Valeri Zaluzhni enjoys so much respect in Ukraine that he can speak frankly like no one else. Not even the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, can be as sincere as the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Zelensky would not praise an enemy, as Zaluzhni has done, who in an interview for time September 2022, he assured that the most intelligent military theorist that exists is his greatest rival, Valery Gerasimov, chief of the Russian General Staff. In a new interview, with The EconomistZaluzhni acknowledged this Wednesday that he had made mistakes, that the front is frozen and that there is no sign of the situation changing: “As in World War I, we have reached the technological level that puts us in a draw.”
Zaluzhni also admits that only with a supply of the most advanced technology from his allies in NATO, and in quantities much greater than what has been provided so far, could the tables on the front be broken. “This war cannot be won with weapons from past generations and outdated methods,” says the general. Ukraine has received tens of billions of euros in military aid, but mostly in equipment that is not the most advanced defense systems in the West. Weapons such as the German Leopard tanks or the future delivery of the American F-16 fighters, for example, began to be produced in the 1970s.
Zaluzhni acknowledges that this new phase of support is unlikely to occur in the near future, so the stalemate on the front will continue. “Most likely there will not be a profound and beautiful breakthrough,” says Zaluzhni, with his characteristic irony.
The Ukrainian commander-in-chief also publishes a short essay in the British magazine in which he even establishes a period of at least one year in which his troops will not be able to count on the weapons necessary to make significant progress. “Russia will have superiority in weapons, equipment, missiles and ammunition for a considerable time. Its defense industry is increasing production, despite unprecedented sanctions,” says the commander in chief; “Our NATO partners are also dramatically increasing their production capacity, but it will take at least a year to achieve this and, in some cases, such as aircraft and command and control systems, two years.”
kyiv has been warning for weeks that NATO arsenals are at minimum levels and that the production of the Western military industry will not be able to meet sufficient Ukrainian demand for new large-scale operations. Mikola Bielieskov, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Studies, an organization dependent on the Ukrainian presidency, made it clear in an October 16 report published by the American center Atlantic Council: “The increase in production [armamentística] planned will not cover Ukrainian needs until the second half of 2024 or early 2025. The projected shortfall in key ammunition will surely determine Ukraine’s strategy for the spring and summer.”
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International support for a war that lasts years is also not assured. Zelensky acknowledged last Tuesday, in an interview with Time, that fatigue is taking over Western governments and societies: “War fatigue is progressing like a wave. “You see it in the United States and you see it in Europe.” Zelensky admits that he is under pressure to negotiate a ceasefire, but he dismisses it because it would mean “leaving an open wound for future generations.”
End of the counteroffensive
Zaluzhni’s words confirm the end of the counteroffensive that Ukraine began in June and in which both kyiv’s allies and the Ukrainian citizens had placed enormous hopes to drive back the invader. The commander in chief is once again in the mood to criticize the pressure he received from the West to achieve quick results, but also to accept his own mistakes: “If we look at the NATO manuals and the calculations we made, four months were “enough to get to Crimea, fight in Crimea, leave Crimea and get back in and out.”
The Ukrainian offensive has only progressed about 10 kilometers towards the Sea of Azov in five months, through a very vulnerable corridor because it is only 10 kilometers wide. The initial objective was to reconquer the city of Melitopol and from there cut off the Russian logistical lines in the east and towards Crimea. But Melitopol remains almost 80 kilometers from the Ukrainian troops. The Crimean peninsula, occupied by Russia since 2014, is 100 kilometers from the nearest Ukrainian positions, in the province of Kherson.
The top Ukrainian commander assumes having made mistakes, for example, having relieved commanders thinking that they were responsible for the lack of results. The first three months of the counteroffensive on the Zaporizhia front were catastrophic, as explained by multiple military sources consulted by EL PAÍS on the front: the high command chose to try to break the Russian defense lines with assaults by large columns of armored vehicles and infantry. . Russian minefields and fortifications, reinforced as had not been seen on a battlefield since World War II, stopped these assaults, leaving hundreds of casualties and destroyed vehicles.
The conflict has since been based on a “war of positions”, as Zaluzhni himself explains: “The war has entered a new phase, what in the military world we call positional war, static fire and attrition, as in “World War I, in contrast to the war of maneuver, movement and speed.” The situation, says the general, “benefits Russia because it allows it to rebuild its military power.”
Zaluzhni regrets that the international arms supply led by the United States has been too slow because it has aimed “that Ukraine would not be defeated and at the same time that America would not be dragged into a confrontation with Russia.” Above all, Ukraine has been assisted to resist, but not to win. While in Washington and Europe there was doubt about what weapons to provide, Russia was erecting 800 kilometers of impregnable triple lines of defense. The Ukrainian commander-in-chief even highlights that the F-16 fighters will arrive too late because the enemy’s anti-aircraft defenses are increasingly superior. Zaluzhni also reveals a hitherto secret fact: of the 120 warplanes that his air forces had at the beginning of the invasion, only 40 now remain.
Moscow response
The Kremlin spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, assured this Thursday that the war is not a stalemate and that Russia will continue with “the special military operation” that must expel the Ukrainian army from the eastern provinces that it wants to illegally annex. Despite the statements of Peskov, one of Vladimir Putin’s main allies, Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko stated last week that the war is at a stalemate and that neither side has the strength to unbalance the balance.
Zaluzhni admits another mistake, and that is having thought that the war would take its toll on Putin: “It was my mistake, Russia has suffered at least 150,000 [soldados] dead. In any other country, this number of casualties would have stopped the war.” The Kremlin has something fundamental that Ukraine does not have, human assets. Zaluzhni also highlights this and that is why he calls for more and better weapons “to accelerate victory”: “Because sooner or later we will find that we do not have enough people to fight.”
![Ukrainian soldiers from the 'Bureviy' (Hurricane) assault brigade train before their frontline deployment, at a shooting range north of kyiv, this Wednesday.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/ScrUb1iUtuXf3icMmLQ3HLe4hec=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/SZHNXXQCSQ3N75PW4P3H2JCONI.jpg)
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