Russia intensifies attacks before Western military aid arrives

Photo: Roman Pilipey Agence France-Presse This photo taken on June 16, 2024 shows a French-made Caesar howitzer traveling on a road in the Donetsk region, Ukraine.

France Media Agency to kyiv

Published at 11:20 a.m.

• Europe

Ukraine ruled on Monday that Russia was intensifying its attacks on the Eastern Front to “maximize the exhaustion of” Ukrainian troops, before the arrival of Western military aid, including fighter planes F-16.

Russian forces have been gaining ground in the border regions of Donetsk and Kharkiv in recent months, taking advantage of a shortage of troops and ammunition in Ukraine.

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“The command of the Russian troops is currently doing everything possible to increase and extend the intensity of hostilities in order to maximize the exhaustion of our troops,” Oleksandr Syrsky, the head of the Ukrainian army, announced on his Telegram channel.

According to the latter, Moscow is aware that “time will play” in Kiev's favor, with the receipt of a “significant quantity of weapons and equipment” from its allies, including American F-16 fighters, which are supposed to strengthen Ukraine's air defenses.

The Ukrainian commander specifies that Russian forces are concentrating their efforts in the vicinity of “Kopiansk, Pokorvsk, Kurakhové and Vremivka”, located on the Eastern Front, while “fierce fighting” continues in the East and South.

The prosecutor of the southern Kherson region, partially occupied by Moscow, announced Monday that a 50-year-old man had been killed by an “explosive dropped from a drone.”

The same day, nine people were injured in a Russian bombing that hit the Poltava region in the east-central part of the country, according to Filip Pronin, its governor .

“Today the enemy shelled civilian infrastructure in the Poltava region,” the official said on his Telegram channel, explaining that “several buildings were damaged.”

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has, for several months, continually requested systems to protect the Ukrainian skies from his Western partners, but these only arrive slowly. drops.

He also estimated in May in an interview with AFP that his country needed “120 to 130” F-16 combat planes or other aircraft modern, “so that Russia does not have superiority in the air”.