(TJV NEWS) Bloomberg reports Friday that the Kremlin may be limiting its key military objectives to taking full control over the Donbas region. This despite multiple parts of the county, including outside the capital of Kiev, still witnessing intense fighting and shelling.
The Friday Bloomberg report says that “After a month of fighting that’s yielded limited territorial gains, the Russian military said it’s focusing efforts on taking full control of Ukraine’s Donbas region, potentially a sign it’s backing away from hopes of taking larger swathes of the country.”
The Russian military’s first deputy chief of the General Staff Sergei Rudskoi said the following as quoted in Interfax: “Our forces will focus on the main thing – the complete liberation of Donbas.”
Bloomberg reports of a fresh casualty count from Russia’s military, “Rudskoi put losses at 1,351 killed and 3,835 wounded, the first official accounting since March 2. He said Russian forces control 93% of the Luhansk People’s Republic and 54% of the Donetsk one.” However, many believe the true count to be much higher.
The Kremlin’s chief negotiator Vladimir Medinsky was cited in Interfax as saying that “Russia sees no progress on key issues in talks with Ukraine.”
