"In general, the enemy did not achieve its goals in any of the directions. This testifies to the skill of our fighters and clearly inflated expectations from the vaunted Western weapons," Shoigu told top military officials.
He also announced that Russian forces managed to destroy some 920 armored vehicles, including 16 Leopard tanks, in Donbass and in Zaporozhye regions last month.
At the same time, Shoigu accused Ukrainian forces of carrying out strikes against civilian targets to make up for Kiev's inability to attain success on the battlefield.
"Kiev is trying to compensate for its inability to ensure success on the ground through terrorist attacks on civilian targets and thus achieve a propaganda effect," the Russian defense minister said.
Last month, Ukrainian forces finally launched the "counteroffensive" that Kiev had been announcing for months.
Despite committing significant numbers of troops and military hardware to this undertaking, Kiev has so far failed to breach even the first line of Russian defenses despite sacrificing hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers and losing a considerable number of tanks and armored vehicles supplied by NATO countries.
Wagner's Aborted Mutiny
Shoigu has also addressed the events that transpired in Russia on June 23-25 involving the forces of PMC Wagner.
"I cannot but touch upon one more issue ... We are talking about an attempt on June 23-25 to destabilize the situation in Russia. These plans failed primarily because the personnel of the armed forces showed loyalty to the oath and military duty," he said.
On Friday, June 23, forces of the Wagner Group (PMC) seized the headquarters of Russia's Southern Military District in the city of Rostov-on-Don following accusations leveled against the Russian Ministry of Defense of striking the group's camps. Both the Russian military and the Federal Security Service denied the allegations.
Later that day, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko revealed that he had spent the entire day negotiating with Yevgeny Prigozhin, as agreed upon with Russian President Vladimir Putin. As a result of the talks, the Wagner group leader accepted Lukashenko's proposal to stop the movement of his troops in Russia and take measures to de-escalate the situation.
Putin guaranteed that the Wagner group fighters would have the opportunity to sign contracts with the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, return home, or move to Belarus.