Moscow:
President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday warned of a protracted military intervention in Ukraine, more than nine months into a conflict the Kremlin had hoped would end after a days-long attack on Kiev.
His remarks came after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said new Russian attacks on a market and gas station had killed six people and wounded several more in Donetsk’s frontline.
As the year-long conflict approaches, Russian forces have missed most of their key military goals, including overthrowing the Ukrainian government, capturing the Donbas region and annexing four regions.
Moscow had expected fighting to last several days before Ukraine’s capitulation, but Putin warned on Wednesday that the results would be a long time coming.
“As for the long process of (seeing) results of the special military operation, this is of course a long process,” Putin said during a televised meeting with the Kremlin’s Human Rights Council.
But he praised the announced annexation of four Ukrainian territories to Russia after Moscow proxies held a referendum – which the West has labeled a sham – and announced their integration in September.
“New areas have appeared – well, this is still an important result for Russia and this is a serious problem,” Putin said.
The Russian leader formalized the annexation of the four southern and eastern territories – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia – at a ceremony at the Kremlin in September.
Russian shelling on the market
But at no time did Russian troops control all of these regions and last month they were forced to leave the regional capital of the southern Kherson region after a months-long counter-offensive against Ukraine.
That same month, Putin announced that Russia was mobilizing hundreds of thousands of Russians to bolster Moscow’s struggling military force after a series of battlefield setbacks, particularly in the Kharkiv region of northeastern Ukraine.
On Wednesday, he said half of the Russians called up for military service in September had been deployed to Ukraine.
“Out of 300,000 of our mobilized fighters, our men, defenders of the fatherland, 150,000 are in the area of operations,” Putin said, adding that about 77,000 were in combat units.
Since the capture of the city of Kherson, fighting in Ukraine has centered on the industrial Donbas region, where Russian forces are pushing to take the front-line city of Bakhmut.
Zelensky said – after visiting the frontline this week – that Russian troops had killed six civilians and wounded several in a recent shelling.
“Terrorists attacked the peaceful town of Kurakhove,” he said in a statement posted on social media.
“A market, a bus station, gas stations and residential buildings came under fire. At least six civilians were killed, five were injured.”
The Donetsk region has been partially controlled by Russian forces since 2014, when Moscow-backed separatists wrested control of Donbas near the Russian border and Moscow annexed the Crimean peninsula.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
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