Ukraine updates: Zelenskyy says counteroffensive ‘taking place’

Patrick Bury, former NATO analyst and a defence and security expert at the University of Bath, has told Al Jazeera the Ukrainian counteroffensive is “a long game”.

“It’s highly unlikely that we’re going to see a rapid breakthrough like we saw in Kharkiv back in September, for example, where the Ukrainians were able to, with the help of allied intelligence, identify places where there were just exhausted and ruined Russian units and drove essentially past them and keep going. It’s not going to be like that,” Bury said.

“The Russians have had months to prepare significant offences and these are … defensive positions with trenches, bunkers, minefields, in particular, which are designed to channel attackers into killing zones. The Russian doctrine is of course to fall back through these defensive lines if they have to and then counterattack. Hence why we’re seeing reports of ‘Yes, the Ukrainians are taking this village’ and ‘Oh no, they’re being driven out.’ We totally expect this; it’s about taking the longer view.”