RUSSIAN PERSPECTIVE
Putin visits Ukraine military operation headquarters
Russian President Vladimir Putin met the head of the General Staff, Valery Gerasimov, and other high-ranking military commanders during an unannounced visit to the headquarters of Russia’s Southern Military District, the Kremlin said on Saturday morning.
The head of state received classified briefings from Gerasimov and other senior commanding officers involved in the ongoing military operation in Ukraine, the brief statement said.
Russian state media shared a video of the rare visit, which shows the head of the General Staff greeting Putin at the headquarters ahead of the closed-door meeting. However, it remains unclear when exactly the meeting took place.
Last week, Putin convened a meeting with members of Russia’s Security Council and on Monday addressed the Army-2023 expo outside Moscow. In a video message to the congress, Putin lauded the expo's contribution to multifaceted relations between Russia and other nations, emphasizing that Moscow “is open to deepening equal technological partnership and military-technical cooperation with other countries.”
The city of Rostov-on-Don hosts the headquarters of the Southern Military District, currently primarily responsible for the military operation in Ukraine. In June, the forces of Wagner private military company briefly captured the headquarters armed with heavy weapons, but faced little resistance, as officials negotiated a peaceful resolution to the short-lived mutiny attempt.
The southwestern Rostov Region borders the frontline Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, and has repeatedly come under Ukrainian drone and artillery attack over the past year and a half.
In July, the port city of Taganrog, some 60 kilometers from Rostov, was hit by a repurposed anti-aircraft S-200 missile, injuring over a dozen civilians and inflicting material damage.
** Kiev taking huge armored vehicle losses – Bild
As Ukraine struggles to breach Russian lines during its counteroffensive, the attacks are taking a heavy toll on its armored formations, with vehicle losses numbering in the dozens in just one sector of the front, Bild reported on Thursday, citing video materials reviewed by its journalists.
According to the report, while Kiev managed to capture the village of Staromayorskoye in the southwestern part of Russia’s Donetsk Region after more than a week of fighting, the success came “at a high price” in terms of destroyed armor. The Russian Defense Ministry has not confirmed this information, but did report numerous artillery strikes by Moscow’s forces in the area.
Citing Russian drone footage, Bild claimed that during the battle for Staromayorskoye, Kiev’s forces lost at least 31 armored personnel vehicles, including 23 mine-protected NATO-supplied vehicles. The wrecks of the destroyed vehicles still remain on the battlefield although some damaged armor has been salvaged, the outlet added.
Bild described the results as “a success from the Russian point of view,”explaining that Moscow aims to destroy as many Western-supplied armored vehicles as possible.
“Moscow's army knows that replacing and repairing vehicles is much more difficult for Ukraine than it is for Russia,” the article said, noting that while many damaged vehicles can be restored, they have to be transported to repair bases hundreds of kilometers away from the frontline.
Ukraine launched a major counteroffensive against Russia in early June, but has so far failed to gain any ground, according to Moscow. The Russian Defense Ministry has estimated that since the start of the push, Ukraine has lost more than 43,000 troops as well as over 4,900 pieces of heavy weaponry.
In mid-July, Business Insider reported that Kiev had lost one-third of its US-supplied Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, while around the same time The New York Times claimed, citing Western officials, that Ukraine’s counteroffensive had cost it 20% of the weapons it sent to the battlefield in the first two weeks of its counteroffensive.
Amid these apparent difficulties – which Ukraine has attributed to delays receiving Western assistance – The Washington Post reported on Friday that US intelligence officials strongly doubted that Kiev would make headway in the southern sector of the front closer to the Crimean Peninsula. Meanwhile, an earlier Newsweek report suggested a growing rift among top Ukrainian officials, with some purportedly pushing to call off the counteroffensive.
WESTERN PERSPECTIVE
Troop deaths, injuries in Ukraine war nearing 500,000 - NYT citing US officials
The number of Ukrainian and Russian troops killed or wounded since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022 is nearing 500,000, the New York Times reported on Friday, citing unnamed U.S. officials.
The officials cautioned that casualty figures remained difficult to estimate because Moscow is believed to routinely undercount its war dead and injured, and Kyiv does not disclose official figures, the newspaper said.
Russia's military casualties are approaching 300,000, including as many as 120,000 deaths and 170,000 to 180,000 injuries, the newspaper reported. Ukrainian deaths were close to 70,000, with 100,000 to 120,000 wounded, it added.
The NYT quoted the officials as saying the casualty count had picked up after Ukraine launched a counter-attack earlier this year.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, commenting on the NYT article, said only the General Staff could disclose such figures.
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"We have adopted a model that only the General Staff has the right to voice the figures on the wounded, the disabled, people who lost limbs, and the missing, and, of course, the number of people who died in this war," he said in a live broadcast on the Youtube channel of journalist Yulia Latynina on Friday.
The Ukrainian military on Thursday claimed gains in its counter-offensive against Russian forces on the southeastern front. Kyiv said its forces had liberated a village, the first such success since July 27, signaling the challenge it faces in advancing through heavily mined Russian defensive lines without powerful air support.
There was no immediate response from Ukrainian officials to Reuters requests for comment. Russia made no immediate comment on the report.
** Ukrainian forces could fail to retake strategic city of Melitopol -US official
Ukrainian forces do not appear likely to reach and retake the Russian-occupied strategic southeastern city of Melitopol during their counteroffensive aimed at winning back territory from Moscow's army, a U.S. official said on Friday.
The Ukrainian military on Thursday said it had made gains on the southeastern front, pushing forward from a newly-liberated village, Urozhaine, in an attempted drive towards the Sea of Azov.
Melitopol, which had a pre-war population of about 150,000, has been under Russian control since March 2022 and has roads and railways used by Russian troops to transport supplies to areas they occupy.
Urozhaine in Donetsk region was the first village the Kyiv government said it had retaken since July 27, signaling the challenge it faces in advancing through heavily mined Russian defensive lines without powerful air support.
The U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, was citing an intelligence report on Melitopol but the prediction is largely in line with Washington's view that the counteroffensive is going slower than expected.
The official added that despite the report and limited progress towards Melitopol, Washington believed it was still possible to change the gloomy outlook.
The assessment on Melitopol was first reported by the Washington Post.
White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan on Friday declined to comment but said there had been a number of analyses about the war in Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022 and many of them had changed as it unfolded.
Russia controls nearly a fifth of Ukraine, including the peninsula of Crimea, most of Luhansk region and large tracts of the regions of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson.
RT/Reuters
