Media publications about "slow offensive" do not affect aid to Ukraine – Ukraine’s Foreign Minister

Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, Dmytro Kuleba, has given assurances that reports about the allegedly slow pace of Ukraine's counteroffensive are not affecting the decisions of Western leaders regarding military aid to Kyiv.

Source: Kuleba on air during the national joint 24/7 newscast on Monday evening.

The minister stated that "those who make decisions" are not affected by media publications about the Ukrainians’ apparently too slow counterattack, "because they are guided by information not from newspapers, but from the objective reports of their military and intelligence officers."

"And I can assure you that in the conversations that the president has with his partners, which I conduct, they all support our counteroffensive, encourage and understand that the situation is more difficult for objective reasons," the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

"But there is no decline in the movement. Everyone is ready to move on and ensure the supply of weapons needed for the counteroffensive," he added.

At the same time, Kuleba admitted that such publications influence the public perception of the counteroffensive, which "is completely distorted from the point of view that it is apparently not as successful as it should be", and also contribute to "commentators who pick up on theses like ‘and we said, Ukraine cannot win.’"

"And despondency is being spread. At the moment, there are no immediate negative consequences from this. This is a controlled situation. But if they continue to disperse these narratives like this, it will certainly have negative consequences for the perception of Ukraine's success on the battlefield in the societies of the respective countries," the minister warned. 

Recently, numerous Western media outlets have published articles citing anonymous officials, where they claimed that the Ukrainian counteroffensive had "started slowly."

Western officials have publicly acknowledged that Ukrainian counteroffensive operations are indeed progressing more slowly than previously predicted, but noted that this situation should not be surprising.

Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, in an interview with The Washington Post, said that soldiers pay in blood for liberation of every metre of Ukrainian land, so he is annoyed by other people's comments that the counteroffensive is slower than expected.

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