The moment belongs to Ukraine and within months it could be even more so. Russian forces are exhausted and on the front line everything is preparing for something new
Having reached a point where the war is rapidly approaching its fifth anniversary, in Ukraine the feeling is that we are reaching a “turning point” that has to happen in the next six months.
The timeline is given by a senior commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, who spoke to the agency in a defined time window to gain as much ground from Russia as possible.
After Russia made major gains in the first months of its full-scale invasion, Ukraine’s reaction through a summer counteroffensive enabled major recoveries and threw the war into a stalemate in which the front line is moving but at a very different pace.
Brigadier General Andriy Biletsky, who commands Ukraine’s Third Army Corps, one of the most respected forces, admitted to Reuters that the belief in Kiev is that Russia’s ranks are exhausted and incapable of achieving great results.
According to the official, if Ukraine manages to maintain this momentum for a few more months, this could be decisive in gaining the initiative on the entire front line, pushing Russia in several directions, including in Donetsk, where the most aggressive battles continue to exist.
“I believe that the next six to nine months are a turning point”, guarantees Andriy Biletsky in an interview from Kharkiv, a region also hit by attacks from Russia.
“More precisely, I think that the next six months are the most critical”, he reiterates, hoping that Ukraine will be able, during this period, to resist enough to then start to command the direction of the battles.
Aware that the United States can cede the entire Donbass, including the areas of Donetsk that Russia does not yet occupy, Ukraine intends to gain maximum advantage in these locations, which would place Kiev in a sufficiently relevant position of strength in negotiations with Moscow.
“We need to define the directions in which we can improve our positions, reach some strategic points and speak to the Russians from a position of strength, not weakness”, says the brigadier general, who was at the beginning of the creation of the famous Azov Battalion.
“From a military point of view, this is realistic”, guarantees Andriy Biletsky, confirming Russia’s moment of greatest despair, which has a set of problems emerging together, not least because the country’s economic performance has also seen better days.
Proving Ukraine’s happy moment, Volodymyr Zelensky recently announced that the country managed to recover almost 600 square kilometers this year alone, which is largely due to the giant success with the use of drones and robots on the front line.
To support this, one of the most recent reports from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) states that Kiev’s forces are now “actively challenging the positional character of warfare”, and may even be able to carry out mechanized assaults soon, even if limited.
The fighting is particularly taking place in Kostiantynivka, a city that is part of the “fortresses” that Ukraine still maintains in Donetsk, and which plays an essential logistical and strategic role in the course of the war.
A little further north, in Sloviansk, Andriy Biletsky’s troops are holding on with what they can, a task that seems to get easier over time.
“The lack of personnel no longer allows them to advance as they were a year ago,” he emphasizes, pointing to Russia’s colossal losses in the most recent battles.
And if the brigadier general admits that it is still too early to draw conclusions from Ukraine’s great successes, the understanding is that all of this can lead to capitalization that later bears greater fruit.
For now, and also thanks to the Starlink service that Elon Musk made available to Ukraine, it is Russia that is “losing radically”. And if Volodymyr Zelensky has already said that the war will continue until at least November, the deadlines given by Andriy Biletsky give Kiev motivation.
