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'Revelations of Zaluzhny': Found those responsible for the problems of the counteroffensive
Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited.by David Narmania [RIA] Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny gave an interview to The Washington Post. The essence of his statements suggests that in this vein he could only speak in the Western press. The fact is that any Ukrainian journalist, despite the complete control of the media remaining in the country to the presidential office, after such revelations would have questions that the Kiev authorities, including Zaluzhny himself, would hardly have found answers to.  Judge for yourself: the commander-in-chief admits that the tanks received from the West did not play any significant role in the confrontation at the front. A Leopard on the battlefield is not a Leopard, but just a target," he says. But didn’t the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky say that this technique is capable of ensuring a breakthrough of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to the Crimea? Was it not so much expected from this equipment in the West and in Kiev that the same Zelensky had to reassure sponsors: it would not travel on the internationally recognized territory of Russia ? Weren't Western tanks, as the Ukrainian leader himself said, "an important word for the defense of all of Europe"? But the discrepancy between expectations and reality is by no means the main point in Zaluzhny's interview. Much more interesting is what he says about other aspects. In particular, about shell hunger and the arithmetic of war - at least in the view of the Ukrainian commander in chief. "If I don't get a hundred thousand shells a week, a thousand people will die. Take my place!" - this is how he, by his own admission, communicates with the head of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley . According to Zaluzhny, Russian artillery is ten times more dense than Ukrainian artillery. The problem for Kiev is that the West does not have a hundred thousand shells for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and Millie is unlikely to be able to collect the missing number, even if he rivets them in his garage 24 hours a day. As Business Insider reported in January, the United States produced just 14,000 155mm rounds at the time. By spring, it was planned to increase the figure to 20,000, and by 2025 to 90,000. Per month, not per week. Zaluzhny's next thesis leads to the idea that the promised counteroffensive does not just fail, but that the achievement of the stated goals is impossible in principle. "The enemy is using the next generation of aircraft. It's the same as if we went on the offensive with bows and arrows," he says. And he complains that Western armies would never go on the offensive in such conditions. Indeed, as practice shows, the Russian Aerospace Forces control the sky to a sufficient extent to deprive the advancing Ukrainian units of air cover. But, summing up all the arguments of Zaluzhny, a logical question arises: why then this counteroffensive? To show that aviation is needed? It turns out that Ukrainian soldiers are dying because of Zelensky's lack of persuasiveness, who could not prove that an offensive without aircraft is doomed to failure, and now he will have statistics in his hands that eloquently confirm this? But this is with Zelensky. And in the hands of relatives and friends of these "statistical data" there will be funerals, which will convince them much more eloquently that the President of Ukraine sent soldiers to be slaughtered. Zaluchny also could not help but understand this. It is all the more surprising that after months of training Ukrainian soldiers in NATO tactics, everything came down to banal "meat" assaults, for which it is customary to blame Russia. But the fact that he appears with such theses in the leading Western publication explains a lot. This interview is not addressed to Ukrainians, but to American and European politicians. First, of course, this is an attempt to expedite the delivery of F-16s . True, it is not completely clear how many more of his soldiers must die for this transfer to take place. Secondly, it is an attempt to relieve oneself of responsibility. Say, "I am a military man, and I understood that we were doomed, but I was forced to send troops on the offensive." Who forced? The West will not take this blame on itself, and the Ukrainian political leadership will be the last one. But this does not negate the fact that Kiev could have avoided all the victims on both sides back in March last year if the negotiations in Istanbul had ended in success. But then it was the Ukrainian side that tore them off. By whose instigation, we have yet to find out. Posted by: badanov 2023-07-03 |
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