MOSCOW, January 22. /TASS/. The Ukrainian frontline will collapse within 100 days, if Vladimir Zelensky does not agree to negotiate, opposition-minded Verkhovna Rada member Alexander Dubinsky has said.
"If Zelensky does not go to negotiate, the frontline will collapse within 100 days," he wrote on his Telegram channel. Dubinsky pointed to the Russian army's advantage on the battlefield, which, he said, "is seen in testimonies by Ukrainian soldiers and territorial losses."
Dubinsky believes that Zelensky lies the number of soldiers at the frontline is as large as 880,000.
"The reasons for this lie are very simple. It is money. By overstating the real strength of the army Zelensky explains his demands for multibillion funding from the ‘allies.’ The ‘dead souls’ in the army are a way to pocket a couple of extra billions for himself," Dubinsky continued. In fact, he notes, the strength of the Ukrainian army without the ‘dead souls’ does not exceed 300,000: "30% of 880,000 is 280,000. Everything else is a fictitious."
On January 15, Zelensky said in Warsaw that the number of soldiers in the Ukrainian army remained at 880,000 and there were no plans to reduce it. A week later, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he demanded that European countries undertake to support and fund the Ukrainian army, which Kiev plans to increase to one million, if Ukraine is not admitted to NATO.
According to The Wall Street Journal, US President Donald Trump has tasked his special envoy for Ukraine Keith Kellogg with ending the Ukrainian conflict within a 100-day deadline. Trump did not rule out the possibility of a complete halt of US arms supplies to Kiev. He also declared his readiness to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin at any convenient moment.
As Putin noted earlier, Moscow was open to a dialogue with the new US administration on the Ukrainian conflict, the most important thing being to eliminate the root causes of the crisis. He reiterated that Russia had taken note of statements by Trump himself and his team about the wish to restore contacts, as well as the need to do everything to prevent a third world war.