Ukraine’s Zelensky says military needs time before counteroffensive – ‘he’s lying’, says Wagner chief
- ‘We can go forward and be successful. But we’d lose a lot of people. I think that’s unacceptable. So we need to wait,’ the Ukrainian president says
- Russia’s Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin meanwhile accuses Zelensky of being ‘dishonest’, and claims Ukraine’s counteroffensive ‘is in full swing’
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has said his military needs more time to prepare for a highly anticipated counteroffensive against Russian forces, according to an interview published by the BBC on Thursday.
“With [what we have] we can go forward and be successful. But we’d lose a lot of people. I think that’s unacceptable. So we need to wait. We still need a bit more time,” he was quoted as saying.
Ukrainian forces have been training a new contingent of forces and stockpiling Western-supplied munitions and hardware that analysts say will be key to reclaiming territory captured by Russia.
The timing of Kyiv’s effort to claw back ground in the eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions, as well as the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, remains a question.
Ukrainian Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said late last month that Kyiv’s preparations were “coming to an end” and his forces were ready “in a global sense”.
But he also said that Abrams tanks promised by the US would not be able to take part in the offensive because they would not arrive in Ukraine until the end of this year.
