Global Courant
Ukrainian T64 tanks move towards Bakhmut, Donetsk Oblast region on March 20, 2023.ARIS MESSINIS/AFP via Getty Images
Russia has deployed a new military formation of about 15,000 soldiers to fight around Bakhmut.
Ukraine’s spy chief Kyrylo Budanov said the 25th Army was deployed ahead of schedule.
Budanov said Ukraine is holding Putin’s troops near Bakhmut to prevent redeployment south.
Ukraine is holding a newly created Russian reserve force near Bakhmut and is confident the 15,000-strong unit will be destroyed, Ukraine’s spy chief says.
Kyrylo Budanov told it The war zone that Ukraine kept Russian troops in Bakhmut to prevent their deployment to other axes where the counteroffensive continues.
“The Russians recently redeployed their only reserve force – the 25th Army – which was only recently established and has not yet completed its creation,” he said.
“Now it has been moved to about north of Bakhmut, and that is where it will be buried.”
The 25th Combined Arms Army was created this summer, a rare move for the Russian military, which has rarely created new organizations during the conflict. said in August.
The unit was suddenly deployed to the front line, despite soldiers being told they would be sent to fight in December, the British ministry says said in an update earlier this month.
Their hasty deployment was likely a sign that Russia “continues to struggle with an overstretched force along the front,” the update said.
It is not clear exactly when the unit was deployed.
As fighting continues around the eastern city of Bakhmut, which Russia occupied in May, Ukraine’s counter-offensive continues in the Zaporizhia area in the south of the country.
Oleksandr Tarnavsky, the Ukrainian general leading the counter-offensive on the country’s southern front line, told CNN in a report published on Saturday that its forces had broken out near the town of Verbove in the southeastern Zaporizhia region and were continuing to advance.
Budanov said: “The threat to the Russians of losing Bakhmut forces them to redeploy more and more troops to the Bakhmut area at all times, which obviously drains their resources from other directions, such as the south.”
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