“They could also try to attack Crimea by crossing the Dnieper River further west,” Dan said. They have been preparing for a possible attack and they are very well dug in.” “But the obvious counterpoint to that is that the geography is perfectly obvious to the Russians as well. That would severely hamper supply lines to Russian troops in the rest of Ukraine as well as being a humiliating blow for Putin. “The ‘route one’ option, and the most obvious strategic imperative, is to cut the “land bridge” to Crimea,” Dan said. But there is a relatively brief list of options both viable enough and valuable enough to be plausible. With a 900-mile frontline that divides occupied eastern territory roughly the size of Portugal from the rest of Ukraine, there are no shortage of possible sites for the attack. So we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen or when.” In Russian, it’s called ‘maskirova’ – the military concept of operational security and secrecy, but also active deception about what to expect. “It’s essential to the success of what happens next. “Secrecy is very, very important,” the Guardian’s defence editor Dan Sabbagh said. And it is always useful for Ukraine to increase pressure for more western military hardware. The Economist’s defence editor Shashank Joshi wrote on Twitter that “Of course this is what you’d say if the counter-offensive was about to begin,” appending a shrug emoji.

Ukrainian commanders have also said that Kyiv lacks vital weapons for the new push – but there are also reasons to be sceptical.

“It will happen.” But yesterday, he suggested that despite endless speculation about the timing, his country’s forces were not yet ready. “We are preparing for it,” Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in April. But it is also extremely difficult to maintain.Īfter the stalemate of winter, Ukraine has talked openly about a planned counteroffensive for months. Surprises over timing and location are the most powerful tool at Ukraine’s disposal as it attempts to regain lost territory, break Russian supply lines, and bolster western support for the long war that likely lies ahead. Ukraine’s greatest success of the war so far came when it successfully fooled Moscow into thinking its September attack would come in the south, and not in the northern Kharkiv region. My colleague Archie Bland looks at what a Ukrainian counter-offensive might mean in practice in today’s First Edition newsletter:

First love by ivan turgenev summary