'This is going to be a tough slog for the Ukrainians'

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00:00 a sense of exactly what's going on. I want to bring in our international affairs commenter

00:03 Douglas Herbert. Right, we've heard about the three villages that have been liberated,

00:07 so say Ukraine. Tell us about the Manusha and what perhaps the strategy is behind this.

00:13 What's going on here, right? Because we're not going to start saying has the counter-offensive

00:17 begun again. We've been going on about that for days and weeks now. Look, what the Institute

00:21 for the Study of War, which has become an authority on this entire war in Ukraine, says

00:27 we're seeing is an extraordinary difficult tactical operation, or rather a series of

00:33 tactical operations by the Ukrainian forces, what can also be called multi-pronged assaults.

00:41 And why I say multi-pronged is because it's not happening all in one area. You have this

00:46 image of counter-offensive. They're going to strike, as they did last fall in Kharkiv,

00:51 repel, dislodge the Russian occupiers, and that's over. This is what we really have is

00:56 what's being called probing operations. The Ukrainian forces are testing the Russian defenses,

01:02 essentially, along that 1,100-plus kilometer front line, which extends, as you know, Gavin,

01:08 all the way from the north, northeast, the Kharkiv region, all the way down to the southwest,

01:14 to Zaporozhye, that Khovkodam region, and even off the map here, Odessa. You can see

01:19 what we're talking about here. It is a very extended region. The Ukrainians are betting

01:25 that the Russians do not have enough manpower or equipment power to be able to hold the

01:30 entire 1,100-kilometer front line. So there may be surprises here. They're looking for

01:34 weak links. Now, you mentioned the village of Blokhodotne. That is in the Donetsk region,

01:40 also sort of on the edge between Donetsk and the Zaporozhye region. And the brunt of these

01:46 tactical operations right now, if you want to sort of boil it down, and remember, we're

01:50 talking through the fog of war. It's really hard to independently confirm and corroborate

01:56 a lot of this. We're basing it on military bloggers. We're basing it on reports from

02:00 the field. We're basing it on satellite imagery. But what we can generally say that there is

02:05 fierce fighting raging around this area, Donetsk region, going also north towards Luhansk region,

02:13 occupied by the Russians, the Zaporozhye region, where that—Europe's largest nuclear plant

02:18 right now has been the center of a lot of attention. Big, big, big area of focus. Why?

02:23 Because if the Ukrainians can breach this area and push south, they can ultimately try

02:27 to encircle Russian forces and cut off a link, a supply link, between occupied, annexed Crimea

02:33 and the Russian occupying forces to the north. And finally, you also have Bahmut up here.

02:39 Bahmut, you'll say, well, why is there fighting going on there? Didn't the Russians claim

02:42 to have captured Bahmut last month in May? Well, yes, but it's complicated, to say the

02:48 least, because Bahmut's been devastated. It's destroyed. As Zelensky said, it doesn't

02:53 really exist anymore. But the Russians must protect the ruins of that battlefield. So

02:58 it still remains very symbolic. And for the Ukrainians, there is a stake here, and that

03:02 is perhaps trying to divert Russian forces in other areas so they can make surprise attacks

03:08 somewhere else. I'm not going to say to take these claims of capturing these settlements

03:12 with a grain of salt. But that said, you do have to put it in context, because these tactical

03:18 operations are running up against very stiff Russian resistance. And we're only seeing

03:23 a tiny little snapshot, a tiny cross-section of what's going on along this front. There's

03:28 lots of known unknowns and unknown unknowns here.

03:33 There's a lot at play, and this map is very useful, as you point out. So go right at the

03:37 top. We had a few weeks ago what's called shaping operations, where perhaps pro-Ukrainian

03:40 Russian groups involved in trying to stop supply lines, explosions, drones. Down here,

03:45 you talked about Crimea ideally being cut off so you'd stop the supply line into Crimea,

03:49 the bridge being destroyed fairly recently, being rebuilt again. When you have this dam,

03:55 add that to the mix, flooding here, militarily potentially stopping.

