Pro-Russian authorities in Lugansk warned today that Ukraine could launch the announced counteroffensive on May 9, when Russia celebrates the day of victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.
“Favourable weather conditions are expected for this weekend, which will allow the Ukrainian armed forces to fully utilize the equipment and weapons provided by NATO countries,” said a representative of the pro-Russian authorities in Lugansk.
Andrei Marochko told Russian news agency TASS that “the enemy will try to overshadow the celebration of Victory Day”.
Russia celebrates the Soviet Union’s victory in the “Great Patriotic War” over the forces of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime on May 9.
Marochko said Ukrainian forces are currently assembling weapons and equipment, and forming strike groups for “large-scale counter-offensive actions”.
“Thus, at the end of this week and at the beginning of the next, there is a high probability that Ukraine will resume the active phase of offensive actions,” he told TASS, quoted by the Spanish agency EFE.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said on Friday that preparations for the Ukrainian counter-offensive had entered the final stage.
“Broadly speaking, we are ready,” Reznikov told the Ukrainian news agency Ukrinform.
Lugansk is one of four regions that Moscow annexed in September 2022, seven months after it invaded Ukraine, along with Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporijia.
Russia had already annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in 2014.
Ukraine and the international community in general do not recognize Russian sovereignty in the annexed regions.
Kiev demands the vacating of annexed regions, including Crimea, as one of the preconditions for eventual peace talks.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, plunged Europe into what is considered the most serious security crisis since World War II (1939-1945).
Ukraine’s Western allies have supplied Ukraine with weaponry to fight Russian forces and have imposed economic sanctions on Moscow to try to affect Russian funding of the war.
The number of civilian and military casualties in the war is unknown, but several sources, including the UN, have admitted that it will be considerably high.
