Russian President Vladimir Putin will need to change his goals in Ukraine given his depleted resources following Kyiv’s successful counteroffensive, the Pentagon’s intelligence chief said.
Ukraine’s military has continued to hold strong against Russia’s invasion, which began in February, and has recaptured significant amounts of territory in the eastern part of the country in a new counteroffensive that began earlier this month. Russia was expected to overthrow the Ukrainian government in the capital of Kyiv quickly but was forced to withdraw troops from the outskirts of the area in the spring following a stronger-than-expected resistance.
STATE DEPARTMENT SAYS NUCLEAR DEAL TALKS WITH IRAN ARE ‘AT A STALEMATE’
“We’re coming to a point right now where I think Putin is going to have to revise what his objectives are for this operation,” Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told an intelligence and national security conference on Friday, according to the Associated Press. “It’s pretty clear right now that he’s … not going to be able to do what he initially intended to do.”
With Ukraine recapturing significant territory in the Kharkiv region, Berrier said Putin is “coming to a decision point. … What that decision will be we don’t know. But that will largely drive how long this conflict lasts.”
There has been fear that Putin could resort to using a nuclear weapon if he’s backed into a corner, though CIA Deputy Director David Cohen said defense officials “have not seen concrete evidence of planning for the use of [weapons of mass destruction].”
However, he cautioned, “I don’t think we should underestimate Putin’s adherence to his original agenda, which was to control Ukraine. I don’t think we’ve seen any reason to believe he has moved off that.”
The Russian president in recent days reiterated that his new goal, to capture the entire Donbas region, remains the same despite having retreated from much of the northern part of the region.
“No, the plan will not be adjusted,” Putin said. “The main goal is to liberate the entire territory of Donbas. This work continues despite the attempts of the Ukrainian army to launch a counteroffensive. We are not stopping our offensive operations in Donbas itself. They continue. They continue at a slow pace, but consistently and gradually, the Russian army is taking more and more new territory.”
When the Russians retreated from the Kharkiv region, Ukrainians uncovered a “mass burial site,” which included more than 440 bodies found in a forest in the region — just like in Bucha, Mariupol, and other cities. Russia again denied responsibility for the horrific scene in Kharkiv.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“This is the same scenario as in Bucha. This is a lie. Of course, we will defend the truth in this whole story,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Monday, according to CNN.
The Institute for the Study of War wrote over the weekend, “The revelations of mass graves of civilians and torture chambers in newly liberated Izyum confirms ISW’s previous assessments that the Bucha atrocities were not isolated war crimes but rather a microcosm of Russian atrocities throughout Russian-occupied areas.”
