“Recently, I won’t give the exact number of villages because I’m afraid I’d make a mistake, but the Russian army has taken control of 2,440,000 square kilometers,” the American Institute for the Study of War (ISW) quotes Putin as saying.
He immediately added that the Russian leader “apparently meant 2,440 square kilometers”, since Ukraine itself has an area four times smaller.
Even in the official transcription of Putin’s words, 2,440 kilometers are actually written, wrote the Russian newspaper The Moscow Times.
In his own words, Putin further mentioned that the Russian army is advancing at all points of the front. According to ISW, this is a lie. “Putin also falsely claimed that Russian forces are advancing on all sections of the front line,” state American analysts.
According to the ISW, it is currently increasingly difficult for the Russians to maintain a protracted war of attrition and “their performance on the battlefield is declining.” This is proven by the June report of the AFP agency, which reported that the Ukrainians liberated about 282 square kilometers during May, thanks to which they reduced the area of the territory occupied by Russia for the second month in a row.
Ukrainians liberate
According to the ISW, the Ukrainian military “in recent months has intensified its medium- and long-range attacks and attempted to take the tactical initiative in several areas of the front line, which poses further obstacles to Russia’s continuation of the war effort.”
But analysts noted that Putin’s statements at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum indicate that, despite growing problems, Moscow is still determined to achieve its war goals. One of them is the full control of Donbass, i.e. Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. However, Russia does not control any of them.
According to Putin, the Russian army controls 85 percent of the Donetsk region and 100 percent of the Luhansk region. However, the Ukrainians claim that they still hold a smaller territory in the Luhansk region.
