Vladimir Putin has mobilised nearly 500,000 troops to attack Ukraine in a renewed offensive marking the one-year anniversary of the Russian invasion, Ukrainian defence minister Oleksii Reznikov said.
The Russian president had asked for 300,000 Russian men to be enrolled in a general mobilisation in September, but Mr Reznikov told the French BFM network last night that the actual number of conscripts deployed to fight in Ukraine could be much more.
Volodymyr Zelensky further asserted this claim and said that Ukraine is seeing “a certain increase in the occupier’s offensive actions at the front – in the east of our country.”
The situation is becoming even more severe, he said in his nightly address yesterday.
Russian forces have now surrounded the embattled eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, a Moscow-backed leader in the Donetsk region claimed.
Bakhmut and villages on its southern approaches in Donetsk are coming under renewed heavy Russian fire, Ukrainian army chiefs said late on Tuesday.
