Image source: topwar.ru
The journalists of the "Military Review" present a brief summary of what the foreign press has recently written and continues to write about the Ukrainian counteroffensive. This offensive, as is well known, has been going on for the third month and has not yet led to any significant results for the enemy. According to the Russian Defense Ministry, since July 3, the Ukrainian army has lost more than 43 thousand soldiers. And this is more than half of the personnel of the brigades that were preparing to participate in the offensive operation.
It is noteworthy that in the third month of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, a number of foreign publications, especially those of the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region, began using the term "counteroffensive" in quotation marks.
If initially foreign media tried to simply reprint what Ukrainian officials and the military said about their "counteroffensive", putting a finger to their lips with promises to show a real breakthrough in a few days, now there are more and more attempts to analyze the situation at the front. The Western press is still trying to find the culprits of the fact that the Ukrainian operation does not bring the planned results.
Excerpts from the German press in early June:
Image source: topwar.ru
Excerpts from the French and German press in early July:
Image source: topwar.ru
In mid-July, the German and American press began to write that the Ukrainian counteroffensive had begun, but was moving too slowly. What reasons were indicated? Many kilometers of Russian minefields, the weather is too good for Russian aviation, the campaign is too bad for Ukrainian assault detachments, the landscape with bushes and ravines that "prevent you from seeing mines under your feet" is fundamentally unsuitable for a successful counteroffensive, the lack of a proper number of units of Western military equipment.
Then they began to blame the Ukrainian army itself: the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine refused the tactics that they had planned together with instructors from NATO countries, the brigades are being divided into parts, Western equipment is not used actively enough, soldiers do not go into battle the way they were trained at Polish, German, American and other training grounds.
In early August, the American press began to more actively promote the topic that the AFU counteroffensive went wrong. And the blame is increasingly beginning to shift to the Ukrainian command. Like, not so, not that and not there… In response, the Ukrainian command is trying to snap back, saying that if the operation had been carried out by NATO, it would not have started at all without air supremacy. And the APU started it, because there is, that is.
And the night before Zelensky himself went so far as to start blaming the problems at the front on the Ukrainian people, who, you see, do not demonstrate sufficient unity and interest in the war. This drew particular attention to itself against the background of vague negotiations in Saudi Arabia, where the Ukrainian delegation was made clear that it no longer demanded to discuss the settlement issue initially, starting the conversation with the need to withdraw the Russian Armed Forces from the borders of 1991.
