After the successful Ukrainian counter-offensives in the south and east, trench warfare is once again dominating the country. Washington’s secret services suspect that the armies are gearing up for new operations in the spring. However, analysts believe that new battles will start with the frost period.
The US intelligence services assume that the slowdown in fighting in Ukraine will continue. “We’re already seeing a kind of reduced pace of conflict and we expect that to continue in the coming months,” Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, said at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in California. Both countries would attempt to stock up on night supplies in preparation for a post-winter counteroffensive.
The US think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW), on the other hand, comes to a different conclusion. The overall pace of operations is likely to increase in the coming weeks, the experts said. The reason is the persistently cold weather that freezes the ground. “Especially in eastern Ukraine, where operations on both sides have been bogged down by heavy mud,” says the current situation report.
Already two days ago, the governor of the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk, Serhiy Hajday, said that the weather in the Kreminna area is finally changing and he hopes that the Ukrainian armed forces will soon be able to optimize their counterattacks, since the mud in the fought-over area area freezes. The Russian war blogger Wysoky Govorit made a similar statement. On Telegram he said that the ground along the Kreminna-Swatowe line was frozen. As a result, he expects the Ukrainian army to increase the pace of its attacks in the area.
(This article was first published on Sunday, December 04, 2022.)
