Mobilisation increases Russian military threat – Ukrainian general

KYIV (Reuters) – Russia’s recent mobilisation has increased its military threat in Ukraine, with better trained soldiers now arriving at the front line, the commander of Ukrainian ground forces said on Monday.

But he said Russia was now using a lot of old equipment because it had no other way of replenishing supplies, and that Russian forces had made only slow progress around Bakhmut, one of the main battle zones in eastern Ukraine.

“On the eastern front, the situation is very tense, the enemy attacks our units every day,” General Oleksander Syrskyi told national television.

Asked about the mobilisation ordered by Moscow in September, he said: “Such a number of personnel increased the threat for us and these are not just words — these are new brigades, new battalions that have been trained, this is the replenishment that the army was waiting for because it was exhausted.”

“Those who come now have a better level of training than those who were previously sent to the front,” he said.

(Reporting by Pavel Polityuk, Editing by Timothy Heritage)