Every weekday The Telegraph’s top journalists analyse the Russian invasion of Ukraine from all angles and tell you what you need to know
Today on Ukraine: The Latest, we bring you the latest updates from Ukraine, discuss the Russian strike on a hotel and pizza restaurant in Pokrovsk, and interview Frederick W Kagan Senior Fellow – Director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute – on the continuing Ukrainian counter-offensive.
Our guest Frederick Kagan speaks about some of the issues faced by the ongoing counter-offensive:
The Russian defences were better than we thought they would be. The team at the Institute for the Study of War that I work with and I had seen the rows of entrenchments and so forth; we had not seen the minefields which the Russians laid very extensively and very skillfully.
Beyond that it turns out, unfortunately, that Russian units defending in western Zaphorizhia area – which had been given actually many months with very little activity to focus on establishing their defences– practiced and developed very good doctrinal defensive tactics. We’ve described it as an elastic defence, where they allow the Ukrainians to penetrate through their first line of defence but then exhaust themselves in the attack, then Russian forces that are in positions further in the rear are able to counterattack and push them back.