiles launched from planes.
“All the targets were hit,” said the spokesman for that ministry, Lieutenant General Igor Konashenko, when offering the daily war report.
The military man indicated last day that Russian troops repelled a total of 21 Ukrainian attacks on all fronts, eleven of them in Kupiansk, the same one where the day before he reported that they had improved their positions on the front line.
According to Konashenkov, the attacks in that sector, where the Russian troops had made some progress, were repelled with the use of aviation, artillery and flamethrowers.
