Hodges gives vision of goal of Ukraine's counter-offensive, praises impact on Russian fleet
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The ultimate aim of Ukraine’s counter-offensive should be to force Russian invasion forces out of Crimea, former U.S. Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges told Radio NV in an interview on Nov. 15.
"A counter-offensive is much more than just what happens on the battlefield," Hodges said.
Read also: Ukraine’s attritive counteroffensive and the looming winter
“Ukraine is conducting what NATO calls multi-domain operations. This means (that) air, land, sea, space, cyberspace are involved. All these things are integrated to achieve the result. And, of course, the result of the counter-offensive should be, I believe, the liberation of Crimea.”
Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, noted that the ground part of the counter-offensive, which most people focus on, has slowed down, but the offensive in southern Ukraine "should only help isolate Crimea by severing the famous land bridge."
Read also: British intelligence explains ‘static’ nature of Ukraine's and Russia's offensives
He also recommended asking the commander of Russia's Black Sea Fleet how Ukraine's counter-offensive is going.
"I think he'd tell you that the Ukrainians are doing a great job because his Black Sea Fleet has been forced to relocate from Sevastopol to ports further east," Hodges said.
In early November, Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi said in an interview with UK weekly news magazine the Economist that there was likely to be "no deep and beautiful breakthrough" on the front.
In his column for magazine, Commander-in-Chief Zaluzhnyi wrote that, according to the command's calculations, the Ukrainian army was supposed to advance at a rate of 30 kilometers per day, breaking through Russian defense lines, and four months should have been enough to enter Crimea.
Read also: Tantalizing pace of Ukraine’s counteroffensive
On Nov. 8, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine would try to achieve results on the battlefield by the end of 2023.
On Nov. 14, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced that Ukrainian forces are successfully pushing the Russian fleet out of Crimea.
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