On the 110th day of the Russian attack on Ukraine, its president promised his citizens that their country would be liberated.

The entire territory will be recaptured and the occupiers will be expelled from all regions, Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video message on Monday evening.

He named Donbass, Kherson, Melitopol and Mariupol, even Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014.

Every occupier there should know: "This is not the country where you will have peace!"

Thomas Gutschker

Political correspondent for the European Union, NATO and the Benelux countries based in Brussels.

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What the President failed to mention: His forces are suffering defeat.

They are far from liberating the areas they have lost since the beginning of the war, not to mention Crimea.

Rather, Russian troops are gradually conquering the city of Severodonetsk in the Luhansk district.

The fiercest fighting has been raging there for weeks, and the Russians have concentrated their troops there.

They are now supposed to control the city center, and there is talk of seventy percent of the entire city.

They destroyed the last bridge from there to Lysychansk, making it difficult for Ukrainian soldiers to retreat.

They're not locked in yet, but according to Western observers, it's only a matter of time before the industrial city falls.

Moscow would then have achieved another war aim:

Both sides have suffered heavy casualties.

Western experts estimate that up to 20,000 Russian soldiers have already fallen.

The army is said to have lost a third of its combat effectiveness, the entire army 15 to 20 percent - and that in just three and a half months.

Little was known about Ukrainian losses for a long time.

The secret services did not provide any information on this, nor did Kyiv.

Earlier this month, Zelenskyy gave a number for the first time: Every day, sixty to one hundred soldiers are killed and up to 500 others wounded, he said in an interview.

Last week his adviser Mykhailo Podolyak spoke of 100 to 200 deaths a day.

“Ukraine cannot sustain losses of 200 soldiers a day for long”

That's a big number.

For a long time, experts have assumed that the Ukrainian losses are less than the Russian ones.

In the current phase, however, they should be at least as high, if not higher.

The number of wounded is also striking.

At the beginning of the war, the Ukrainians stationed ten brigades in the Donbass, totaling 40,000 soldiers.

These were the most experienced and powerful units in the army.

They should be severely decimated by now.

Although the country - unlike Russia, which shies away from general mobilization - has a huge number of reservists, they can only partially replace the fighting force.

"The Ukraine will not be able to sustain losses of 200 soldiers a day for long," a Western secret service representative told the FAZ.

The Ukrainian troops are under continuous fire from Russian artillery positions, especially at night.

The Russians have a clear advantage here, they have ten to fifteen times as many guns, as the deputy head of the Ukrainian military intelligence service, Vadym Skibitskyj, recently told the "Guardian".

In addition, the ammunition for Soviet-made mortars and howitzers has now largely been used up.

According to Skibitskyj, 5,000 to 6,000 grenades are fired a day.

The Eastern European partners also have hardly any reserves left.

The Ukrainian leadership foresaw such a scenario early on and asked for Western guns.

They are standardized, the NATO caliber is 155 millimeters.

That's slightly larger than the Soviet standard, 152 millimeters.

According to Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, the partners also delivered.

Five types of howitzers are now in use, a total of 150.

The ammunition stocks were ten percent higher than was the case for the old Soviet systems at the beginning of the war.

The United States alone had pledged more than 200,000 shells to Kyiv.

The western guns have a longer range than the Russian ones, and they hit their targets more accurately.

Nevertheless, they cannot compensate for the sheer superiority of the Russians.

At the moment the army in the east is only able to