The US has not recorded any new Russian troops arriving in Ukraine despite Putin’s call for a mass mobilisation.
A military official anonymously told Reuters: “Broadly speaking, we’ve seen relatively small numbers (of Russian reinforcements) … but nothing large-scale at this stage of the game”.
Meanwhile, Ukraine is set to hit three key battlefield objectives, according to the Pentagon.
The upbeat assessment by Celeste Wallander, U.S. secretary of defense for international security affairs, came on the same day that Ukrainian forces achieved their biggest breakthrough in the country’s south since the war began.
Referring to the efforts to recapture Kherson, Kharkiv and Donetsk, Ms Wallander told Washington think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Ukraine seems to be on track to achieve in all three of those objectives right now.”
“Ukraine’s goal is to push back the Russian bridgehead on the western Bank of the Dnipro in Kherson,” Wallander explained.
That, she said, would represent “a major defeat for Russia.”
“Because it pushes back, even more, Russia’s ambition to take Odessa, which was one of the stated objectives earlier this year.”