President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy has rejected the idea of redeploying some Ukrainian troops from the east to the south, as Western experts had suggested in comments to the New York Times the day before.
"Does any expert realize how many people there are, how many occupiers in the east? Approximately 200 thousand. The proposal is as follows: let's take our Armed Forces from there and transfer them somewhere. I don't want to say where. For example, where we want or need it," Zelensky said at a press conference in Kyiv. "I think the following will follow: in a few days, Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, then they [Russian troops] will go to Pavlohrad, Dnipro, cut off the banks.
According to the NYT, American strategists believe that Ukrainian troops are too dispersed and should concentrate on the main direction – in the south of the country.
In their opinion, Kyiv is having a hard time breaking through the heavily fortified Russian defenses, largely because too many troops, including some of the best combat units, are in the wrong places.
The interlocutors said that the Ukrainian command has distributed troops and firepower roughly equally between the east and south, which has resulted in more Ukrainian troops near Bakhmut and other cities in the east than near Melitopol and Zaporizhzhia in the south, where the more strategically important parts of the front are located, experts say.
"We will not give up Kharkiv, Donbas, Pavlohrad or Dnipro. And let all the analysts in the world not even count on it," Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
Background. The day before, it was reported that the United States advised Ukraine to distribute its counteroffensive forces differently, in particular, to focus on advancing to Melitopol and breaking through Russian minefields.