Author: Yuri Lapaiev / Eurasia Daily Monitor

On September 11, Rustem Umerov, Ukraine’s newly appointed minister of defense, held his first conversation over the phone with his American counterpart, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. As stated in the press release following their conversation, the two officials exchanged their views on the priorities for supporting Ukraine’s immediate battlefield needs over the long...

On April 17, the Slovak Defense Ministry announced that Slovakia had delivered the promised 13 Soviet-made MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine (Kyiv Independent, April 17). Earlier, the German government had authorized Poland to hand over an additional five MiG-29s, originally from the former reserve of the German Democratic Republic’s military and later sold to Warsaw...

On July 20, Sergey Lavrov, minister of foreign affairs for the Russian Federation, declared that Moscow had new objectives in Ukraine, as it now wants to expand its gains beyond the borders of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk “people’s republics” by capturing the Kherson, Kharkiv and Zaporizhia regions. Mr. Lavrov underlined Western military equipment transfer...

On April 22, Gen. Rustam Minnekayev, the acting commander of the Central Military District, announced that one of the goals of the second phase of Russia’s “special military operation in Ukraine” is to gain full control of the Donbas and Ukraine’s south. According to him, achieving this objective would “ensure a land corridor to Crimea,...

At the beginning of April, the hampered and decimated Russian forces that had been trying to conquer the Ukrainian capital retreated from the Kyiv region to resupply and regroup. According to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), a new potential direction of attack could be the Kharkiv region, in order to...

On October 26, the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) for the first time used the Turkish-produced Bayraktar TB2 unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV) to strike at forces of the so-called Donetsk “People’s Republic” (DPR) militia in Donbas. According to the official statement of the AFU General Staff, enemy units used a battery of D-30 howitzers...