Will Ukraine's counter-offensive change the course of the war?

Ukraine is preparing a new counter-attack but what does this mean and will it change the course of the war well we don't know until they launch it and that's something that only a few people in Kiev know when it's going to be where it will be and quite what it will consist of almost certainly it is some sort of armored attack with heavily armored forces to punch through some part of the uh the Russian occupied areas of Ukraine which are that semicircle from the the donbass round through to the the air of mikalayev in the Southwest and the purpose we think of that is probably that the ukrainians will punch southwards if they can in order to threaten Crimea probably can't take Crimea but they can put themselves in a position to threaten Crimea and if they do that then they have got something politically to bargain with against the Kremlin sometime in the later summer or the Autumn but we don't know we're only guessing we'll see when we see what the ukrainians have decided to do with the forces which are now building up this counter-offensive is really important because it's there to convince both the west and Ukraine's own population that they can win this war in some meaningful sense the ukrainians have not just got to do well in this offensive I'm sure they'll do well anyway but they've got somehow to be decisive they've got to be able to change the balance of forces on the battlefield and the Western world that is supporting Ukraine have got to feel that therefore the ukrainians now might be able to win they might be able to throw the Russians out of their territory over the next year or two years if it looks as if they won't be able to do that if it looks as if this war will just go on surging one way and then the other then the view is that the Western World will very quickly get fatigued by Ukraine and won't be prepared to support Kiev in its aims of throwing the Russians out of the territory that they've conquered so this offensive is politically very important because it has to convince the West that the ukrainians can't just do well but actually win in some significant way that's a pretty big ask when you look at the way the forces are lining up [Music] of Russian response is quite an interesting one so far the Russians have pulled back a little bit from the the tempo of operations the restricting their usual ammunition not because they don't have it but because they're saving it and I'm pretty sure they're holding back quite a lot of their own heavy metals some of their own armor they're waiting to see what the ukrainians will do and so we've seen the tempo of operations pause a little bit in the last two or three weeks the Russians are holding back like the rest of us waiting to see what the ukrainians will do when they see what the ukrainians will do then we'll see how the Russians will respond but but they will respond and they will respond I think fairly vigorously in a sense the West is behind all of it the ukrainians are determined to do this and they're confident that they can achieve something significant even decisive but they can't do it without Western Equipment and so what the West has done is provide at least 200 maybe 250 really good main battle tanks leopard ones leopard twos Challenger tanks American Abrams tanks are on their way the French the AMX 10 that's another tank busting system and if you look at what the West has given Ukraine it isn't just tanks and armored vehicles it's aircraft it's helicopters it's it's recovery Vehicles maintenance stuff pontoon bridges lots and lots of material anti-aircraft defenses missiles they've given them something of the whole range of Modern Warfare if the ukrainians are able to use it properly in an integrated way it's known as combined arms operations if they're able to conduct combined arms operations at a very big level which is what they'll have to do then that equipment will really make a potential difference because their equipment now is there in numbers and it is a great deal better than the Russian equipment that they're up against

Channel: Sky News

Views: 109,937

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Id: tr1SlPCW1Eg

Length: 4min 14sec (254 seconds)

Published: Thu May 11 2023