Russia is building a force of 100,000 soldiers to attack the northern sector of the frontline as Ukrainian commanders start to admit that their counter-offensive has stalled.
Col Serhi Cherevaty, a Ukrainian army spokesman, said that Russia had also ordered Storm-Z ex-convict battalions to prepare for battle and was firing more than 500 shells per day at Ukrainian forces around Kupyansk.
“The enemy has concentrated a very powerful group,” he said. “More than 100,000 personnel, more than 900 tanks, more than 550 artillery systems and 370 rocket salvo systems.”
Kupyansk is a town in the northeastern Kharkiv region of Ukraine. Ukrainian forces recaptured the town, which previously had a population of 25,000 people, in September last year.
Col Cherevaty’s assessment that Russian forces were preparing to attack in the north was confirmed by senior Ukrainian military officials.
Hanna Malyar, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister, said that the Kupyansk attack may be a diversionary tactic used to lift pressure on sectors of the battlefield where Ukraine has been taking ground.
“As soon as we seize the operational initiative and start moving forward, the enemy immediately activates in other directions to distract and drag in our forces,” she said.
Russian news agencies claimed, without providing any evidence, that Russian forces had advanced up to one mile towards Kupyansk. Russian military bloggers, often well-plugged in and well-followed, were less exuberant and said that Russian forces had failed to cross the Oskol River near Kupyansk but that they had recaptured the village of Novoselovskoye.
There has been a shift in the language used by Ukrainian commanders over the past few weeks.
Their optimism at the start of their counter-offensive six weeks ago and promises of cutting off Russian forces with a lightning strike towards the Sea of Azov have faded.
Instead, they started talking about slow but steady progress against well dug-in Russian defences and have now begun to describe how the counter-offensive has stalled with only an area half the size of Rutland recaptured. Most of these gains have been around Bakhmut and a handful of villages in the southern Zaporizhzhia region.
Additional reports Telegraph
