Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been in full swing for more than 100 days. Tens of thousands have been killed and large chunks of land have been occupied in Ukraine, but Kyiv now predicts that “it may end by the end of the year.”

Oleksii Reznikov, the defense minister of Ukraine, while speaking at the GLOBSEC-2022 Forum in Bratislava, Slovakia said that he is making an “optimistic projection”. Reznikov, however, emphasised Ukraine’s need for backup.

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Ukraine’s forces still need “heavy weapons, primarily MLRS, as well as other artillery, tanks, anti-ship systems, unmanned systems, missiles and air defenses.”

“We need them quickly and in quantities commensurate with the scale of the threats. Ukraine found itself in a state of war without adequate support from the democratic world,” Reznikov said, according to CNN reports.

Ukraine’s top defense official added that the nature of the ongoing war is not the same as it was a month ago. Russia entered Ukrainian territory on February 24, 2022. The “philosophy of weapons” had changed since then, he said.

“If in the first month of the war we focused on obtaining anti-tank and anti-aircraft portable systems, now the nature of the war has changed and we need more heavy weapons”, Reznikov said at the forum.

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Top officials of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier this month that the Russia-Ukraine conflict is likely to conclude at the negotiation table. However, almost all diplomatic ties between Kyiv and Moscow have been cut for now.

“We can’t say when, we can’t say exactly how”, Blinken said when asked about when the war will end, Al Jazeera reported. “What we can say is what we will do to make sure that Ukraine has the means to defend itself and has the strongest possible hand at every step along the way,” he added.