Ukraine’s top commander: Russia’s likeliest new offensive runs through Chernihiv

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrskyi said Russia’s most realistic option for opening a new front is an offensive into Chernihiv Oblast from Russia’s Bryansk Oblast, ranking it above an attack staged from Belarusian territory.

“This is a realistic option, and of course, we are preparing for it,” Syrskyi said in a 30 June interview with TSN, adding that several intelligence indicators support the Bryansk axis as the most likely scenario.

The assessment extends a warning Ukraine has been building for over a year. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in May that Russia was weighing offensive scenarios against “the Chernihiv-Kyiv direction” specifically, one of two options alongside a strike on a NATO state from Belarusian soil. Chernihiv Oblast was the corridor Russian troops used in February 2022 in the failed attempt to encircle Kyiv from the northeast.

Syrskyi said Russian President Vladimir Putin had ordered the Russian General Staff to calculate offensive options that included routing an attack through Belarus, but that he doubted Minsk would risk handing over its territory as a staging ground given recent developments. Ukraine is nonetheless preparing for that scenario too, he said.

A Russian offensive opening in the north, Syrskyi said, would aim to pull Ukrainian forces away from the active fighting in the east and south and to stretch the front line further.

The interview lands days after signal repeaters that had been helping guide Russian Shahed drones into Ukraine from Belarusian territory went dark. Zelenskyy gave Belarusian ruler Aliaksandr Lukashenka a one-week deadline on 19 June to remove the repeaters; they stopped transmitting on 22 June, days before the deadline, though Zelenskyy has said it remains unclear whether Belarus dismantled the equipment or Ukraine acted itself. Russia retains other means of guiding drones along the northern border, including signal-relay balloons and Shaheds fitted with SIM cards that latch onto neighboring countries’ networks.

Ukraine’s Defense Forces have already begun reinforcing the area. Syrskyi said earlier in June that new drone units would help cover the northern border, and Ukraine’s Operational Command West reported in May that fortifications and minefields had been built in the Polissia border region. The commander of Ukraine’s National Guard said on 22 June that the threat from Belarus remains real given an estimated 70,000 Russian troops concentrated there, but said defense forces were taking steps to prevent that scenario from materializing.