From the New York Times, I'm Katrin Benholt in For Sabrina Tavernisi.

This is The Daily.

For months, much of the world has been watching and waiting as Ukraine prepares for a major counter-offensive in its war with Russia.

That battle is now underway, and it's not what we expected.

Today, my colleague Andrew Kramer reports from the Front Line.

It's Friday, June 23rd.

Andrew, you're 20 miles from very intense fighting after visiting the Front Line yourself last week.

Thank you so much for making time for us.

Thank you for having me on.

So there's been a lot of hype around this counter-offensive.

When we last talked about it on the show, very little was actually known about it, or the timing of it.

But in the last couple of weeks that has began to change, can you walk us up to this moment where we're just starting to understand what we actually mean when we say counter-offensive?

Well, the war in Ukraine had settled into a stalemate since last fall.

The armies were lined up against one another along about 600 miles of trench fortifications in southeastern Ukraine.

And it was very intense and very violent fighting, but very little ground-changed hands.

The war had become a quagmire, so there was a lot of pressure on the Ukrainian government to show that the policies of arming and assisting Ukraine were going to yield results.

So as this anticipation and hype arose about a counter-offensive, about a shift in the battlefield, this had been building for months through the winter and into the spring.

But there was very little information about what would actually happen.

What were they actually saying officially, publicly, the Ukrainians about this coming counter-offensive?

Well, interestingly, they were saying almost nothing.

Just before the counter-offensive began, the government released a video that had the sounds of crickets in the background and soldiers who were holding their fingers that are lips and shushing, asking for silence.

And the video had a headline that said, plans love silence.

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