The Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Valery Zaluzhny, said on Wednesday that he believes his army is in a static positional war, while hinting that Kyiv’s summer offensive has failed, reports DPA, quoted by Agerpres.

“The war is now entering a new phase: what we in the military call ‘positional’ warfare, consisting of static battles and battles of attrition,” Zaluyny said in an editorial published by Britain’s The Economist magazine, in which he warned that the battle front may soon resemble the trenches of the First World War.

Zaluzhnyi believes that the situation at the front has reached a stalemate, when neither side can advance, because both are equally equipped from a technological point of view, which reminds him of the events of the First World War, Ukrainian Pravda reports.

After five months of counteroffensive, Ukraine managed to advance only 17 km, he says, recalling that Russia fought for ten months around Bakhmut – in the east of the country – to “conquer a city measuring 6 by 6 kilometers”. Only a technological leap can create a way out of this situation, the Ukrainian general claims.

According to him, the stalemate on the battlefield only helps Russia restore its military power. In this regard, General Zaluzhnyi emphasizes that Ukraine needs airplanes first of all.

Kyiv is looking forward to receiving the F-16 fighter jets that several countries have promised to Ukraine. Until then, improved Ukrainian drones should compensate for the lack of fighters, the general concluded.

According to him, the key to success in drone warfare is advanced electronic warfare to disrupt and intercept Russian aircraft. And Russia is superior in this regard, Zaluzhnyi admits.

“At the moment, we managed to match Russia with a smaller but more accurate firepower. But this cannot continue,” he warned.

Zaluzhny says he was wrong to assume that huge losses would deter the Kremlin

Ukraine also needs modern means of demining, as the Russian army has created lines of fortifications with mines up to 20 kilometers deep. In contrast to the re-capture of large territories last year, Ukrainians’ hopes this summer were barely met in terms of success on the ground.

Ukrainian troops weakened Russia’s position on the Crimean peninsula and drove the Russian fleet from the western part of the Black Sea.

But the way the Ukrainian counteroffensive developed undermined the West’s hopes that Ukraine could use a possible advance to change Vladimir Putin’s calculations and force the Russian president to sit down at the negotiating table, Ukrainian Pravda notes.

This dashed Zaluzhny’s hopes that he would be able to stop Russia by destroying its army, the Ukrainian publication writes.

“It was my mistake. Russia suffered losses of about 150,000 soldiers. In any other country, such losses would have led to the end of the war, but not in Russia, where life has no price, and Putin is guided by the example of two world fires in which Russia lost tens of millions. people,” he states.

In its current form, the Ukrainian army must advance at the front at a speed of 30 km per day.

A Ukrainian general says his army needs “something new” to advance

“If you look at the NATO textbooks and what we did during the planning of the counteroffensive, then four months was not enough for us to reach Crimea, fight in Crimea, return from Crimea, enter and let us leave,” he said. the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in an interview after his article in The Economist.

Instead, troops and equipment are stuck in minefields near Bakhmut, while Western equipment is attacked by Russian artillery and drones. The same evolution can be observed on the southern front, he says.

“At first we thought there was something wrong with our commanders, so we changed some of them. Then I thought that maybe our soldiers are not good, so I moved soldiers in some brigades,” says Zaluzhny, adding that even these changes did not bring results.

“The problem is that we see everything the enemy does, and they see everything we do. To get out of this impasse, we need something new,” the Ukrainian general says, emphasizing the need for a “technological leap” in equipping his army to be able to move forward.

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