Ukraine liberated 40% of territories occupied after Feb 24, says Armed Forces Chief

Ukrainian armed forces have liberated an estimated 40 per cent of territories occupied since Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb 24 of last year, said General Valery Zaluzhny, Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. “The Armed Forces liberated 40 percent of the territories occupied during the full-scale invasion and 28 percent of all territories occupied by Russia since 2014,” Zaluzhny wrote in his last post of 2022 on the Telegram app.

Brigadier General Oleksii Hromov, Deputy Chief of the Main Operational Department of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, also noted that the Armed Forces of Ukraine and other elements of the defense forces liberated 40% of the territory. 

The liberation of the right-bank Kherson region brought the total area of de-occupied territories to almost 40,000 square kilometers, said Brigadier General Oleksii Hromov in the Telegram post. Last year, Ukraine recaptured an estimated 12,000 square kilometers and about 500 settlements were recaptured during an offensive in the Kharkiv region. 

About 6,000 square kilometers were liberated and more than 200 settlements were retaken during an offensive in the Kherson direction. Meanwhile, 14,000 square kilometers were also liberated in the Chernihiv and Sumy regions and 7,000 square kilometers in the northern Kyiv region from the invading Russian troops. 

Russian soldiers have managed to partially achieve the goals of their military offensive Donetsk operational area - to temporarily deprive Ukraine of access to the Sea of Azov and to create a land corridor to the temporarily occupied Crimea.

'Major offensive in early 2023'

Dmytro Kuleba, the head of Ukraine's ministry of foreign affairs, noted earlier that Russia might launch a major offensive in early 2023. He released a video on the foreign affairs ministry's official YouTube channel, saying, while he doesn't claim "it will definitely happen" there is intelligence about Russia's renewed assault on Ukrainian territories. 

Russia's mobilisation, conscription, training for new conscripts, and movement of heavy weaponry are taken into account, it certainly seems like Moscow's hope is breaking through Ukrainian defences to penetrate deeper into Ukrainian territory, said Kuleba. "I think the Russian ability to launch a major offensive will probably be restored sometime in late January or February," he stressed. Ukraine is doing everything it can to ensure Russia's offensive fails, assuming Russia decides to go ahead with the offensive.