Kyiv – Ukraine is braced for a major new offensive that could begin within weeks. One of President Zelenskyy’s key insiders told The Daily Beast that they anticipate an impending Russian push to encircle the country with a simultaneous attack on three fronts.
Rustem Umerov, a member of the negotiating team with Russia, said the Kremlin was preparing for a new push that could start as early as February. The attack would come from the north, across the Belarusian border, from Russian strongholds in eastern Ukraine and from the south, where the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea was captured by Vladimir Putin’s forces in 2014, and from the nearby cities of Melitopol and Zaporizhia are now standing too under Russian control.
“The Russians are circling us from an angle of 240 degrees and are attacking from the Black Sea, Belarus and the Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” Umerov said.
Russia this week declared its first victory in the war in months and claimed it had captured the Donetsk salt-mining town of Soledar. It’s still debatable whether fighting for control of the city will continue, but the Russians have clearly made territorial gains – at a huge cost.
Mercenary fighters working for Wagner, Putin’s private army, have led the attack on Soledar and the nearby town of Bakhmut. Fighters recruited from Russian prisons were key to the attack; The Daily Beast reported that their fearless forays toward near-certain death helped the Russians identify pockets of Ukrainian resistance.
“They come from all directions, with three lines of battle: criminals, private contractors and regular armed forces. Their goal is to get rid of their criminals, test and train their contractors,” Umerov said.
Ukrainian intelligence and defense experts believe these are all preparations for a full-scale ground offensive, reinforced by more regular army recruits.
Colonel Oleh Zhdanov, a former staffer in the Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, told The Daily Beast that Ukraine’s military and intelligence units are tracking the movement of Russian troops in real time.
“We are watching how Russia is building up many armed forces in the Zaporizhia region. It looks like they are planning a pincer attack from Kharkiv [in the east] and Zaporizhia [in the south] instructions, they will try to capture all of Ukraine’s main defense forces,” Zhdanov told The Daily Beast. “We also observe that the Russian military is constantly moving 10-12 thousand men in Belarus [to the north]. They are also strengthening in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions.”
Colonel Zhdanov says there is only one man in the world who knows when the war in Ukraine will end: President Joe Biden. He believes the war will continue until the White House approves any additional military firepower that Ukraine is requesting.
“President Biden has a detailed scenario of this war at the White House. The sooner we get guns, the sooner we end the war, but it looks like the US wants Russia to exhaust itself with all its war effort,” Zhdanov told The Daily Beast. “In Russia they now have a death cult: at all levels, from the propagandists to the Orthodox patriarch, Russians are being called upon to go to this war and die as their grandfathers died in previous wars.”
According to the latest Levada Center polls, the number of Russians who think the country “should definitely continue military action in Ukraine” has fallen to 23 percent. And so Putin updates his rhetoric. He no longer speaks of the “unity” of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples. The Kremlin has given up demanding Russians die for the legacy of ancient Kievan Rus’. Instead, they portray this war as a mighty struggle against NATO.
Ukrainian soldiers equip trenches in a field near Soledar on January 14.
Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty
On Saturday, his top adviser Nikolai Patrushev said: “The events in Ukraine are not a Moscow-Kyiv clash; this is a military confrontation between NATO and, above all, the United States and England with Russia.”
Putin and Patrushev are both graduates of Soviet KGB schools. They have always viewed the United States and its allies as enemies worth destroying at all costs.
Ukraine knows full well that it faces the wrath of this decades-old conflict with NATO.
Umerov, who is also head of the State Property Fund, said Russian missiles and land strikes have already destroyed or stolen more than $127 billion worth of property. The violence wiped out Ukrainian business. To recoup losses and build up Ukraine’s resources, the state is now selling off state-owned companies, but that’s far from enough. They need more investment from the West.
Ukraine lacks ammunition and weapons. “We’re fighting the Russians with bare knuckles,” Umerov said.
One of Ukraine’s problems is its lack of air defense systems, but they hope an announced spate of Western military aid will help change that.
A Russian Kh-22 missile destroyed more than 70 homes in the south-central Ukrainian city of Dnipro last Saturday, killing at least 44 people, including four children. “The screams of the victims in the rubble on the videos of the disaster still echo in my head,” Yulia Mashuta, editor of Svoi.City newspaper, told The Daily Beast earlier this week.
In addition to the civilian deaths, an enormous number of Ukrainian soldiers lost their lives.
A field of small blue and yellow national flags is growing on Kiev’s central square, the Maidan. Each flag is inscribed with the name of a dead soldier. Olena Zinchenko, an engineer passing by this week, gave her change to volunteers raising money for the army: “It’s for our defenders,” she said. She took a small blue and yellow ribbon from a volunteer and twisted it around her wrist.
With tears in her eyes, she looked at the little flags on the ground. “Putin knows he can only stay out of prison as long as he fights this war, so he won’t stop attacking us as long as he lives,” Zinchenko told The Daily Beast. “Russia is mobilizing more soldiers, this hell doesn’t end.”