Ukraine’s army chief says battlefield situation ‘difficult’

KYIV – Ukraine’s army chief said on March 13 that the situation on the battlefield was “difficult” and that Russian forces could be poised to strike deep into Ukrainian lines in the eastern Donetsk region.

Kyiv’s forces are on the defensive across the 1,000km of front lines in the east and south after Moscow made its first territorial gains in almost a year.

Commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrsky said he had visited two brigades “where the situation is gradually becoming more complicated and there is a threat of enemy units advancing deep into our battle formations”.

Ukraine is facing a shortage of both manpower and ammunition amid

hold-ups to Western aid

and a domestic debate over how to recruit more soldiers with the war now in its third year.

“In general, the operational situation on the eastern front remains difficult. The enemy continues to conduct offensive actions” in a number of areas of the Donetsk region, Colonel-General Syrsky said in a post on Telegram.

“At the same time, probably due to the high level of losses, the activity of the enemy in other areas of the front decreased significantly,” he added, without providing further detail.

In an interview with the French media on March 11, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia’s advance had been “halted” in the east and that

the situation was “much better”

than it had been three months earlier.

Russian forces captured

the symbolic front-line town of Avdiivka,

just outside the Russian-occupied city of Donetsk, in February after one of the bloodiest battles of the two-year war.

They have since claimed to have captured a number of small settlements farther to the west as their troops seek to press their advantage.

A Ukrainian army spokesman rejected a claim by Moscow on March 12 that it had captured the village of Nevelske in the eastern Donetsk region.

Russia’s claims to have seized the village “don’t correspond to reality... There are no grounds to say that (Ukraine’s) control over Nevelske has been lost”, Mr Dmytro Lykhoviy, a spokesman for Ukrainian forces in the area, told AFP on March 13. AFP