MOSCOW, December 11. /TASS/. Ukraine’s army has found itself in a difficult situation in five frontline areas in the country’s east, including in Avdeyevka in the Kiev-controlled part of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), former Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Anna Malyar said on Monday.
"The Kupyansk, Liman, Bakhmut [the Ukrainian name for Artyomovsk in the DPR], Maryinka and Avdeyevka directions. In all these directions, the situation is tense," she wrote on her Telegram channel.
Intense fighting is underway in all the five directions, she added.
Earlier, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky admitted in an interview with the Associated Press news agency that Kiev’s summer counteroffensive had failed to achieve expected results. On November 30, he held a meeting on building fortifications at the borders with Russia and Belarus and along the engagement line. The Ukrainian president stressed the need "to speed up" the construction of fortified structures. He specified that the Avdeyevka and Kupyansk-Liman areas, the entire Kharkov, Sumy, Chernigov, Kiev, Rovno and Volyn Regions, and also the Kiev-held part of the Kherson Region were the main directions.
Commenting on this statement, Verkhovna Rada MP Alexey Goncharenko (blacklisted as a terrorist and extremist in Russia) said that Ukrainian troops were switching over to defense. Later, ex-Chief of Ukraine’s General Staff Viktor Muzhenko said in an interview with the Ukrainian service of the BBC that the Kiev forces should switch over to strategic defense and completely reshape the frontline. He specified that Ukrainian troops should build layered fortifications and set up reserves.
The Ukrainian army has been making unsuccessful attempts to attack since early June. As Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu reported, the Ukrainian military has lost more than 125,000 troops and over 16,000 items of military hardware since it launched its counteroffensive on June 4.
Russia has repeatedly said that Kiev’s so-called counteroffensive has failed to yield any tangible results. Both the West and the Kiev regime has made statements over the past few weeks that the ‘counteroffensive’ fell through and the frontline situation reached a stalemate for the Ukrainian side.