As the battle for the key Ukrainian city of Severodonetsk rages on, Western military experts believe that more weapons from the United States and its western allies would be needed to prevent Russia from taking Ukraine’s eastern regions.
Russian president Vladimir Putin since last month started issuing Russian passports and circulated ruble in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia and installed local leaders to ensure the Russian annexation of Donetsk and Luhansk autonomous regions.
Regional governor Serhiy Haidai said that Russian forces destroyed a second bridge across a river to the neighboring city of Lysychansk with intent to totally cut Severodonetsk off of reinforcements – a tactic Russian forces applied in the conquest of Kherson and Mariupol.
Western military experts used this case to point out that more western military aid thwarted Russian forces from Ukraine’s northern territories but if Russia continues to bombard its way through cities under Ukrainian control in the east, there are chances that it could regroup and mount a fresh assault on the cities of Kharkiv and eventually Kyiv.
“In this war, the victory will be with the side that has more and better weapons. And, if Ukraine doesn’t obtain enough weapons in time, it will bleed out,” Anton Gerashchenko, adviser to the Ukrainian interior ministry, warned.
The Ukrainians say that for every 10 to 20 Russian artillery units out fighting Ukraine has 1, pointing out that the imbalance in firepower is leading to casualties.
A meeting of Ukraine Contact Group conference of defense ministers and top military officers from North Atlantic Treaty Organization members and other allies and partners in Brussels will be chaired by US defense secretary Lloyd Austin where they are slated to discuss measures on how to help Ukraine at this juncture, the Wall Street Journal said in a report.
Retired Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, a former commander of the US Army in Europe who is now with the Center for European Policy Analysis, told the Wall Street Journal that Ukraine can push back the Russian army to where it was on Feb 23, 2022 but for that to happen more weapons would be required. “If we fail to do that…then this is going to go on for potentially years,” Hodges was quoted as saying by the Wall Street Journal.
(with inputs from the Wall Street Journal and the BBC)
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