Cavoli is the first military official to confirm that Ukrainian troops have entered the Belgorod region. Ukraine’s own military has not officially confirmed its troops’ presence in Belgorod, but regularly reports Ukrainian airstrikes in the region.
Neither Cavoli nor the Ukrainian army revealed how much territory Ukrainians control in the Kursk region, but according to the DeepState OSINT project that monitors military operations, Kyiv’s forces still hold around 140 square kilometers in Kursk, out of the 1,300 they originally seized last summer in the surprise cross-border offensive.
In March, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that his army has been taking proactive steps at the Russian border to stop an upcoming massive offensive Moscow is preparing on the northeastern Sumy and Kharkiv regions.
Ukraine is not destined to lose
In a further general assessment of the battlefield, Cavoli said the Ukrainian army is now in strong defensive positions, and is improving weekly its ability to recruit and train new soldiers to reinforce those positions.
“[Still] it is hard sitting here right now to envision a major Ukrainian offensive that clears everybody, you know, out of every square inch of Ukraine. But likewise, it’s very hard to envision Ukraine collapsing and losing that conflict,” Cavoli said. “I do not think there is an inevitability to a Ukrainian loss … They are in much better position than they were.”
It appears that Ukraine has solved some of its manpower problems that were so acute last fall, according to Cavoli. Meanwhile, the Russians appear to suffer from a paucity of armored vehicles and a lack of manpower.
“Ukrainians increased the pool of people available for voluntary recruitment. And they’ve done a good job squeezing people out of headquarters to the front. Ukrainians are relying mainly on one-way attack drones, as well as some indigenously produced cruise missile systems,” Cavoli said.
“They’re trying to win. They want to start by making sure Russia doesn’t win,” he added.
