The first Canadian Leopard 2 main battle tank donated to Ukraine arrives by air transport in Poland in a photograph released on Feb. 5.CANADIAN FORCES/Reuters
The Leopard battle tanks donated by Canada and other Western countries are now in action in southern Ukraine, a top security official said on Friday, as evidence mounted that a long-anticipated counteroffensive to liberate Russian-occupied territories has begun.
“All the equipment we have received works to destroy the enemy … and all this equipment is actively being used on the front line,” Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defence Council, said in an interview with The Globe and Mail inside the NSDC’s heavily fortified Kyiv headquarters.
Mr. Danilov maintained Ukraine’s official silence about whether the counteroffensive is under way, but when asked whether Western-donated Leopard 2 tanks were now involved in battle – as videos posted online by Russian military bloggers appear to show – he picked up his mobile phone and called General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi who commands the Tavria battle group responsible for the southeastern sector of the front line.
“He is satisfied that he has the Leopards and they are performing combat tasks,” Mr. Danilov said after a brief conversation with Gen. Tarnavskyi. “This is the reply of the person who is there, who sitting in this equipment, and who can assess the efficiency of this equipment. He is the one on the front line.”
The deployment of at least some of the 100-plus Leopard and Challenger main battle tanks that Ukraine has received from its Western allies is one of the biggest possible signs that a new and critical phase in this 15-month-old war has begun.
The Russian military said on Monday that it believed the Ukrainian counteroffensive was under way, with sources since claiming to have inflicted heavy defeats on the advancing Ukrainian forces. The Russian embassy in Washington declared on Wednesday that eight Leopard tanks had been “annihilated” by Russian fire, with the Ministry of Defence posting a grainy video of a vehicle being destroyed by a helicopter-fired missile. An analysis of the video by the Associated Press determined that it “actually documented the destruction of a tractor.”
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However other images posted on social media this week, geolocated to the southern Zaporizhzhia front by the Ukraine Weapons Tracker Twitter account, appeared to show at least two destroyed Leopard 2 tanks, with another damaged and abandoned nearby. One U.S.-donated Bradley Fighting Vehicle was also shown to be destroyed, while four more were damaged and abandoned.
Independent reporting of the situation on the Ukrainian side of the front line is almost impossible due to increasingly tight media controls. Russia has outright denied accreditation to most foreign journalists.
“We can definitely state that this Ukrainian offensive has begun,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in a video interview published on Telegram on Friday.
On Thursday, the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War said it believed the Ukrainian counteroffensive had begun on June 4 with heavy fighting in the southeastern Donetsk and southern Zaporizhzhia regions.
The ISW assessed that Ukrainian troops had made gains this week on the flanks of the city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, which Russian forces captured in May after a nine-month siege. On Wednesday, Ukrainian troops launched what the institute called “a limited but still significant attack” in the Zaporizhzhia region that Russia appeared to have defended “in a doctrinally sound manner,” with Russian troops pushing back to their original positions by Thursday.
Mykola Bielieskov, a Kyiv-based military analyst, told The Globe that he believed both sides saw Zaporizhzhia as the most important front because of the possibility that a Ukrainian thrust south could cut the Russian-occupied areas in two. If Ukrainian troops reach the Azov Sea, they would sever what’s known as the “land bridge” connecting Russia to the occupied Crimean Peninsula, and effectively reset the front line to where it stood before Mr. Putin ordered the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
Mr. Bielieskov said the majority of long-range Ukrainian missile strikes in recent weeks – some involving British-donated Storm Shadow cruise missiles – were on the southern front, marking the Russian-occupied areas of the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions as the most likely targets for the counteroffensive.
“If we can liberate these parts of Ukraine, it would be the best proof that Russian plans failed completely and spectacularly,” Mr. Bielieskov said. “To liberate this fertile black earth territories, to liberate the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, to cut the land bridge.”
Mr. Danilov said that this week’s destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam – which Ukraine accuses Russia of destroying with an underwater explosion – was an attempt to “stop our military action in that direction” by widening the Dnipro River, which serves as the de facto front line in the Kherson region.
The disaster – which Russia claims was caused by a Ukrainian missile strike on the dam – has flooded entire villages, displacing thousands of people and ruining tens of thousands of hectares of rich farmland. At least 13 people have died as a result of the dam burst, which unleashed the 18 million cubic metres of water contained in the Kakhovka Reservoir. Previously, the reservoir helped irrigate much of southern Ukraine and provided cooling water to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant.
Mr. Danilov said there was “no doubt” that the dam was intentionally destroyed by the Russian military. For proof, he pointed to an audio recording released Friday by Ukraine’s SBU security service in which a man identified as a Russian soldier says, “they didn’t strike it. That was our sabotage group.” The voice adds that the operation – which led to the flooding of Russian defensive positions on the east bank of the Dnipro – “didn’t go according to plan, and [they did] more than what they planned for.”
Mr. Danilov said the recording was “one proof among others” of Russian culpability in the destruction of the dam. Ukrainian military intelligence believes Russia initially planted explosives on the dam last fall, ahead of their withdrawal from the city of Kherson, but decided not to destroy it at the time.
Russia has repeatedly denied responsibility for well-documented war crimes committed by its forces during the invasion, including last year’s massacre of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, as well as the bombing of a theatre where hundreds of people had taken shelter during the siege of the Azov Sea port of Mariupol.
The destruction of Nova Kakhovka and the flooding of the surrounding area was “a terrorist act beyond our understanding,” Mr. Danilov said. But it didn’t substantially alter the Ukrainian military’s plans. “It will probably change our tactics. However it doesn’t impact our strategy, which remains the same, unchangeable, which is to liberate all of Ukrainian territory from the occupiers.”
Mr. Bielieskov said that even with the Western-supplied tanks and other weapons, the counteroffensive would likely be “a slow, grinding fight” with military breakthroughs followed by periods of resting and regrouping – unlike last fall’s rapid liberation of the eastern Kharkiv region
The stakes are extremely high, he said, because of the looming U.S. presidential elections and the possibility that Donald Trump – who has been critical of U.S. military support for Ukraine – could return to the White House. “We need to be successful in general, because 2024 is almost here … and even such person as Donald J. Trump wants to be on the winner’s side, not on the loser’s side.”