Ukraine military resources almost exhausted: Kremlin
Published on: Wednesday, August 16, 2023
By: AFP
Local residents take a closer look at the crater of a missile that fell between residential buildings and a kindergarten in the city of Lviv, western Ukraine.
Moscow: Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu said Tuesday that Ukraine’s military resources were “almost exhausted”, as Kyiv wages a gruelling counter offensive to recapture lost territory.“Despite comprehensive assistance from the West, Ukraine’s armed forces are unable to achieve results,” Shoigu said at a security conference in Moscow.
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“Preliminary results of the hostilities show that Ukraine’s military resources are almost exhausted,” he said.
He added that there was “nothing unique” about Western weapons and that they were not invulnerable to Russian arms on the battlefield.
Kyiv kicked off its long anticipated counter offensive in June, but has acknowledged tough battles as it struggles to break through heavily fortified Russian positions.
While Ukraine has claimed gains around the war-torn city of Bakhmut in its east, Russia has claimed advances around the town of Kupiansk in the northeastern Kharkiv region.
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Shoigu was speaking at the Moscow Conference on International Security. Russia invited representatives from over 100 nations to attend, but Western countries were excluded.
Russian missiles killed three people in the Ukrainian city of Lutsk early Tuesday, the latest deadly strike on the west of the country suffering an uptick in aerial attacks.
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The bombardment of nearly three dozen missiles also tore through a playground in Lviv, western Ukraine’s largest city, and sparked a blaze that left a five-storey residential charred and its windows burnt out.
The barrage of several types of missiles came as Russia’s defence minister said during a military expo in Moscow that Ukraine was running low on military resources, with Kyiv posting slow battlefield progress.
Lutsk mayor Igor Polishchuk announced the death toll on social media and said emergency services were searching for survivors.
They later said they had pulled a victim from the debris alive.
The regional governor Yuriy Poguliaiko said air defence forces had repelled overnight air attacks but confirmed one missile hit an industrial facility in Lutsk.
The town had a pre-war population of over 200,000 and is less than 100 kilometres (60 miles) from Ukraine’s border with Poland.
“Deliberate large-scale attacks on
civilians. Solely for the sake of killing and psychological pressure,” was how senior presidential aide Mykhailo Podolyak described the barrage in its aftermath.
Fatal Russian strikes in western Ukraine are sporadic.
In March last year, four Ukrainian soldiers were killed and six wounded in Russian strikes on the Lutsk military airport.
But they have increased in recent weeks and AFP journalists in the western region of Ivano-Frankivsk this week witnessed family members bury an eight-year-old boy killed by Russian cruise missiles targeting a western airbase last week.
In Lviv, mayor Andriy Sadovyi said several missiles had been downed but confirmed widespread damage to dozens of buildings and said four people were injured.
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