Now I see General Zaluzhny has more to say, on potential next steps for Ukraine, covered in today's ISW report.The Economist today reported on an interview with Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny. Quotes from the article:
“Just like in the first world war we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,” he says. The general concludes that it would take a massive technological leap to break the deadlock. “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”
Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war.” But not in Russia, where life is cheap and where Mr. Putin’s reference points are in the first and second world wars in which Russia lost tens of millions.
"...the level of our technological development today has put both us and our enemies in a stupor.”
“The simple fact is that we see everything the enemy is doing and they see everything we are doing. In order for us to break this deadlock we need something new, like the gunpowder which the Chinese invented and which we are still using to kill each other,” he says.
General Zaluzhny is desperately trying to prevent the war from settling into the trenches. “The biggest risk of an attritional trench war is that it can drag on for years and wear down the Ukrainian state,” he says.
Crimea, he believes, remains Mr Putin’s greatest vulnerability. It is the linchpin of his imperial restoration project, and his legitimacy rests on having brought it back to Russia.
A collapse in Ukrainian morale and Western support is precisely what Mr Putin is counting on. There is no question in General Zaluzhny’s mind that a long war favours Russia, a country with a population three times and an economy ten times the size of Ukraine’s. “Let’s be honest, it’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life. And for us…the most expensive thing we have is our people,” he says. For now, General Zaluzhny says, he has enough soldiers. But the longer the war goes on, the harder it will be to sustain. “We need to look for this solution, we need to find this gunpowder, quickly master it and use it for a speedy victory. Because sooner or later we are going to find that we simply don’t have enough people to fight.”
TL;DR Ukraine needs a miracle weapon to win, and it is not at hand.
Ukraine’s commander-in-chief on the breakthrough he needs to beat Russia
General Valery Zaluzhny admits the war is at a stalematewww.economist.com
(I need to get to bed, so no summary.)
Institute for the Study of War
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