The Russian army is shifting battalions from eastern Ukraine to the south.
The goal: to cut off and starve the Russian 49th Combined Arms Army and its 10 or so battalions in Kherson Oblast, potentially accelerating the southern counteroffensive.
In the span of a few weeks, Russia’s southern forces roughly doubled from around a dozen battalion tactical groups to 30,At the very least, those battalions could join, and stiffen, the 49th CAA in Kherson. But both Arestovych and Konstantin Mashovets, a Ukrainian analyst and army officer, have said they expect the Russians to launch an offensive toward Kryvyi Rih and Mykolaiv, both around 30 miles from the line of contact in southern Ukraine.
But there are reasons to be skeptical of this purported Russian offensive. The Russian army in Ukraine has buried 15,000 or more of its best troops—more than 10 percent of its pre-war strength—and written off more than 5,000 of its best vehicles. The Russian army in Ukraine needs fresh troops, bad. And the fresh troops it’s going to get are under-trained and under-equipped.
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