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Ukraine will look to launch a counteroffensive in 2025 with the support of the approved $61 billion aid package from the United States, as well as additional Western aid funding, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told the Financial Times on May 4.

Sullivan echoed Ukraine's hopes that the country will "move forward to recapture the territory that the Russians have taken - the clearest such articulation as to how the Biden administration sees the war evolving in the coming months.

The Financial Times notes that any new Ukrainian offensive would require additional military aid from Western allies, including the United States. The most recent $61 billion aid package from the U.S. took months to pass through Congress amid political infighting.

The United States is currently leading talks among Group of Seven (G7) allies to develop a military aid package to Ukraine worth up to $50 billion, Bloomberg reported on May 3. The potential package would reportedly be funded by the profits generated by accrued interest on frozen Russian assets.

Despite mounting pressures of an anticipated Russian summer offensive, Sullivan noted that with incoming U.S. weapons supplies, Ukraine will have the capacity to "hold the line" as it faces a difficult period in the war over the next few months.

Last month, in an interview with Germany's Bild magazine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that while there is a plan for a eventual counteroffensive, any such developments would be contingent on receiving additional aid from Western allies.

Amid a looming presidential election in the United States, questions have risen over the U.S.'s ongoing support of Ukraine if former President and presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump is once again elected to office.

In early April, media reported, citing undisclosed sources, that Trump had privately said he could end Russia's war by pressuring Ukraine to cede Crimea and Donbas to Moscow, which was denied by his advisor.

According to a former advisor to Trump, the former president made it very clear that he believed Ukraine must be part of Russia.

Despite his comments, Trump reportedly voiced support for House Speaker Mike Johnson, following a vote on military aid for Ukraine after months of delays, and has previously suggested providing Ukraine aid as loans.

Bloomberg: US leading efforts within G7 to develop $50 billion aid package to Ukraine

The United States is leading talks among the Group of Seven (G7) nations to develop a military aid package to Ukraine worth up to $50 billion, Bloomberg reported on May 3. The package would reportedly be funded by the profits generated by accrued interest on frozen Russian assets.

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FT: US aid to Ukraine will help Ukraine launch counteroffensive in 2025, Sullivan says - Kyiv Independent

Ukraine's armed forces released a video claiming to show 42 destroyed Russian military vehicles.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry described the scenes as a"line to hell."

Fighting has intensified in the Donetsk region in recent months as Russia pushes further past Avdiivka.

Ukraine's armed forces claim to have destroyed 42 Russian tanks and military vehicles in the eastern region of Donetsk.

A video shared by Ukraine's 58th Motorized Brigade appears to show the wrecks of the vehicles.

A caption accompanying the video reads: "It seems that in recent weeks, Putin's generals have been making a large-scale sacrifice to their hellish gods, throwing new forces and equipment to their death."

"The result is dozens of burned-out Russian tanks and armored vehicles," it continues.

The Ukrainian Defense Ministry reshared the video on X, formerly Twitter, writing: "A line to hell. Dozens of Russian tanks and combat vehicles were destroyed on a small section of the front in the Donetsk region."

Business Insider was unable to independently verify when or where the footage was taken.

Fighting has intensified in the Donetsk region in recent months as Russia pushes to take more ground around the already-captured city of Avdiivka.

Russian forces are currently targeting the strategically important city of Chasiv Yar, just to the north.

Ukrainian officials believe that Russia is now intent on seizing the regions of both Donetsk and Luhansk in 2024.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) think tank reported in February that Russia's campaign around Avdiivka had resulted in significant losses to both equipment and personnel.

The report said that at that time, Russia had lost 8,800 armored fighting vehicles since it launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.

The director-general of the IISS also said in February that Russia had likely lost more than 3,000 tanks since the invasion began.

"To put that into perspective, Russia's battlefield tank losses are greater than the number it had when it launched its offensive in 2022," he wrote.

Dutch open-source intelligence website Oryx puts visually confirmed Russian tank losses since the start of the conflict at just under 3,000.

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Ukraine highlights Russia's 'line of hell.' Claim of dozens of tanks and military vehicles destroyed on one sector of the ... - Yahoo! Voices

Moscow has reacted to comments about sending troops and arms to Ukraine as dangerous, while Kyiv urges Western allies to speed up aid deliveries.

Recent statements by French President Emmanuel Macron and UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron about the war in Ukraine are dangerous and will deepen international tension around the conflict, the Kremlins spokesman said on Friday.

