9
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ukrainian officials and their supporters say they are confident they will prevail on the battlefield in the end, but warn against what they see as unrealistic expectations in media coverage and commentaries that could create a misleading narrative suggesting it cannot and will not win.
Although equipped with new U.S. and other Western-made weapons and gear, including tanks, longer-range missiles and artillery ammunition, Ukraine lacks air power and has encountered stiff resistance from the Russian forces who have planted hundreds of mines across the front line, set up anti-tank barriers and dug rows of defensive trenches.
“We are confident that they have significant combat capability available to them, and that they’re going to employ that at a time and place of their choosing to defend their country and take back sovereign territory,” Pentagon press secretary Brig.
Leonid Polyakov, a former Ukrainian vice defense minister, said that in two separate cases, once in June and another time in July, a brigade commander had pursued direct assaults during the counteroffensive in hopes of a swift victory.
An assault with armored units in June failed to break through Russian lines in the south and, in the past week, Ukraine has made a concentrated effort in the western area of the Zaporizhia oblast, according to analysts and U.S. officials.
Both Ukrainian and Russian forces have failed to achieve major advances, and Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corp think tank, argues that neither side has a realistic chance of scoring a definitive victory.
I'm a bot and I'm open source!