SKY NEWS LIVE

all right let’s bring in our military and this Shan belf on this afternoon to you Sean so what’s the latest on this new front yeah come on it’s been interesting hasn’t it um there’s been Fierce fighting across the kke region Russia’s claimed that it seized nine settlements uh up near vens as we’ve been hearing from Deborah and litzy across at the top there H now Ukraine has known for months that Russia’s been building massing forces in the region between 30 and 50,000 troops but of course as was intimated in that report that the the West won’t allow the ukrainians to use Western Spide weapons on Russian soil and that’s limited their ability to react it’s worth remembering all this area in Ukraine had been taken by the Russians just after the invasion back in February last year by May the ukrainians are liberating KH ke by September they’d swept the Russians out of the area um but now it seems the pendulum swinging back again it’s also worth it’s not all going the Russians way though we’ve just seen some video footage released um overnight this is an attack in belgorod but ukrainians did it combination of missile and some artillery strikes apparently there were 15 people killed and 20 injured in this attack interesting Okay now what’s the uh overall strategy do we think of of Russia to launch this this new front yeah it’s interesting because this is a second front which is quite worrying and although we don’t know clearly that’s in the mind of President Putin there’s there’s two real options one of which the most dangerous one is this signifies the change of strategy by Putin and actually going for ke long term and actually therefore and car ke would be a stepping stone on the on the route to ke now that would be incredibly dangerous if you want to subjugate the whole of Ukraine that’s the way you do it but it’s not believ that the Russians have the military might or the resources to do that and sustain the attack down here so it looks very unlikely what seems much more likely as if we go back to the more zoomed in map you remember belr we’ve been talking a lot it’s a Russian Logistics uh Hub it’s only about 20K north of the border which means it’s just within range of the artillery of Ukraine it’s been regular attacked Putin said he’s going to build a buffer Zone pushing the r the Ukrainian forces further south and that appears to be what he’s been doing around vens and likewise in lipy he wants to get his artillery close enough to kke to attack and therefore pushing South all of that though is tactic strategically by having a second front it forces Ukraine to move some of its forces up there makes them more vulnerable in the donbass which we still believe is Russia’s main effort interesting stuff and look we had news yesterday as well that Putin is going to replace his defense minister what do we understand uh about the who’s the new Man In Charge yes a sery shugu I’m seen here behind Putin been in post as the defense minister for 12 years since 2012 he’s part of Putin’s Inner Circle Putin’s always valued his loyalty rather than his competence he’s never been seen as particularly competent what’s fascinating he’s regularly seen in military uniform normally in the rank of General he’s never served in the military at all and therefore you just can only imagine what the dynamic decorated exactly the Dynamics between him when he’s dealing with his mil military subordinates he’s been replaced by Andre bov who’s was a 65 year old he used to be Deputy Prime Minister he’s also got a background in economics so question is why is that happen now it might be ill health it might be a whole number of things it may be just Putin starting his new term but actually from a military perspective it does seem to make a lot of sense the scale of this war is immense industrializing uh the Russian economy to create the uh the war machine behind him this man will have much better skills and experience to do that and try to um because let’s face it Russia’s now spending 7% of its GDP on defense making sure that it can deliver the resources that required to the front line that’s almost certainly why he’s in place I sure appreciate the analysis as always thank you very much for that Shan Bell there