In an interview published on Thursday, Macron repeated an earlier comment that he doesnt rule out sending troops to Ukraine.

Cameron, meanwhile, said during a visit to Kyiv the same day that Ukraine will be able to use British long-range weapons to strike targets inside Russia - a possibility that some other NATO countries providing weapons have balked at.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov branded Macrons comment a very important and very dangerous statement. Remarks by Macron about possible direct French engagement in the conflict represent a very dangerous trend, he said.

Camerons statement about Ukraines right to use British weapons provided to strike facilities inside Russia is another very dangerous statement, Peskov told reporters.

This is a direct escalation of tensions around the Ukrainian conflict, which potentially may threaten European security, the entire European security architecture, Peskov added.

Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 significantly heightened tension between the Kremlin and NATO countries. The alliance countries have provided much of the military hardware that Kyiv is using to fight Russia, ensuring that the tension has continued to simmer. Russia, in turn, has sought help from China, Iran and North Korea, according to the US.

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Russia will face consequences after accusing its military intelligence service of masterminding an absolutely intolerable cyberattack, as NATO and European Union member countries said they will not let Russias malicious" behavior in cyberspace go unanswered.

Relations between Russia and Germany were already tense over German military support to Ukraine.

Baerbock said Russian state hackers were behind a cyberattack last year that targeted the Social Democrats, the leading party in the governing coalition. The German Interior Ministry added that German companies, including in the defense and aerospace sectors, as well as targets related to Russias war in Ukraine were a focus of the attacks.

The Council of the EU and the Czech Foreign Ministry said that Czechia's institutions have also been a target of a cyber campaign by the same group.

The ministry said APT28, which is associated with the Russian military intelligence service GRU, exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook from 2023.

In a statement by Josep Borrell, the EUs top diplomat said they strongly condemn the malicious cyber campaign conducted by the Russia-controlled APT28 against Germany and Czechia.

The EU noted that it had previously imposed sanctions on individuals and entities responsible for APT28 attacks targeting the German parliament in 2015. It said it will not tolerate the continuation of such attacks, particularly with EU elections upcoming in June.

NATO said that APT28 targeted other national governmental entities, critical infrastructure operators and other entities across the Alliance," including in Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Sweden.

Ukraines president and foreign minister on Friday pressed British Foreign Secretary David Cameron to accelerate the delivery of promised military aid to Kyiv, as Russia heaps battlefield pressure on depleted Ukrainian forces in the third year of the war.

It is important that the weapons included in the UK support package announced last week arrive as soon as possible, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on the social platform X, as Cameron visited Kyiv on Thursday.

He said armored vehicles, ammunition and missiles of various types were top of the list.

Vital support pledged by Western allies to help Ukraine fend off the Kremlins forces has been delayed by political disagreements in the US and a lack of manufacturing capacity in Europe. That has opened a door to advances for the bigger and better-equipped Russian army, especially along the front line in eastern Ukraine.

Ukraine and its Western partners are in a race against the clock to deploy the new military aid, especially a fresh batch of US support, in the coming weeks and prevent Russia from taking more ground.

The pressing concern at the moment is keeping the strategic eastern hilltop city of Chasiv Yar out of Russian hands. Capturing the city would offer Russia the opportunity of attacking other key cities deeper inside the Donetsk region and hitting important Ukrainian supply lines.

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Kremlin brands France and UK's Ukraine comments as 'dangerous' - Euronews

The latest Ukrainian deep-strike weapon isnt a drone, a cruise missile or a ballistic missile. Its a balloon.

In a recent speech, Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu claimed Russian air defences had shot down 37 Ukrainian balloons since Russia widened its war on Ukraine starting in February 2022.

Many of the balloons arrived recently. The Kremlin reported five balloon shoot-downs on April 18 and two more on April 20 one of the latter got as far as Moscow, 275 miles from the border with Ukraine. Another balloon crashed just inside Russian territory in March.

The balloon designs are all pretty similar: an inexpensive envelope, a simple satellite-communications relay, a bit of ballast and a few pounds of explosives. Its possible each balloon costs just a few hundred dollars, likely making the lighter-than-air vehicles the cheapest of Kyivs deep-strike weapons, which also include long-range strike drones, British- and French-made cruise missiles and ballistic missiles from the United States.

