Mediapart said that the Ukrainians had reclaimed more than 6,000 square kilometers of their territory that had been controlled by the Russian army since the beginning of September, and had penetrated deeply into the Kharkiv region, allowing them to increase pressure on Westerners to obtain necessary weapons.
This French website asked: Could this attack be decisive in the course of the war?
The website explained - in a report by Laurent Jeslin - that the Russian army, which lost a large area, was trying in recent days to contain the incursion of the Ukrainian forces, but it was not able to prevent the infiltration, even though it had huge resources of equipment and personnel, and that it believed in the necessity of winning this war.
Kharkiv attack dispels Russian delusion
Despite the strength of the attack launched by the Ukrainian army in the Kharkiv region, military analyst Oleksiy Melnik from the Razumkov Center in Kyiv says, "Caution is necessary. We must not underestimate the Russian army and its ability to withstand, even if the Ukrainian General Staff did not expect a breakthrough of this magnitude." "The attacks will continue in the coming days, but the gains may be limited if the Russians manage to re-establish a relatively strong line of defense."
It seems that the Kharkiv attack - according to the American military analyst Michael Kaufman - will dispel Russia’s illusion that it is inevitably victorious in this war, and shows that its army did not win, but rather suffered a major defeat, although “this defeat will not lead to a Russian strategic collapse in Ukraine, but these operations It could make the Russian war effort unsustainable."
Whatever the outcome, this victory allows Ukrainian officials to increase their pressure on the Westerners to obtain the weapons they need. “What does Berlin fear more than Kyiv?” Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba quipped, referring to Germany’s reluctance to provide his country with Leopard-2 tanks and infantry fighting vehicles from Russia. Mardier model.
Volodymyr Fesenko, director of the Penta Center for Political Research, considered Ukraine's military successes as a "signal to Western politicians who might hesitate," especially since Kyiv needs ever-increasing aid to maintain pressure on Russian forces.
long-term resilience
The site pointed out that the Kharkiv offensive is one of the most effective attacks on the European continent after Operation Storm, which allowed the Croatian army to recover 17,000 square kilometers of the self-proclaimed Republic of Serbian Krajina, in 1995. Although the Russian army is a stubborn opponent, some testimonies indicate that it suffered heavy losses. On the southern front, some of his units even tried to negotiate a surrender, according to Natalia Homenyuk, a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian Army's Southern Operational Command, although this information has not yet been confirmed.
The site concluded that the limited confidence of the Russian soldiers in their leaders will deepen more than the feeling of the bitterness of the recent defeats on the ground, noting that Moscow lost most of the lands it occupied in 7 months of fighting, in addition to tens of thousands of lives, which made the resentment more visible on the accounts of bloggers on Telegram platform, to the point that several elected officials from 18 municipal councils launched a petition to demand the resignation of President Vladimir Putin.