Russia's new war strategy with Kharkiv as cunning ruse

General Michel Yakovleff, former NATO Deputy Chief of Staff, was a guest of French news channel LCI. He gave his analysis of the Russian advance in recent days and the strategy employed by Putin's army.

"The Russian soldiers are destabilizing the front. It's a two-pronged attack, I don't think they intend to take Kharkiv, but to get as close to it as possible," says Michel Yakovleff.

And he adds:

"They are going to 'torture the child,' it is an old Mongolian custom, and by that I mean they are going to perform a threatening action to hit the opponent and thus force him to respond. The Ukrainians will not be able to just watch how Kharkiv gets 'tortured', and they will have to deploy considerable resources to defend the country's second largest city, allowing the Russians to attack on another front, so this is a crisis moment for the Ukrainians."

But this worries the general the most:

"The Russians have not yet shown their full strength in this offensive. The resources deployed are not the greatest. So they keep reserves in the back and there is a risk that they will regain the ground they lost in September 2022. In fact, we will be back where we were in 2022."

(FVDV and FM for Tagtik/Source: LCI/Photo: Dominik Sotsmann for Unsplash)

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