Zelenskyy: Ukraine Meets ‘Very Tough Resistance’ Dislodging Russian Forces

Russian troops along the front line in occupied Ukraine were putting up heavy resistance, President Volodomyr Zelenskyy acknowledged, a sign that Kyiv’s counteroffensive will be a long, hard slog. 

“Our heroic people, our troops on…the front line, are facing very tough resistance,” Zelenskyy told NBC News in an interview broadcast Thursday. “Because for Russia to lose this campaign to Ukraine, I would say, actually means losing the war.”

Ukrainian forces made small overnight gains in their efforts to reclaim Russian-held territory in the east and south, analysts said, but reports of the recent fighting continue to show a war of feints and limited advances–evidence that Russia has adapted to Kyivs’ battlefield tactics. 

Russia launched 60 airstrikes overnight, causing civilian and military deaths, Ukraine’s military said Friday, while Ukrainian missile forces attacked Russian troop concentrations and ammunition dumps.

One reason for the slow-moving offensive: Russian military bloggers have claimed that advanced electronic warfare tools have denied Ukrainian forces the use of GPS-guided precision bombs and have “heavily” disrupted Ukrainian radio communications, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) reported. 

And Russian forces are using “doctrinally sound defensive operations…in which a first echelon of forces repels or slows attacking forces before a second echelon of forces counterattacks against any enemy breakthrough,” the U.S.-based ISW said.

“The armed forces of the Russian Federation continue to implement the concept of strategic defense, seeking to bleed the advancing forces…in order to be able to subsequently go on the offensive against a weakened enemy,” Boris Rozhin, a pro-war Russian military blogger with 840,000 followers, wrote on Telegram.

“The enemy understands this plan, so he is in no hurry to spend everything at once, realizing that it will be problematic to restore so many brigades after the losses incurred.”

Russia controls a little more than 16 percent of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea.

Zelenskyy told NBC that news from the front was “generally positive, but it’s very difficult.” He called for his Western allies to speed up the delivery of fighter jets and other weapons. 

"I understand that there is bureaucracy," Zelenskyy said. "But we are losing time, we are losing people, and, the most important thing, we are losing our advantage" and "Russia is controlling the air."