NEW YORK, August 5. /TASS/. Sooner or later, London will have to admit the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive, although it is still trying to disagree with this. Russian Ambassador to the UK Andrey Kelin voiced this opinion in an interview with CNN International.
"I am reading the reports by the British Defense Ministry, which still continues to say that they [Ukrainian forces] are moving [forward]. This is not correct. Couple of villages that have been taken by Ukrainian forces two weeks ago have been retaken by the Russian forces. They have achieved nothing in this counteroffensive," the diplomat said.
"Sooner or later the government in the UK should recognize the truth - this counteroffensive is not a success," he noted.
Kelin stressed that the allegations that Russian forces were also allegedly forced to withdraw from the Kiev region in April 2022 are completely untrue. According to him, the conflicting parties were very close to an agreement. The authorities and the President of Ukraine [Vladimir Zelensky] asked the Russian forces to leave the Kiev region, and Russia did it as a goodwill gesture. But immediately after that, the Ukrainians said there was no agreement and that they would fight, the ambassador said.
In June, speaking at a meeting with leaders and representatives of several African countries, President Vladimir Putin recalled that Ukraine initialed a draft agreement with Moscow, which was drawn up in Istanbul in March 2022, but after Russian troops withdrew from outside Kiev, Ukraine threw it out into the "landfill of history."
As reported by the Russian Defense Ministry, the Ukrainian army has been making unsuccessful offensive attempts since June 4. According to the agency, in two months the Ukrainian armed forces lost more than 43,000 servicemen and about 5,000 units of various weapons, including 26 aircraft and 25 Leopard tanks. Russian President Vladimir Putin stressed that the Ukrainian troops are not successful in any direction.