After six months of war, Russian Defense Minister Shoigu has to admit that the offensive in Ukraine is making little progress. But from the Kremlin’s point of view, the reality is even more bitter: not much has remained of the initial gains in territory.
The appearance of Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu on Wednesday caused astonishment, the sole purpose of which was apparently to explain the slow progress of the offensive in the south of the country after six months of war against Ukraine. The only reason for this is that Russia is trying to “avoid casualties among civilians”. Experts at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) believe this is an excuse to cover up the Russian army’s poor record. Because since mid-March they have lost a large part of the territory conquered at the beginning of the war.
Between February 24 and March 21, the Russian armed forces penetrated deep into Ukrainian territory – to date, they have not been able to gain greater ground than at that time. In the south they had advanced as far as Mykolaiv, in the north to the city limits of Kyiv. But in the months that followed, according to ISW military analysts, Ukraine recaptured about 45,000 square kilometers of the territory occupied by Russia – “an area larger than Denmark,” the experts write.
However, they also concede that in the past 39 days the Russian army has recaptured 1 percent of the lost territories. “Since Russian forces resumed their offensive on July 16, they have captured about 450.84 square kilometers of new territory, roughly the size of Andorra.” Compared to the initial successes, these are marginal gains that the Russian Ministry of Defense is now trying to justify. Shoigu had stated that the goals of the so-called military special operation had not changed.
It is all the more important to the Russian leadership that the occupied territories quickly come under Russian administration, the experts continue. The Russian-backed interim president of the unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), Denis Pushilin, received a delegation of the Russian State Duma led by Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin in Donetsk on Wednesday to discuss the integration of “legislative institutions of the DNR with Russian legislative processes “, as the ISW writes.
The US secret service is also certain that Russia wants to create facts in the occupied territories as quickly as possible. Sham referendums are planned in several cities in eastern Ukraine – in addition to the separatist regions of Luhansk and Donetsk, also in Cherson, Zaporizhia and parts of Kharkiv. The aim is to annex these areas and claim that the Ukrainians living there want to join the Russian Federation of their own free will. A procedure that, from a Russian point of view, has already proven its worth in Crimea in 2014.
