UNDERSTANDING THE WAR
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14 June 2022: Here are this evening’s key takeaways from the Ukraine update by the Institute for the Study of War:
— Russian military authorities are pursuing options to increase the available pool of eligible recruits to account for continued personnel losses in Ukraine. [As I have noted before, the way in Ukraine is increasingly a force generation context, as well as a brutal, costly, and destructive war of attrition.]
— Russian forces are continuing to fight for control of the Azot industrial plant in Severodonetsk and have destroyed all bridges between Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, likely to isolate the remaining Ukrainian defenders within the city from critical lines of communication.
— Russian forces continue to prepare for offensive operations southeast of Izyum and west of Lyman toward Slovyansk.
— Russian forces are continuing offensive operations to the east of Bakhmut near the T1302 highway to cut Ukrainian lines of communication to Severodonetsk-Lysychansk.
— Russian forces continued offensive operations to push Ukrainian troops away from frontlines northeast of Kharkiv City.
— Ukrainian counterattacks have forced Russian troops on the Southern Axis to take up and strengthen defensive positions.
— The Belarusian Armed Forces began a command post exercise focused on testing command and control capabilities on June 14. However, Belarus remains unlikely to join the war in Ukraine on behalf of Russia. Head of Logistics for the Belarusian Armed Forces Major General Andrei Burdyko announced that the exercise will involve military authorities, unspecified military units, and logistics organizations and is intended to improve the coherency of command-and-control and logistics support to increase the overall level of training and practical skills of personnel in a “dynamically changing environment.”
— Russian authorities may be accelerating plans to annex occupied areas of Ukraine, and they continue to arrange political and administrative contingencies for control of annexed territories. Russian military correspondent Sasha Kots posted an image of a map that was displayed at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum depicting a proposed scheme for the “administrative-territorial” division of Ukraine following the war on a three-to-five-year transition scale. The proposed scheme divides Ukrainian oblasts into Russian “territorial districts” and suggests the manner in which Russian authorities hope to incorporate Ukrainian territory directly into Russia.
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