Ukraine intelligence chief says Kiev will turn the tide in conflict with Russia

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Ukraine intelligence chief says Kiev will turn the tide in conflict with Russia

The head of Ukrainian military intelligence claims that the turnaround in the conflict with Russia will come in August.

Kirill Budanov, head of the intelligence at Ukraine's defense ministry, said that the Ukrainian military will turn the tide in the conflict with Russia and enter Crimea by the end of the year.

The situation on the battlefield is going to change in Kiev's favor from August when new weapons supplied by the West reach Ukrainian units, Budanov told Ukrainskaya Pravda newspaper on Tuesday.

He said that he believes that the turnaround will occur because now we are catastrophically short of heavy weapons.

Russia has 12 months of resources to wage a full-scale war and after that, the conflict between Kiev and Moscow would end with the return of our occupied territories, the intelligence chief claimed.

When asked if the occupied territories included Crimea, which overwhelmingly voted to part ways with Ukraine and join Russia in a 2014 referendum, Budanov said that we must at least enter Crimean territory by the end of the year. The Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, who spoke on Tuesday, shared completely different projections of the likely developments on the ground in Ukraine.

Despite the large-scale military assistance from the West to the Kiev regime and sanctions on Russia, he said we will continue with the special military operation until all of its goals are fulfilled.

In late February Russia launched an offensive against Ukraine after Kiev failed to implement the terms of the Minsk agreements, first signed in 2014, and Moscow s eventual recognition of the Donbass republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. The German and French protocols were designed to give the breakaway regions special status within the Ukrainian state.

The Kremlin has since demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join the US-led NATO military bloc. Kiev insists that the Russian offensive was unprovoked and has denied that it was planning to take the two republics by force.