Putin’s new deadline for Ukraine’s war revealed

Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly ordered Russian forces to reach the administrative borders of the Donetsk region by Sept. 15. Russia will be attempting to shift its third Army Corps to handle the Donetsk shift, the Deputy Chief of the Main Operational Directorate, Oleksiy Gromov, said Thursday, according to Interfax.

“We are considering the issue that directly with the participation of this unit there will be an attempt to conduct offensive operations in the Donetsk direction,” Gromov said. “The enemy continues to hold the occupied areas of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, Kherson, and Mykolaiv regions, and is also trying to create favorable conditions for the resumption of the offensive.”

But the new army corps that Russia wants to send to Donetsk to overpower Ukrainian forces isn’t necessarily the most impressive force. In recent days Russia has tried to gin up the new group of fighters by nixing an age limit for recruits and even recruiting prisoners, so that they can beef up their numbers, according to a senior U.S. defense official.

“Russia has already begun trying to expand recruitment efforts to staff at least one volunteer battalion per federal district and to raise a new third Army corps. They’ve done this in part by eliminating the upper age limit for new recruits, and also by recruiting prisoners,” the senior U.S. defense official said in a briefing with reporters on Monday. “Many of these new recruits have been observed as older, unfit, and ill-trained. So what this all suggests to us is that any additional personnel Russia is able to muster by the end of the year may not, in fact, increase overall Russian…combat power.”

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Putin’s armed forces have been faltering since the beginning of the war. Some troops have taken to sabotaging Russian equipment. And Russia hasn’t achieved major objectives in the war, either. Moscow aimed to take Donetsk by June but has not succeeded, according to the head of the Donetsk regional military-civilian administration, Pavlo Kyrylenko. Russia also failed to take Kyiv, the capital, and has not taken much ground since mid-summer.

After several months of problems, Putin has tried to dismiss the idea that Russia has made full-force efforts to advance, only to fail. He warned in July that “by and large, we have not started anything seriously yet.”

But Russia’s goals to add 137,000 additional troops to its armed forces by January, too, are unlikely to prove helpful to Moscow’s war plan, the senior U.S. defense official said.

“This effort is unlikely to succeed,” the official said.

In recent days, Russian forces have been facing more setbacks. As Ukrainian forces work to launch a counteroffensive in the south of Ukraine, to take back Kherson, a city that Russia captured in the early days of the war this year, Russian units are faltering, according to the Pentagon.

“Ukrainian military operations… have made some forward movement, and in some cases… in the Kherson region,” Pentagon Press Secretary Pat Ryder told reporters in a briefing this week. “We are aware, in some cases, of Russian units falling back.”