Russia is rearming faster than first thought for a potential attack on Nato, Germany’s military pointman on Ukraine has warned.
On the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president, Maj Gen Christian Freuding said that Russia had already replaced missiles and tanks lost in its invasion of Ukraine.
“The Russian armed forces are not just able to compensate for their enormous personnel and material losses… they are successfully rearming,” he told Die Welt newspaper.
Vladimir Putin has reorientated the Russian economy to feed his war machine and has also bought extra supplies from Iran and North Korea which Maj Gen Freuding, who is head of the German military’s task force, said was helping Russia replenish its tanks, missiles and drones.
He warned that although it was not clear that Putin had plans to attack Nato, he was “clearly creating the conditions for it”.
“Production is growing, the supplies in the depots are growing,” he said.
Germany is locked in a debate ahead of a national election next month on whether to back a £2.5 billion aid package for Ukraine.
Olaf Scholz, the chancellor, has said that he will only back the aid package for Ukraine if tight national borrowing rules are relaxed.
In Ukraine, Russian forces have surrounded the fortress town of Pokrovsk and are on the brink of capturing one of the last Ukraine-held villages in south Donetsk.
Russian military bloggers celebrated the military advances and said they were “shaping the international agenda”.
“Ukraine has stopped coal mining at the Pokrovsk mine due to the approach of Russian forces,” said the Two Majors Telegram blog. “Pokrovsk is surrounded from the flanks.”
Pokrovsk in the central section of the front line has been a target for Russian forces for several weeks. Reports now say that invading forces are shelling the town.
Analysts have said that the town, which had a pre-war population of 60,000 people, is of major strategic importance because it acts as a supply hub for the Ukrainian military and as a railway and road network centre.
The coking coal mine outside Pokrovsk is also vital for Ukraine’s steel industry, the second-largest export industry, as it is one of the largest in Europe and the only one operating in the country.
Reuters quoted unnamed Ukrainian sources confirming that Ukraine had closed the mine down and evacuated workers earlier this week as Russian forces moved forward.
“They have all stopped working now,” one source said. “There’s no production there, they’re only working on the surface,” another source said.
The capture of Velyka Novosilka in south Donetsk region is of more symbolic importance than strategic but it does underscore how far Russian forces have advanced since mid-2024.
Mr Trump wants to impose a peace deal to end the war in Ukraine. Analysts have said that Vladimir Putin wants Russian forces to capture as much land as possible before talks and has told his generals to throw soldiers at Ukrainian positions in an extension of his “swarm infantry tactics”.
But advisers to Volodymyr Zelensky have said that it would be a “catastrophic mistake” for Mr Trump to open talks with Putin even though Ukrainians are exhausted by the war and polls show increased support for a negotiated peace deal.
