A senior Ukrainian commander says Kyiv has roughly a six-month window to wrest the battlefield initiative from Russia and improve its position in future peace talks, calling the coming period a potential “turning point” in the more than four-year war.
Russian forces have made slow, grinding advances since launching their full-scale invasion in February 2022, but those gains have eased this year as Ukrainian troops step up pressure across multiple fronts in an effort to push them back.
Brig. Gen. Andriy Biletsky, commander of Ukraine’s Third Army Corps, told Reuters he believes Russia’s military is increasingly exhausted and no longer capable of achieving major breakthroughs.
He argued that if Ukrainian forces can sustain momentum over the coming months, they could seize the initiative along the front line and force Moscow to scale back its ambitions in the remaining parts of the Donetsk region still outside its control.
“I believe the next six to nine months are a turning point,” Biletsky said at an undisclosed underground location in Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region.