The recent barrage of balloons is part of a wider campaign of Ukrainian raids targeting strategic targets hundreds of miles inside Russia and Russian-occupied Ukraine: air bases, weapons factories and oil refineries are among the top targets.

The Ukrainians lately have been especially busy with their American-supplied Army Tactical Missile System rockets. The United States reportedly shipped more than a hundred of the precision-guided ATACMS starting in March. Ukraine wasted no time bombarding Russian air bases and air-defence batteries in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Ukrainian strikes on Russian air bases have escalated to the point that, in recent days, the Kremlin pulled back dozens of its best warplanes, redeploying them from bases near the front line to bases hundreds of miles away beyond the reach of Ukraines cruise and ballistic missiles, although not beyond the reach of the farthest-flying strike drones.

Dont expect the balloons to have such a serious impact on Russian operations, however. Explosive war balloons arent new. Theyve floated across borders in at least three wars in just the last century and never had any meaningful impact.

This is for one major reason: theyre unguided. They just float on the wind until they cant anymore. Japan floated nearly 300 bomb-laden balloons across the Pacific Ocean in 1944 and 45. The only casualties were a pastors wife and five Sunday School students on a fishing trip in Oregon who accidentally triggered the explosive payload of a crashed balloon .

The Japanese balloon bombs were more effective than the crude bombs terror group Islamic State deployed in Syria in 2015. The tiny unguided craft apparently just condoms full of some lighter-than-air gas and carrying miniscule explosive charges apparently inflicted exactly zero damage on Syrian forces.

Balloons can work as wide-area surveillance systems, which is why Russia has drifted a few over Ukraine since 2022 and why China routinely deploys them over the western Pacific Ocean and even sent a few floating over the United States last year.

But surveillance doesnt necessarily require precision. High-resolution cameras and sensitive electronic receivers can collect useful intelligence over thousands of square miles.

An air raid does require precision: missing by just a few yards can make the difference between a successful raid and a failed one. An unguided strike balloon is, at best, a way for one country to compel another country to waste precious air-defence resources trying to shoot them down.

Smart air-defence commanders would simply ignore them. Ukrainian planners might be hoping they dont. Its apparent that one aim of Ukraines widening strike campaign more and more drones, missiles and rockets hitting more and more bases and industrial sites is to force Russia to spread out, and thin out, its radars and surface-to-air missile batteries.

Ukrainian drone strikes against targets within Russia are ... likely increasing pressure on available Russian air-defence assets, the Institute for the Study of War in Washington DC explained.

And for the Ukrainians, that pressure represents an opportunity. Thinner Russian air-defences along the front line means less risk to Ukrainian warplanes operating directly over the battlefield. You cant defend everywhere, retired US Army general Mark Hertling noted.

As long as the Russians are wasting resources shooting down balloons, theyre not devoting those same resources to shooting down Ukrainian assets that actually matter. Ones with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

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Ukraine's balloon-borne bomber blitz: Designed to waste Russian shells and missiles - Yahoo! Voices

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said his troops had taken control of 547 square kilometres (211 square miles) of territory this year in what he called Russia's "new regions," a reference to four Ukrainian regions that Moscow says it has annexed.

Shoigu, in remarks on Friday to senior military commanders, said Ukrainian forces were retreating all along the front line and that Russian troops were breaking what he called a network of Ukrainian strongholds.

"The Ukrainian army units are trying to cling on to individual lines, but under our onslaught they are forced to abandon their positions and retreat," said Shoigu.

"Over the past two weeks, the Russian Armed Forces have liberated the settlements of Novobakhmutivka, Semenivka and Berdychi in the Donetsk People's Republic," he said, referring to the name Russia uses for one of the four annexed regions.

Ukraine's top commander said on Sunday that Kyiv's outnumbered troops had fallen back to new positions west of three villages on the eastern front.

Moscow said in September 2022, seven months after sending troops into Ukraine, that it had incorporated four Ukrainian regions - Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia - into its own sovereign territory despite not fully controlling any of them.

Ukraine said the move was an illegal land grab and has said it plans to evict every Russian soldier from its territory, including from Crimea, which Moscow annexed in 2014.

Russia controls about 18% of Ukraine - in the east and south - and has been gaining ground since Kyiv's 2023 counter-offensive failed to make any serious inroads against well dug-in Russian troops.

(Reporting by Reuters; Writing by Andrew Osborn; Editing by Frances Kerry)

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Russia says it has driven Ukrainian army from 211 square miles of territory this year - Yahoo! Voices