Russia insists on its tactic of wearing down Ukraine along the front line while kyiv tries to gain a foothold on the left bank of the Dnieper, where it maintains a beachhead.
"Russia has been preparing for war for several decades and has accumulated many weapons," former Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar acknowledged this Sunday on her Telegram channel, according to whom the Russian Army's objective lies in "exhausting us." the more possible".
This pressure, according to Maliar, is intended to prevent Ukraine from creating ammunition reserves, repairing its damaged military equipment and lowering the Army's morale.
"They act so that we do not have time to recover. Meanwhile (...) they are preparing for the next stage of aggressive actions," he warned.
He added that "the occupiers will do everything possible to put pressure" on Avdivka (Ukrainian stronghold in the Donetsk region) and reach Kupiansk (in the Kharkiv region).
"For them, this is important not so much in the military sense, but for propaganda purposes and moral support for their own army," he estimated, recognizing that the Russian advance in the east of the country remains "at the same pace as in the fall." ", despite the fact that the Ukrainian Army fiercely resists.
In order to wear down the Ukrainian Army, he indicated, "the Russians use small assault group tactics" similar to those used by the Russian mercenary group Wagner, since Ukraine spends practically the same amount of supplies to repel the attack of a small group than to reject a larger group.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian troops urgently need reinforcements, the commander of the Fifth Assault Brigade of the Ukrainian Army, Oleksí Tarasenko, told public television today.
"The troops are eagerly awaiting new reinforcements, because in many areas, in many units, the personnel situation is quite critical and the quality of the troops arriving leaves much to be desired," he stated.
He explained that the average age of Ukrainian soldiers is over 40 years old, "people of advanced age with many health problems" and little military preparation.
At the end of last year, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reported that the Army asked to recruit 500,000 people into the armed forces, but so far Parliament has not approved the new mobilization law that would give the green light to this campaign.
For its part, the Russian Ministry of Defense reported that during the day the Army had repelled eight Ukrainian attacks in three sectors of the front: in Kupiansk, in Liman (in the Luhansk region) and in the Donetsk sector.
In turn, the General Staff of the Ukrainian Army indicated that in the last 24 hours the Ukrainian forces repelled four enemy attacks in Sinkivka (Kupiansk sector) and four in Lugansk and Donetsk, while in Avdivka, a city that the Russians are trying to surround from Three months ago, they repelled around twenty attacks.
However, one of the sectors of highest fighting intensity is that of Jerson, on the left bank of the Dnieper River, where Ukrainian forces managed to sit a beachhead and resist dense Russian fire.
"We are making efforts to consolidate and expand the beachhead, and the enemy is trying to expel our units. There are almost no houses left intact, the artillery on both sides is working. In addition, the enemy intensively bombed the area," he declared to the Ukrainian television the spokesperson for the Southern Command of Ukraine, Natalia Gumeniuk.
In this sector of the front, he noted, Russia may have concentrated around 10,000 troops, with the aim of maintaining control of this area.
