Russian forces could soon seize southern Ukraine, says former Pentagon adviser

Colonel Douglas Macgregor thinks Russian forces could soon seize the port city of Odessa in southern Ukraine.

The Ukrainian military has not been able to pull off its promised counteroffensive, and Russian forces are now likely to take over the entire Black Sea coast of Ukraine, Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a former adviser to the secretary of defense in the Trump administration.

Macgregor, who appeared on the livestream hosted by former US judge and columnist Andrew Napolitano last Tuesday, dismissed as utterly nonsensical reports in some US media outlets that the Russian military has lost some 80,000 personnel in Ukraine so far. The decorated Gulf War veteran said that more accurate numbers are probably thirteen to fifteen thousand dead on the Russian side, with Ukrainian forces losing sixty to eighty thousand. A Kremlin spokeswoman Dmitry Peskov described the Russian casualty figures as fake after commenting on these reports in late July. He lamented that even established media outlets are publishing misleading reports these days.

The last time Russia's Defense Ministry provided an update on the number of casualties was in late March, at which time the official death toll had reached 1,351, with 3,825 service members injured.

When asked to comment on the current state of affairs on the frontline, the former Pentagon official said that the majority of Russian personnel had been given rest, refitted, reorganized, to renew the offensive in August. Macgregor claimed that the first signs of that happening were already evident, particularly down in the south. He went on to predict that the Russian military would seize the key port city of Odessa, making Ukraine a landlocked country. Ukrainians have been unable to put together any kind of counteroffensive. The former Pentagon adviser said that they don't see much evidence that the Ukrainians can stop this. Macgregor said that the activities of Russian forces south of Kharkov in the east of Ukraine seemed to him like preliminary shaping operations meant to pave the way for a major offensive later on.

He concluded that the operation in the south comes first and then up in Kharkov, pointing out that the Ukrainian army does not seem to be able to stop either one.

Macgregor said that he expected these offensives to be over by the end of August-beginning of September. Last month a number of top Ukrainian officials suggested that the country's military would launch a counter-offensive in the south of the country in August to regain the city of Kherson.

According to Moscow, it is the Russian military along with the forces of the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics that have recently made advances and taken territory.

On Saturday, Igor Konashenkov, the spokesperson for Russia's Defense Ministry announced that the allied forces completely liberated the strategic village of Peski in the Donetsk People's Republic.