‘There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,’ says Valery Zaluzhny.
Russia’s war with Ukraine has become totally bogged down in the trenches, according to Ukraine’s top general.
And the prospect of a long war gives Vladimir Putin and Russia an advantage, Ukraine’s Army Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny said in a sobering interview with the Economist published Wednesday night.
In the five months since Ukraine launched an eagerly awaited counteroffensive, its troops have advanced only 17 kilometers through heavily fortified and mined Russian defense lines.
The counteroffensive has already disappointed many Ukrainian partners, some of whom are now demanding an end to military aid with the war deadlocked. However, the West’s cautious provision of weapons to Ukraine has allowed the Russians to mobilize thousands and fortify positions in occupied Ukraine, according to Zaluzhny.
This is something that I’ve been thinking about and came to the realisation of the last couple of months.
And this is exactly what Russia’s objective was after the disaster of last year. Politically and strategically is the best they can hope for. Drag it out and Ukraine’s allies and the world will get tired and stop caring. They’ll stop supplying weapons, and sanctions will soften, maybe even start leaning towards supporting or feeling sorry for Russia. Something that were already seeing with Slovakia cutting all aid to Ukraine and taking a ‘war is bad, negotiate peace’ stance that is a blatant and thinly veiled Russian supportive line. Which is funny since their new govt is Russia leaning.
US are also starting to waver recently with the whole House Speaker débâcle. And Poland/Ukraine relations are a little frosty at the minute too.
That’s before you even talk about the Russian strikes on the Ukrainian/Romanian border that are being almost ignored in relation to their severity. Or the Russian mining of the Black Sea. Or Russian missiles flying paths over Maldova on their way to Ukraine. It’s a piss take. And only a matter of time unless the world pulls its finger out.
Something that were already seeing with Slovakia cutting all aid to Ukraine and taking a ‘war is bad, negotiate peace’ stance that is a blatant and thinly veiled Russian supportive line.
Keep in mind that Fico is lying populist. He is very vocal about ending support for Ukraine, but then ends up supporting budget that includes help for Ukraine.
He’s very dependent on EU money. Estonian prime minister Kaja Kallas very correctly pointed out to reporters that Hungary often said one thing to the media and did another thing behind closed doors. Fico is exactly the same.
Any military equipment Slovakia could send is already in Ukraine. And any future financial help will be approved by Fico after making loud claims in the media how he’ll stop any and all support. Or pretend that the support is only humanitarian. (But obviously money is money, we can easily pretend the 1% of the overall budget that Slovakia sent was used for… …uh… …fuel?)
Something that were already seeing with Slovakia cutting all aid to Ukraine and taking a ‘war is bad, negotiate peace’ stance that is a blatant and thinly veiled Russian supportive line.
This was not because of fatigue, the assholes that were just voted in spewed Russian propaganda long before the war started.
But he was voted in by the people (I assume). So whoever voted him in didn’t mind what he was saying at the very least. That still says something about fatigue among the people if not the government, right?
It’s hard to know which is cause and which is effect to be honest. They are saying sweet sweet lies that people want to hear and in turn, they believe them everything. It’s a fucked up and complex situation.
Are you correct? Likely. But last there were polls on this it was around 50:50 split I think - which is incredibly bad still, but in the end it means the bad guys just managed to tip the scale. As always they worked with emotions of hate and anger these elections and those are easier to rally behind than rational thoughts. And easier to sway people with.
And it gets worse, as people keep saying the worse seasonal weather makes further fighting more difficult. Do you what it doesn’t impede? Installing barricades and booby traps and mines. Winter could be yet another situation where Russia has relative peace to build up yet more defenses
Promised F-16 and Gripen fighter jets haven’t even made an impact yet, and the quality of weapons provided in international aid has been steadily increasing over the last year. Further, Ukraine has been consistent in finding ways to make all hardware provided find much more functionality than they were designed to. Seems premature to call this a stalemate. The only thing going stale has been Russia’s ability to respond in kind.
