Russia will invade in new year – military
Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine at the beginning of next year with far greater force than anything seen in the conflict to date, according to Ukrainian military intelligence.
The Kremlin had sent 92,000 soldiers to its western border and could launch a multi-pronged offensive in January or February, Kyrylo Budanov, the chief of Ukraine’s defence intelligence, told the
The assault would include airborne strikes as well as amphibious assaults via the ports of Odessa and Mariupol, Budanov said.
Ukrainian intelligence released a map detailing its assessment of how the invasion would play out, with Russian forces pushing deep into the country from north, east and south. It would be a much more traditional, and bloody, operation than the Kremlin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014.
Analysts noted that elements of the map are speculative, including Kyiv’s assessment that Russian fighter jets will invade from within Belarus. Moscow’s air force has conducted patrols inside Belarus in the past month, but currently has no permanent military base there.
Michael Kofman, the director of
Russia studies at the US Centre for Naval Analyses, said on Twitter that the map was nonetheless realistic.
‘‘I think this is a sobering and fairly accurate picture of what is being considered,’’ he wrote on Twitter. ‘‘The
Russian military can do this. This is a worst-case iteration of several possible contingencies.’’
Budanov said that Moscow’s priority was to increase internal pressure on the Ukrainian government through disinformation campaigns, but that it would resort to military incursion if these tactics failed to lead to a change of government in Kyiv.
‘‘They want to make the situation inside the country more and more dangerous and hard and make a situation where we have to change the government,’’ he said.
‘‘If they can’t do that, then military troops will do their job.’’
Responding to Budanov’s interview, Artyom Lukin, an international relations scholar at the Far Eastern Federal University in Russia, said: ‘‘One gets the impression the Ukrainian leadership and the Kremlin are perfectly aligned at least on one thing: ratcheting up tensions and keeping up a sense of crisis.’’
The government of Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, has angered Russia by censoring media channels owned by Kremlin-linked moguls, and moving to oust them from positions of power within the country.
Russia says that it is responding to increased Nato exercises near its borders.