Five months into its counter-offensive, Ukraine has managed to advance by just 17 kilometres. Russia fought for ten months around Bakhmut in the east “to take a town six by six kilometres”. Sharing his first comprehensive assessment of the campaign within an interview this week, Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, says the battlefield reminds him of the great conflict of a century ago.
“If you look at Nato’s text books and at the maths which we did, four months should have been enough time for us to have reached Crimea, to have fought in Crimea, to return from Crimea and to have gone back in and out again,” General Zaluzhny says sardonically.Instead he watched his troops get stuck in minefields on the approaches to Bakhmut in the east, his Western-supplied equipment getting pummelled by Russian artillery and drones.
An army of Ukraine’s standard ought to have been able to move at a speed of 30km a day as it breached Russian lines. “And before I got even halfway through it, I realised that is exactly where we are because just like then, the level of our technological development today has put both us and our enemies in a stupor.”That thesis, he says, was borne out as he went to the front line in Avdiivka, also in the east, where Russia has recently advanced by a few hundred metres over several weeks by throwing in two of its armies.
This time, however, the decisive factor will be not a single new invention, but will come from combining all the technical solutions that already exist, he says.by General Zaluzhny, as well as in an essay shared with the newspaper, he urges innovation in drones, electronic warfare, anti-artillery capabilities and demining equipment, as well as in the use of robotics.
“They will inevitably lead to delay and, as a consequence, defeat.” It is, instead, technology that will be decisive, he argues. Over the past few months, Ukraine has taken the war into the peninsula, which remains critical to the logistics of the conflict.