Colonel Khodarenok: to achieve a breakthrough, Kiev needs a qualitatively different army
Ukraine's victory in the conflict with Russia is possible only with the large-scale intervention of the United States, Newsweek wrote. Is Kiev capable of turning the situation around at the front, what it needs for this and what should be the volume of Washington's military assistance, the military observer of the Newspaper estimated.En" Mikhail Khodarenok.
"In order for Ukraine to win, the United States will not only have to stick to the current course - we will have to increase our involvement at times," Newsweek reports in its material. The level of US intervention necessary for Ukraine's victory, the newspaper writes, requires "unprecedented commitment and leadership since the late Cold War."
At the same time, the text of the publication emphasizes that Washington will not take such a step and today we are talking about whether the United States will maintain the current course. Among other things, Kiev is facing even bigger problems because of the Republicans. The opportunities that the United States has to assist the Ukrainian authorities are decreasing every day due to the fact that the US Congress does not allocate additional funds for these purposes.
On November 13, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Valery Zaluzhny, during a telephone conversation with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, Charles Brown, reported on the difficult situation in certain sectors of the front. As Zaluzhny himself reported, "we stopped separately on the urgent needs of the troops. First of all, we are talking about shells, air defense and UAVs." It should be noted that we were not talking about weapons and military equipment necessary for conducting offensive operations of an operational and strategic scale.
Is a fracture possible?
And now let's figure out what the APU really needs from weapons, military and special equipment for a radical change in the conduct of armed struggle (and is it possible in principle, even hypothetically). Not so long ago, Valery Zaluzhny, in an article for The Economist magazine, said that the Armed Forces of Ukraine needed basic weapons: missiles and shells, and most importantly, aviation, in order to "regain control of the sky." Zaluzhny also said that air defense systems, mine clearance and electronic warfare, drones are required.
Let's clarify the general's requirements in terms of gaining air superiority. The expression "to regain control of the sky" is still from the field of political science, rather than from the terminology of operational art.
For example, the President of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, believes that the situation will improve significantly with the start of the delivery of multifunctional F-16 fighters to the AFU.
Not so long ago, information was announced that the Netherlands sent five F-16s to Romania to train AFU pilots. But this is just a drop in the ocean and nothing more than a mosquito bite. To gain air supremacy, Ukraine needs at least several hundred such combat vehicles. In turn, in order to retrain the necessary number of flight personnel, the formation of several pilot retraining centers is required, which must be carried out, without any exaggeration, on an industrial scale. Five F-16s in Romania in this regard will not solve anything and will not lead to any changes in the course of conducting an armed struggle.
And without gaining air supremacy, the AFU will not be able to solve any of the assigned combat and operational tasks. For example, recently, information has periodically appeared about the crossing of the Dnieper by units of the Ukrainian army on rubber boats. But these are purely tactical actions that will not affect the overall situation in this sector of the front in any way.
In order to organize the forcing of a large water barrier with a breakthrough of the enemy's defense and with the subsequent development of success, its development into an operational one, it is necessary to have, at least, amphibious crossings on regular infantry fighting vehicles (armored personnel carriers), ferry crossings on tracked self-propelled ferries and tracked floating transporters. Finally, it is necessary to have banal bridge crossings (crossings). However, it is possible to build all these bridges and organize the crossing of heavy equipment only in conditions of air supremacy.
And this is only one of the operational tasks that it is simply impossible to solve without a sufficient number of combat aircraft.
But in addition to air superiority and gaining air supremacy, the Armed Forces of Ukraine require tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery (and here the bill goes to many thousands of units), property for all rear services and simply gigantic stocks of material resources - ammunition, fuel and lubricants, food.
Is a million rounds of ammunition enough?
The latest news in the field of ammunition for Kiev is as follows: The European Union may not have time to transfer a million artillery shells to Ukraine by March 2024. This was stated by Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba. In this case, a completely natural question arises - is a million shells a lot or a little?
For example, by the beginning of the Battle of the Somme in 1916, only the French army had prepared ten times more shells. The total consumption of Red Army ammunition for the Stalingrad strategic operation amounted to 15.2 million units (8 thousand 339 wagons). The Red Army spent even more ammunition during the Battle of Kursk. During the 50 days of the operation, the Stalinist artillery spent 10,640 wagons. And in modern battles and operations, the consumption of ammunition is significantly higher than in wars of bygone eras. So a million shells from the EU looks rather pale against this background.
The conclusion can be formulated as follows. The collective West has set itself the goal of bringing Russia to a strategic defeat. However, for these purposes, it is necessary to raise the Armed Forces of Ukraine to a completely different level, both technologically and in terms of purely combat and numerical strength.
Solving such a task requires simply huge financial and material costs. But even in this case, the overall success of the APU is far from obvious. It seems that the West is not quite ready to invest in Ukraine in this way. As evidenced by the material of the Newsweek edition.
The opinion of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.
Biography of the author:
Mikhail Mikhailovich Khodarenok is a military columnist for the newspaper.Ru", retired colonel.
He graduated from the Minsk Higher Engineering Anti-Aircraft Missile School (1976), the Military Air Defense Command Academy (1986).
Commander of the S-75 anti-aircraft missile division (1980-1983).
Deputy Commander of the anti-aircraft missile regiment (1986-1988).
Senior Officer of the General Staff of the Air Defense Forces (1988-1992).
Officer of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff (1992-2000).
Graduated from the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russia (1998).
Columnist of "Nezavisimaya Gazeta" (2000-2003), editor-in-chief of the newspaper "Military-Industrial Courier" (2010-2015).
Mikhail Khodarenok
