By Asami Terajima,
KYIV Ukraine
Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley said on Sept. 10 that Ukraine likely has about 30 to 45 days for the counteroffensive before the weather worsens on the ground.
The summer counteroffensive,
which has seen Ukraine liberate more than a dozen villages in Zaporizhzhia and
Donetsk oblasts, is going slower than expected, Milley said, but he added that
Ukraine is still "progressing at a very steady pace through the Russian
front lines."
"There's still a
reasonable amount of time, probably about 30 to 45 days' worth of fighting
weather left, so the Ukrainians aren't done," Milley said in the BBC's
Sunday program.
"I said at the very
beginning of this (war) that this was going to be long, slow, hard, and
high-casualty-producing, and that's exactly what it is," he added.
More than three months into
the counteroffensive, raging in Zaporizhzhia Oblast and two axes in Donetsk
Oblast – Bakhmut and Velyka Novosilka, Western skepticism grows as
to whether Ukraine will achieve its goals set for the high-stakes operation.
Thwarted by heavily mined
fields and incessant artillery, Ukrainian soldiers on the ground say that
everything is done slowly to minimize casualties.
However, on Sept. 9, Ukraine's
military intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told Reuters
on the sidelines of the annual Yalta European Strategy (YES) conference that
Ukraine plans to continue the counteroffensive no matter the weather
conditions.
"Combat actions will
continue in one way or another," Budanov said. "In the cold, wet, and
mud, it is more difficult to fight. Fighting will continue. The
counteroffensive will continue."
Two foreign volunteers were killed and two others were severely
wounded on Sept. 9 while driving near Chasiv Yar, close to Bakhmut.
The killed volunteers were
Emma Igual of Spain, the director of the NGO Road to Relief, and her colleague
Anthony Ignat of Canada.
Road to Relief's two other
representatives who were in the car, Swedish volunteer Johan Thyr and German
volunteer Ruben Mawick, are hospitalized in stable condition after being
"badly injured" by shrapnel and burns, according to a statement by the
organization.
At around 10 a.m. on Sept. 9,
the Road to Relief team headed toward Bakhmut from their base in Sloviansk to
assess the civilian situation in Ivanivske – a village about eight kilometers
southwest of the Russian-occupied city of Bakhmut.
The team came under a direct
Russian attack, according to Road to Relief, flipping the vehicle over and
causing it to erupt fire.
In the statement released on
Sept. 10, Road to Relief said that “the Needs Assessment team are often the
first to go into front-line villages to gain clarity about the current
situation.”
“The team’s efforts have
resulted in numerous evacuations and crucial aid deliveries over the 18 months
that we have been in operation,” it added.
When Russia launched its
full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Igual came to Ukraine and soon co-founded Road
to Relief with Henri Camenen from France.
“I felt I needed to put all
the experiences I had already had to good use, and to apply my humanitarian and
Jewish ethos,” she told the London-based weekly newspaper Jewish Chronicle in
July.
She added that she had been
“extremely lucky” thus far, as she has been able to work throughout the
full-scale war without “even a scratch.”
The report about more foreign
volunteers’ deaths comes as Russia continues to attack civilian and near
front-line areas indiscriminately, killing and wounding civilians, human aid
workers, and journalists on the ground.
Earlier in May, Arman Soldin,
a 32-year-old Bosnian-born video journalist with news agency Agence France
Presse (AFP), was killed near Chasiv Yar by a Russian rocket
fire.
In January, 28-year-old
Christopher Parry from the U.K. and 47-year-old Andrew Bagshaw, a dual New
Zealand and British citizen, were killed during an evacuation mission in the
Bakhmut area.
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