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31 March, 09:35
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Ukraine’s top commander says Russia’s plan to capture southeastern regions

Russia’s large-scale plan to capture Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions in southern regions last year failed, Oleksndr Syrskyi, the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has said.

In an interview with local media on Monday, Syrskyi said Russian troops were launching continuous offensive with their key objective being the capture of Kupyansk and Pokrovsk cities in eastern Donetsk region. He stressed that the cities’ capture by Russians was impossible due to “stability of Ukrainian defence” in the area.

Syrskyi explained that Russia’s offensive operation continued without interruption from last year to the current 2026. “To put it bluntly, they have continuously carried out—or at least tried to carry out—offensive operations without any real pause. These attacks did not stop with 2025 but carried over into 2026,” Syrski said. He recalled the period just before the New Year, when worsening weather conditions coincided with a sharp increase in the intensity of the enemy’s offensive actions, the general noted.

Syrskyi noted that Russia failed to achieve its strategic goals for 2025, stressing that the Kremlin had planned to fully capture the industrial region of Donbas - comprised of Donetsk and Luhansk, southeastern Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia regions and established a so-called “buffer zone” in the northern Sumy and Kharkiv regions. Another of the Kremlin’s failed plans was to start active military operations in Kherson and Mykolaiv regions, Syrskyi added.

"That is, global plans, there were a lot of announcements, remember how many announcements there were around the capture of Kupyansk, when there were even jokes when they showed a medal for the third capture of Kupyansk," the general went on saying.

Syrskyi also touched upon the situation in embattled Pokrvosk city, which the Russian Defence Ministry had claimed to have captured in September 2024, stressing that the Ukrainian army continues to hold the lines. “Every day the enemy tries to attack, attacks our positions, suffers losses, rolls back and has only corpses, wounded, but there is no success," Syrskyi concluded.