Ukraine war: Russia claims their commander of the Black Sea fleet is alive

The Russians are trying to hold on until the bad weather comes, and they’ve put everything pretty well everything onto the front line.

Ukraine war: Russia claims their commander of the Black Sea fleet is alive

The defense minister Shogu. We’ve looked at the video. It hops around a lot and isn’t clear. The guy on the video who most closely resembles Sokolov has been identified, and while it appears to be him, there is some doubt. This person on the left, there, could be Sokolov looking at previous photographs of him. On the other hand, there’s still no proof that this video is current.

There’s a lot of evidence that Sokolov was in the building that was hit on Friday by a couple of Storm Shadow missiles, so Sokolov may live. But I think the Russians would have to produce more convincing evidence than this if they want to be taken seriously on this particular issue. It’s odd that producing a rather vague video and saying he’s here somewhere and leaving it to news organizations like us to try to work out who it might be is less than clear in the message they were trying to send.

Turning more broadly now to the front line. What’s the latest strategy on the ground? Well, on the ground, things are very interesting. The Ukrainians are still battering away at these front lines up in the East, where they’ve made a significant breakthrough just south of Bakmut and in the south of the Bove. They’re attacking at Nova proper pifka. And what’s interesting is that the Russians have moved quite a lot of units from the Northeast down to the South to strengthen the area around Tokamak south of Orikive where the real battle is now going on. This is the difference in strategy here.

The Russians are trying to hold on until the bad weather comes, and they’ve put everything pretty well everything onto the front line. The Ukrainians have now, as it was, worked their way through that front line. They think that they are through the worst of the or the biggest of the defenses and that they can now as it will get back in their vehicles and start to motor. We’ll see, but on the other hand, they’ve only got a month to do it. So on the 4th of June when this offensive started we said this is a Now or Never moment, and they’ve spent the last almost two months as we’re battering away through these incredible defenses.

They’ve now gone from the Now-or-never moment to the make-or-break moment. If they can’t break through now in the month or six weeks that are left to them, then the offensive will be judged a failure whatever happens during the rest of the winter. Meanwhile, drone strikes in Odesa on the border with Romania. What do you make of this? Yes, I mean the Russians are continuing their attacks on the grain facilities, and there were big attacks overnight at Odesa.

Again, this is a nightly thing, and also, in this case, they attacked the Danube Basin, which is the area that demarcates Ukraine from Romania. They uh attacked the well or hit the ferry Crossing, which affected both countries. Whether that was an intentional hit or not, I’m not sure. But they’re going for the ports of Ismail and Rennie down there, which are the two big grain ports in Russia. The Ukrainians have got about half of their grain out through the Danube, about 45 million tons in the last 12 months. So it’s become very important to them, and the Russians are now attacking it. But in attacking the Danube Basin, they’re very, very close to Romania, which is just the other side of the river, and that, of course, is a NATO country.