MOSCOW, August 20. /TASS/. On Thursday, August 20 the grouping of pro-Kiev armed units in eastern Ukraine totaled 90,000 men and officers, 450 tanks, 203 salvo artillery units, and five Tochka-U missile complexes, Eduard Basurin, a top official at the Defense Ministry of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic told the Donetsk News Agency.
The troops are concentrated in four sectors - Mariupol, Donetsk, Debaltsevo, and Luhansk.
"Along with this, two groupings [of Kiev’s forces] are intended to launch an offensive in the Donetsk direction north and south of Donetsk towards Ilovaisk, close the circle around the republic’s capital and encircle the city," the spokesman said.
In the Luhansk direction, Kiev’s forces are planning to hold separate combat operations against the militia of the Luhansk People’s Republic to prevent their redeployment to provide support to the DPR, the spokesman said.
"Further on, active offensive operations will be launched in the Luhansk direction with the aim to advance to the border with Russia," Basurin said.
According to the DPR Defense Ministry, Kiev hopes this blitzkrieg will help it crush the militia and destroy the Donbass republics.
"At the same time, it would be nice to remind these ‘wise guys’ in the Ukrainian General Staff that the attempts to carry through such ‘Napoleon plans’ were made before but all this ended in the encirclement of the Ukrainian troops near Izvarino and Ilovaisk where a great number of Ukrainian soldiers died," the DRP Defense Ministry spokesman said.
Thousands have been killed and hundreds of thousands of people have fled Ukraine’s embattled east as a result of clashes between Ukrainian troops and local militias in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions during Kiev’s military operation, launched in mid-April 2014 to regain control over parts of the breakaway territories, which call themselves the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.