Putin ready for long war beyond Donbas, says US
KYIV/WASHINGTON: President Vladimir Putin will not end the Ukraine war with the Donbas campaign and is determined to build a land bridge to the Russiacontrolled region in Moldova, US director of national intelligence Avril Haines said on Tuesday.
US intelligence also views it increasingly likely that Putin will mobilise his entire country, including ordering martial law, and is counting on his perseverance to wear down Western support for Ukraine.
“We assess President Putin is preparing for prolonged conflict in Ukraine during which he still intends to achieve goals beyond the Donbas,” Haines said.
US intelligence thinks Putin’s decision to concentrate Russian forces in the eastern Donbas region is “only a temporary shift” after their failure to capture Kyiv in the north.
Haines, who oversees the entire US intelligence community, including the CIA and National Security Agency, also said Putin uses nuclear “rhetoric” to scare the West from backing Ukraine, according to Haines.
Fighting on the ground
Ukraine said its forces had recaptured villages from Russian troops, pressing a major counteroffensive in the northeast of the country that could signal a shift in the war’s momentum and jeopardise Russia’s main advance.
Ukrainian troops had recaptured the settlements of Cherkaski Tyshky, Ruski Tyshki, Borshchova and Slobozhanske, in a pocket north of Kharkiv in recent days, according to a spokesperson for the main Ukrainian force near Kharkiv.
Luhansk governor Serhiy Gaidai said the region was attacked 22 times over the previous 24 hours.
In the southern port city of Mariupol, Russian forces continued their assault on the Azovstal steel plant where the city’s last defenders are holed up. An aide to the city’s mayor said at least 100 civilians were still trapped there. Russia pounded away at Ukraine’s vital southern port of Odesa, Ukrainian officials said Tuesday, as they announced they found the bodies of 44 civilians in the rubble of a building in the northeast that was destroyed weeks ago. The 44 bodies were found in a five-storey building that collapsed in March in Izyum, about 120km from the city of Kharkiv, which has been under sustained Russian attack since the beginning of the war in late February.