New York Times: US intelligence pessimistic about Kyiv’s military capabilities
The New York Times reported that US intelligence has become more pessimistic due to Kiev’s inability to solve the problem of the severe shortage of soldiers.
The New York Times quoted its sources as saying that some American military and intelligence officers have become more pessimistic about Ukraine’s future in the conflict with Russia, given the latter’s advances in the Kursk and Donbas regions, explaining that US officials cite Ukraine’s inability to solve the problem of the severe shortage of soldiers, and they also stress that the reason for this inability is the Ukrainian forces’ attack on the Russian Kursk region, which led to a significant reduction in the number of its forces in Donbas and made it vulnerable to Russian attacks.
It’s noteworthy that Ukrainian forces launched a large-scale attack on the Kursk region in early August, with Kursk Governor Alexei Smirnov reporting on August 12 that Ukrainian forces had taken control of 28 populated areas.
The Russian Defense Ministry later announced the recapture of 14 of them.
The Russian President Vladimir Putin stated on October 24 that Russian forces are besieging about 2,000 Ukrainian soldiers in the Kursk region, and he described the losses of Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region as “enormous.”
For its part, the Russian Defense Ministry confirmed that it had stepped up the pace of the attack on the Donbas front, in light of the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk.
It’s also worth noting that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky admitted that the military operation in Kursk was supposed to divert the attention of Russian forces from Bakrovsk and Toretsk, but “it’s still difficult there,” as he put it.
