Ukrainian forces started counter-offensive amid inflowing modern weapons

UKRAINE - In Brief 07 May 2022 by Dmytro Boyarchuk

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Two days till the May 9th, Victory Day – a sacred day for USSR-longing inhabitants of Russia. Now we can say it for sure, ‘the big battle for Donbas’ turned out to be one more failure for Russian army. Despite substantial concentration of forces and armors at the East, the Russians managed to get very modest progress near Izum so far which did not translate into anything reasonable result from strategic point of view. Huge losses (25100 killed in actions according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine), the effectively stopped offensive (no progress of Russian forces over the last week), counter-attack of Ukrainian forces near Kharkiv (see the progress on repulsing Russians near Kharkiv at this link, yesterday the General Staff reported more villages cleaned near Stary Saltiv) and steadily growing inflow of modern weapons and ammunition from the West – tell us that the war is slowly but persistently turning into our favor. A lot of talks about some decisive move of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin on May 9th. Something like general mobilization. But at this stage general mobilization in Russia is unlikely to bring dramatic change in this war. According to famous military journalist Yuriy Butusov Ukraine has up to 700 000 soldiers in the service (counting Secret Service, National Guards, Territorial Defense and all other kinds of troops) and mobilization is in progress (we still witness queues of volunteers waiting their turn to enroll to the army). Just to compare, Russia has at the East near 120 000 soldiers. The mobilized Ukrainian soldiers are already for two months on training and combat coordination. If Moscow starts general mobilization just now it w...