Ukrainian officials informed Washington that Ukraine will now deploy thousands of Western-trained reinforcements previously held in reserve, the New York Times reported on July 26.
The objective is to cut off the land bridge between Russian-occupied Ukraine and occupied Crimea, or at least make enough progress to bring the strategically significant peninsula within Ukraine's firing range.
The estimated timeline, as conveyed by Ukrainian officials to officials in Washington, suggests the new operation might last one to three weeks.
How long until Ukraine retakes Crimea? End of the year maybe? I wonder what Russia does then. I wonder if Putin survives that, both politically and literally.
How long until Ukraine retakes Crimea? End of the year maybe?
My understanding is that Ukraine does not intend to invade Crimea -- Zelenskyy made some pretty explicit statement on this, something about how many lives would be lost in doing so. What my understanding from listening to Michael Kofman ("the aim will be to make Russia's continued presence in Crimea not viable") and doing a bit of reading between the lines is is that they expect to just cut off supply of Crimea from Russia. Cut the land bridge, knock out the Kerch Strait Bridge, and then make water transport via the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea impractical due via threatening cargo shipping there. I doubt that it's actually necessary to cut off air transport, as I don't think that Russia has the capacity to supply Crimea via air.
My guess is that if Russia is determined to sink resources into it, stockpile supplies there now, and is also willing to evacuate civilian population from Crimea, they can potentially probably turtle up there for rather longer than six months. And the timer hasn't really started on that yet, because the Kerch Strait Bridge is only partly down, the land bridge is still open, and marine transport is still open. So I'd guess that six months is probably optimistic, if Russia wants to push back hard.
A few days after US said they've sent ALL the promised equip now for an offensive/counter offensive. Awesome. Ukraine were smart in clearing the mine fields first and using long range on the weapons storages and logistics lines using their massive intel effort. They're clearing the way to reduce losses and be efficient/effective. I think they'll phase it out and do this bit by bit.
They also made a concerted effort to counter-battery the living crap out of Russian artillery, popping 20 to 25 pieces a day for the past couple of weeks.
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