President Joe Biden and other Western leaders must accelerate the “delivery of supplies” for Ukraine’s soldiers, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urged.
“There are no vacations in war,” Zelensky said. “Decisions are needed, as is timely logistics for the announced aid packages. I especially address this to the United States, the United Kingdom, and France.”
Zelensky made the public appeal as Ukrainian forces roil the Kremlin with their incursion into Russia’s Kursk region, while Russian forces batter the short-handed contingents of Ukrainian troops trying to hold their own lines in eastern Ukraine. Those clashes unfolded as local authorities in Ukraine and Russia worked to evacuate civilians from parallel war zones, and both militaries showed the strain of manpower shortages — even on the Russian side, where a Chechen commander demanded that conscripts join the fight.
“If your 18-year-old children should not defend the fatherland even when it is attacked by the enemy and when it is on our territory, I have one question for you: What does this country need you and your children for?” Apti Alaudinov, Chechen special forces commander, wrote on social media. “We don’t need to turn 18-year-old male conscripts into babies who have to be given a dummy and sent to bed. …Everyone in our country should be queuing up to serve, both young and old.”
Those tensions surfaced on the Russian side as Zelensky renewed his call for Western powers to drop the restrictions on the use of long-range weapons against Russian forces.
“The courage of our warriors, the resilience of our combat brigades are currently compensating for the lack of necessary decisions by our partners,” Zelensky said in another weekend address. “And we could effectively deprive the occupier of any opportunity to advance and wreak havoc if our long-range capabilities were sufficient.”
Those frank exhortations come at a difficult juncture for Ukrainian forces in Donetsk, one of the Donbas districts that Russian President Vladimir Putin is trying to seize, almost two years after signing annexation documents to claim the region for Russia. Ukrainian forces have been fighting to prevent the seizure of Pokrovsk, where Russian forces have “opportunistically exploited weaknesses in Ukraine’s defenses,” as Institute for the Study of War analysts have observed, to threaten a Ukrainian logistical hub.
“A decision has been taken regarding Pokrovsk. Children and families with children will be compelled to evacuate the city starting from tomorrow because the enemy is approaching,” said Vadym Filashkin, the head of Donetsk Oblast Military Administration, per a Ukrainian media translation. “Child safety is the responsibility of adults. When our cities are within range of virtually any enemy weapon, the decision to evacuate is necessary and inevitable.”
In parallel, Ukrainian forces destroyed three bridges in Kursk, spurring Russian military bloggers to fret about the Ukrainians “cutting off our logistics for a fairly large area” of Russian territory, according to the War Translated project. Russian commanders reportedly have been forced “to redeploy up to 11 battalions from within Kursk Oblast and four Russian force groupings elsewhere,” as ISW put it, though they’re trying to avoid the diversion of troops “from priority sectors” in Donbas.
“If Russia continues to focus mainly on the Pokrovsk direction, then from the Ukrainian side, there is an expectation to try to move forward in all directions in Kursk oblast,” former Estonian intelligence chief Rainer Saks wrote on social media. “If the Ukrainian army begins to threaten Rylsk, Lgov, not to mention Kurchatov, where the region’s crucial nuclear power station for electricity supply is located, then it could be said that Russia’s attempt to focus all forces on Pokrovsk did not justify itself. However, if Ukrainian army progress in Kursk oblast stops while Russia continues to advance in the Donbas, then Russian military leaders could say that the plan is indeed to first take the Donbas and only then, somewhere around October, take back the land in Kursk.”
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If Russia postpones the attempted recovery of Kursk, Saks noted, then Ukrainian forces could have the time to prepare substantial fortifications on Russian territory. On the other hand, Ukrainian strategists have run the risk of diverting scarce manpower away from their own front lines and into Kursk — an operation that they hope will shore up Ukrainian morale and break the Western taboo on the use of long-range missiles to strike key Russian military bases far from the Ukrainian border.
“We are doing everything to provide our warriors with the necessary weapons and reinforcements,” Zelensky said. “The long-range capabilities of our forces are the answer to all the most important, to all the most strategic issues of this war.”