“It’s time for the rus invaders to prepare for a swim. It takes a lot of strength to swim to Sochi or Yeysk. BTW the Guinness Book of World Records may include a new record for the longest open water swim,” it wrote on Twitter. The British ministry of defence said there was “heavy fighting” on three fronts in Kherson, Donbas and Kharkiv and that Russian forces could become overstretched as they tried to respond. “Russia’s planned main effort is probably an advance on Bakhmut in the Donbas, but commanders face a dilemma of whether to deploy operational reserves to support this offensive, or to defend against continued Ukrainian advances in the south,” it said in an intelligence update. “Multiple concurrent threats spread across 500km will test Russia’s ability to coordinate operational design and reallocate resources across multiple groupings of forces,” it said.
‘Balance slowly shifting to Ukraine’s favour’
Konrad Muzyka, of Rochan Consulting, which publishes daily analysis of the war, said Russia had deployed most of its best regular troops to Kherson to face down the Ukrainian offensive there, leaving Wagner and locals soldiers from the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, puppet states Russia has established Donbas, to hold the east. He said the information blackout means it is too early to assess the scale of the Kharkiv operation, its objectives or how dangerous it might prove to the Russians. “In general we are probably looking at a stalemate,” he said of the tempo of the war. “However we are probably seeing the first evidence that the balance is slowly shifting to Ukraine’s favour.” The further progress of the offensive near Kharkiv is likely to depend on the number of reserves Ukraine is able to commit to it, said Killil Mikhailov of Conflict Intelligence Team, an open source investigations group focussing on the Russian army. “I am sure if everything goes to plan they could cut off the Izyum salient. That would be their maximum objective. Even if they do not achieve that, they do achieve keeping the Russians off balance,” he said. “It is the same question as in Kherson. How many men have they committed to this? We don’t know.”
