"Russia’s offensive won’t succeed" - NATO Commander

BRUSSELS, Belgium

Russia’s ongoing offensive in Ukraine doesn’t have the legs for a breakthrough, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe said Thursday.

“I know the Russians don't have the numbers necessary to do a strategic breakthrough,” General Christopher Cavoli told reporters after a meeting of the alliance’s defense chiefs at NATO headquarters in Brussels.

“They don't have the skill and the capability to do it, to operate at the scale necessary to exploit any breakthrough to strategic advantage," said the U.S. general, but added: "They do have the ability to make local advances and they have done some of that.”

Cavoli's assessment comes from “very close contact with our Ukrainian colleagues, and I'm confident that they that they will hold the line,” he added.

General Christopher Cavoli

Despite Russia pressing along the frontlines with Ukraine, and recently launching an attack near Ukraine's second city of Kharkiv, Cavoli said he was uncertain that this was Moscow's full-scale summer offensive.

“What we don't see is large, large numbers of reserves being generated someplace," he said.

Cavoli added that it's difficult to know if Russia's effort has run out of gas. "Whether an offensive is stopped or not takes a little bit of time to figure out," he said.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the U.S. Congress agreeing on a $61 billion military aid package for Kyiv after months of delay, Ukrainians are right now “being shipped vast amounts of ammunition, vast amounts of short range air defense systems and significant amounts of armored vehicles," he said.

Although Russia failed in its bid to overwhelm Ukraine, it should not be underestimated.

In the more than two years of fighting, Russia has improved in areas such as logistics and industrial production “where they are actually moving forward faster than we in Europe and in North America,” Admiral Rob Bauer, chair of the NATO Military Committee, said at the same press conference.

He said Russia has managed to muster additional forces,“but the quality of the troops is lower than the troops they started the conflict with” due to the number of officers “that were killed in the beginning of the war” and so aren't able to train newer soldiers.

The main subject of Thursday's meeting was to discuss strengthening the alliance's defense plans.

"This ensures that we are ready to face current as well as future threats," Bauer said.

The meeting was followed by a meeting of the Ukraine-NATO Council with the chief of staff of the Ukrainian armed forces, Major General Anatoliy Barhylevych.