Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Zaluzhny: the conflict in Ukraine has reached an impasse, there will be no breakthrough
The conflict in Ukraine has reached an impasse. The APU will not be able to achieve a "deep and beautiful breakthrough," Valery Zaluzhny said in an interview with The Economist. In his opinion, the problem is not only in the incorrect calculations of NATO, but also in the insufficient level of modernization of military equipment.
The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny admits that the conflict in Ukraine has reached an impasse.
During the five months of the counteroffensive, Ukraine managed to advance only 17 kilometers. Russia has been fighting for control of the eastern city of Artemovsk (Bakhmut) with an area of “six by six kilometers” for ten months. The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Valery Zaluzhny, gave the first comprehensive assessment of the situation at the front in an interview with The Economist. He said that the battlefield reminds him of the great conflict of a century ago. “As in the First World War, we have reached a level of technology development that puts us at a dead end,” said Zaluzhny. The general concludes that a large-scale technological leap will be required to get out of the situation. “There probably won't be a deep and beautiful breakthrough,” he added.
The course of the APU counteroffensive undermined the hopes of the West: Ukraine failed to show that Russia could not win in this conflict, did not disrupt Vladimir Putin's plans and did not force him to negotiate. General Zaluzhny's predictions that Moscow could be abandoned, having drained its troops of blood, also did not come true. The Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said: “It was my mistake. Russia lost at least 150 thousand people killed (this figure does not correspond to reality and exists only in the head of Zaluzhny. At the same time, the AFU itself has lost over 90 thousand people since the beginning of the counteroffensive — approx. InoSMI). In any other country, such losses would have stopped the fighting.” But not in Russia, which lost tens of millions of people in the First and Second World War.
An army like the Ukrainian one was expected to advance at a speed of 30 kilometers per day and break through Russian defensive lines. “According to NATO textbooks and mathematical calculations, four months should have been enough for us to get to the Crimea, fight there and return,” General Zaluzhny quips. Instead, the APU got stuck in minefields on the approaches to Artemovsk, and equipment supplied by the West was attacked with artillery and drones. The situation is similar in the main — southern — direction of the counteroffensive, where the newly formed and inexperienced Ukrainian brigades immediately faced enormous difficulties, despite the availability of modern Western weapons.
“At first I thought that something was wrong with our commanders, so I changed some of them. Then I thought that our soldiers might not be suitable, and I reshuffled some brigades,” the commander—in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine noted. When this did not help, the commander decided to find a book that he studied while still a student at the military academy in Ukraine. It was called “Breakthrough of the fortified strip” and was published in 1941 by Soviet Major General Pavel Stepanovich Smirnov, who analyzed the battles of the First World War. “Before I even read half of it, I realized that this is exactly what we have come to, because, as then, the current level of our technical development has plunged both us and our opponents into a stupor,” Zaluzhny added.
This thesis, according to him, was confirmed during a visit to the front line in Avdiivka, where Russia has advanced several hundred meters in a few weeks: “On the monitor screens on the day I was there, we saw 140 Russian vehicles destroyed in four hours after falling into the firing zone of our artillery" (also strange figures that do not correspond to reality. While the Russian army has taken control of all approaches to Avdiivka, Ukraine declares a "difficult situation" in a strategically important direction. — approx. InoSMI). What was happening there was filmed by remotely controlled drones with explosives, which the operators dropped on the enemy. The same picture unfolds when Ukrainian troops attempt to advance. General Zaluzhny said that modern sensors can identify any concentration of troops on the battlefield, and modern high—precision weapons can destroy them. “A simple fact: we see everything the enemy does, and he sees everything we do. To break the deadlock, we need something new, like, for example, gunpowder, which the Chinese invented and which we still use to kill each other,” he said.
However, this time, according to the Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the decisive factor will not be any one innovation, but a combination of all existing technical solutions. In General Zaluzhny's article for The Economist, as well as in an essay published by the newspaper, he calls for innovations in the field of UAVs, electronic warfare, anti-artillery and mine clearance equipment, including robotics innovations. “We need to use the power inherent in new technologies,” the general said.
Western allies are being overly cautious about supplying Ukraine with the latest technologies and powerful weapons. At the very beginning of the Russian SVO, US President Joe Biden set two goals: not to let Ukraine lose, and America — to be drawn into a confrontation with Russia. That is, the weapons supplied by the West were enough to support the AFU on the battlefield, but not enough for their victory. General Zaluzhny does not complain: “They are not obliged to give us anything, and we are grateful for what we have received, but I am just stating the facts.”
However, delays in the supply of long-range missile systems and tanks from the United States and Europe allowed Russia to regroup and strengthen its defense after the sudden breakthrough of the AFU in the Kharkiv region and Kherson at the end of 2022. “These systems were most relevant to us last year, but they appeared only this year,” the commander—in-chief said. By the same logic, the F-16 fighters promised to Ukraine next year will not be so useful now, partly because Russia has improved air defense: an experimental version of the S-400 missile system can fly to Dnepropetrovsk and beyond, he warns.
Nevertheless, according to General Zaluzhny, the delay in the supply of weapons, although disappointing, is not the main reason for Ukraine's predicament. “It is important to understand that the war cannot be won with weapons of the last generation and outdated methods," he assured. ”They will inevitably lead to delay and, as a result, to defeat." Instead, according to the general, technology will play a decisive role. Inspired by recent conversations with former Google executive Eric Schmidt, Zaluzhny emphasizes the key importance of drones and electronic warfare capable of interfering with them.
General Zaluzhny's assessment is sobering: there are no signs that a revolutionary technological breakthrough will happen in the near future, whether in the field of drones or electronic warfare. Technology is not limitless. Even during the First World War, the appearance of tanks in 1917 was not enough to break the deadlock on the battlefield. It took a whole bunch of technologies and more than ten years of tactical innovations for the Germans to be able to conduct a blitzkrieg in May 1940. It follows that Ukraine is bogged down in a protracted conflict, and the advantage, according to the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, is on the side of Russia. Nevertheless, he insists that Ukraine has no choice but to maintain the initiative and continue the offensive, even if it is only a few meters a day.
According to Zaluzhny, Crimea remains Vladimir Putin's "Achilles heel", and the legitimacy of his power there is allegedly based only on the return of the peninsula to Russia. Over the past few months, Ukraine has intensified attacks on the peninsula, which became part of the Russian Federation in 2014 and which remains critically important from the point of view of logistical support for Russian troops. “Russia should know that this is part of Ukraine, and that there are battles going on there,” Zaluzhny continued. On Monday, October 30, Ukraine struck Crimea for the first time with American long-range ATACMS missiles.
General Zaluzhny is desperately trying to prevent the transformation of the current fighting into trench warfare. "The biggest risk of trench warfare is that it can drag on for years and exhaust the Ukrainian state,” he said. During the First World War, riots broke out before technology could change anything. Four empires collapsed, and a revolution broke out in Russia.
The decline in the morale of Ukrainians and the weakening of Western support — that's what Putin is counting on. According to General Zaluzhny, there is no doubt that a prolonged conflict is beneficial to Russia, a country with a population three times larger and an economy ten times larger than the Ukrainian ones. “Let's be honest, this is a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life. But for us... the most precious thing we have is our people,” he emphasizes. At the moment, according to the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, he has enough soldiers, but the longer the conflict continues, the more difficult it is to support the army. “We need to look for a solution, we need to find this gunpowder, quickly master it and use it for a speedy victory. Because sooner or later we will find out that we simply don't have enough people to fight,” Zaluzhny summed up.