Ukraine Clarifies Counteroffensive Hasn’t Started Despite Russia’s Claims Of Victory

Russia says it has already won against the highly expected campaign, but Ukraine said Thursday that it hasn’t started its counteroffensive yet.

Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said that they haven’t started a counteroffensive yet. He also said that Kyiv is only working to find out where Russian troops are weak right now.

“We have not yet started the counteroffensive as such, but Russia is saying, ‘We’ve already won, we’ve already stopped the counteroffensive,'” he said in a recent live show, as translated by the investigative news website Meduza.

Podolyak said that the Ukraine’s Armed Forces have three goals for their much-anticipated counteroffensive operations. They want to destroy as many Russian conscripts and pieces of military equipment as possible, and they also want to move forward in more than one way at the same time.

Putin said earlier this week that Ukraine is suffering “catastrophic” losses in its counteroffensive operations, saying that Kyiv has already lost up to 30% of the military vehicles its Western partners gave it. Podolyak’s comments come after Putin’s claims.

“This is a huge counterattack, and strategic reserves that were set up for this job are being used. “They lost more than 160 tanks, while we lost 54, and some of them need to be restored and fixed,” Putin told military bloggers in a live meeting, according to translations from The Guardian. “Their losses are getting close to a point where they could be called catastrophic.”

It is not clear when Ukraine will start its counterattack or if Kyiv will tell the public when the operation starts. But Zelensky, who had previously announced the start of the counteroffensive, said on Thursday that he thinks Russia will lose the war if it can’t defend itself against Ukraine’s highly expected campaign.

In an interview , he said, “Our brave people and troops on the front lines are facing very tough opposition.” “Because I would say that Russia would lose the war if it lost this campaign to Ukraine.”

People say that Ukraine has been making steady progress on the lines over the past few days and has been able to take back several towns in the south and east from Russian control. As of Wednesday, it was said that Ukraine had taken back about 100 square kilometers of land from Russian troops.

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a big way, which started the war there. Since then, Moscow has lost about 217,910 men, with 580 soldiers being killed just today. It is not clear how many Ukrainian soldiers have died in the fighting.