03:58 It's tough.

03:59 It's tough. They were successful in a counter-offensive in Kherson, but you think this time it's going

04:05 to be tougher going.

04:06 Yeah, Kherson took a while as well. It's a very, very tough terrain, and this is going

04:10 to be a tough slog for the Ukrainians. Remember, their goal, their military objective, according

04:15 to Zelensky, remains to dislodge the Russian occupiers from all the territory, almost 20

04:20 percent of Ukraine right now, that they occupy. Dislodge them, repel them, push them back,

04:25 recapture that territory. This is a tough slog, including Crimea, up to and including

04:30 Crimea.

04:31 This around Zaporizhia is flatland, farm flatland, very few places to duck for cover and defenses.

04:37 It's very difficult. But here's the toughest part. Yes, the Ukrainians are going on these

04:42 tactical operations equipped with the bristling with the new Western weaponry, the Bradley

04:47 tanks, the Abrams armor, the tanks. They have, you know, a lot of munitions as well. But

04:54 what do the Russians have done? The Russians have had a lot of time to dig their own defenses.

04:58 And what you're getting along a lot of this region, especially Zaporizhia, this is where

05:02 you're seeing some of the absolute most formidable Russian defenses, perhaps that we've seen

05:07 since the trenches since World War One, World War Two as well. We have thinly manned lines

05:14 of Russians who are ready to sort of probe when there's a Ukrainian assault, to see the

05:20 Ukrainians coming, to give notice. And then what you have behind that is you have very

05:24 deep trenches that the Ukrainians would have to get across, very deep trenches along this

05:29 whole ridgeline here. And behind that you have minefields. So the trenches, then the

05:33 minefields and behind the minefields you have divisions of assault troops, Russian assault

05:39 troops, which are ready to rush forward to try to thwart, to stop the Ukrainians if they

05:45 were to get through those trenches and mines. We are not talking about a cakewalk. Far from

05:50 it. We are talking about a potentially long, hard slog, but one that the Ukrainians believe

05:56 they will have the wherewithal to take on as long as they go about this methodically

06:02 and coherently and consistently.

06:04 It's about trying to give a picture of what's going on using open source material, using

06:09 what's going on with our correspondence on the ground and what both sides are saying,

06:12 which is completely different.

06:14 Completely different. And you'd expect both sides to have completely different messaging,

06:18 right? Russians, essentially their message from the Ministry of Defence boils down to

06:22 carry on, nothing to see here, everything's just fine. In fact, the Russians have been

06:27 claiming in the past few days that they've been just repelling these unsuccessful, as

06:32 they see it, Ukrainian counteroffensive. Vladimir Putin himself making a rare statement about

06:37 the operation, saying basically the Ukrainian counteroffensive's failing, already dismissing

06:42 it out of hand. The Ukrainians taking exactly the opposite approach. You now know their

06:47 famous video campaign with the soldiers putting their fingers to their lips, the "Shh, plans

06:52 love silence." They are being deliberately very, very coy, very, very silent, if you

06:59 will, about what their actual plans are. Even their communication may be meant to divert

07:03 us. There may be fighting taking place in places we have no idea of right now. The Ukrainians'

07:07 silence remains their greatest asset, their greatest category. But they are making the

07:13 claims, as you said at the top here, of having captured these small settlements, these three

07:17 settlements in the Donetsk region, bordering the Zaporizhia region as well, which, whether

07:23 they're on behind the Russian defensive lines or actually sort of in Ukrainian territory,

07:29 symbolically it will give them a little bit of a morale boost. Both sides, very different

07:33 messaging, but there is fierce fighting raging along multiple fronts, and that makes this

07:38 a very complicated, very complicated war and counteroffensive to try to follow and decipher

07:44 in the absence of easily verifiable information.

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