Sure, things will come to a bit of a standstill over the cold season. That was always expected. But next year, there is every reason to believe Ukraine will be able to make the break throughs they need to break Russia’s occupation entirely.
I mean, this isn’t the opinion of some analyst reporter. That’s a quote taken from the CiC himself. Maybe it’s some 5d chess pr move, but I don’t think there’s any reason to assume he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Whilst the arrival of F16 and Grippen will help, it isn’t going to be some magic bullet wonder system that will win the war for Ukraine.
They have been rocking HIMARS for about a year at this point, Lepoards, Challenger2, Bradley, Patriot, Gepard, Excalibur etc from their allies. Not to mention the home grown/home developed systems that have achieved parity and even arguably surpassed the Russian Naval impact from the Black Sea. And yet they’re still at the point where they’re pretty much at an attritional grind. Russia has done well to adapt to much of these systems and tactics, using the last winter as an example of where they shifted focus from trying to gain ground to simply holding what they have (a-la Germany following the strategic failure of Op Michael).
I will steadfastly support Ukraine and strongly believe that Russia absolutely needs to be stopped and shown that their Imperial actions cannot be allowed. But we also need to be realistic and realise this isn’t as easy as we want it to be. That Russia aren’t the complete drooling fools that we want to believe them to be.
It’s true. The magic bullets would be agm-158s w CHAMP packages. Fry all electronics on the Russian side and everything from communications to launchers become useless while occupier coordination would become nonexistent. War would be ended and Ukraine restored with a lot less bloodshed if they were deployed.
Edit to add - Fun fact: Agm-158s are able to be launched by F-16s.
Would that also help with insane amount of mines, trenches and dumb ww2era weapons Russian is using to hold ground. Which seems to be the crux of the issue. Just like Ukrain shown, holding ground and digging in seems to be very effective strategy that might only be overcome with sheer numbers (and death…). Ukraine hope was finding a weak point in defense and punching through, but it seems that there are no real “weak” points so far. The question is, can allies provide Ukrain with weapons that can help with breaking through current defenses? So far it seems traditional weapons however advanced, don’t solve the issue of dumb mines, trenchs, and dug in positions for either side…
Good thing is: the loses Russia has are everything but sustainable. Both personnel and materiel.
I was under the impression that Russia have slowly ground away the Ukrainian army primarily with long distance artillery. From what I’ve gathered, Ukraine have already sent boys, women, old men and those initially unfit for service to the front lines. Even those who paid bribes to avoid serving have been pulled in.
Perhaps it’s just propaganda. Perhaps I should just read official, western media. We should be able to trust the statements of the western military, practically allies with Ukraine right? No well-adjusted member of society would accuse then of trying to sway people’s opinions about wars.
Ah yes, because US journalism is so reliable.
Western media isn’t necessarily malicious, but it’s just plain negligent and lazy.
So basically this has devolved into WWl
This is the best summary I could come up with:
And the prospect of a long war gives Vladimir Putin and Russia an advantage, Ukraine’s Army Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny said in a sobering interview with the Economist published Wednesday night.
In the five months since Ukraine launched an eagerly awaited counteroffensive, its troops have advanced only 17 kilometers through heavily fortified and mined Russian defense lines.
Zaluzhny acknowledged a mistake in thinking Russia would halt the full-scale invasion after it lost more than 150,000 soldiers killed on the battlefield.
“The American taxpayers have become weary of funding a never-ending stalemate in Ukraine with no vision of victory,” reads a recently published letter to Biden, signed by seven Republican members of the U.S. Congress.
According to an accompanying essay he wrote, the key to Ukraine’s possible path out of the current positional warfare is to: gain air superiority; breach mine barriers in depth; increase the effectiveness of counter-battery; create and train the necessary reserves; and build up electronic warfare capabilities.
In short, Zaluzhny said that combining old methods of war with superiority in technological warfare might let Ukraine fight to its strengths of flexibility and nimbleness.
The original article contains 419 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 56%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
