{"id":44722,"date":"2023-11-13T08:48:06","date_gmt":"2023-11-13T16:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=44722"},"modified":"2023-11-13T08:48:06","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T16:48:06","slug":"ukraines-military-leadership-admits-the-obvious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2023\/11\/13\/ukraines-military-leadership-admits-the-obvious\/","title":{"rendered":"Ukraine’s Military Leadership Admits the Obvious"},"content":{"rendered":"

Commander in Chief of Ukraine\u2019s armed forces Valery Zaluzhny admitted last week in the pages of The Economist <\/em>that the war with Russia has become a stalemate and there will \u201cmost likely\u201d be no breakthrough. It has been clear for months that Ukraine\u2019s much hyped summer offensive has been a massive failure, and military leadership is finally acknowledging the reality. But at a press conference days later Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky sternly rejected<\/a> Zaluzhny\u2019s assessment. Evidently he\u2019s still hanging on to the notion that victory is just around the corner.<\/p>\n

He pointed to the fact that talk of stalemate was widespread last year before the Kharkiv offensive. \u201cA few military tricks, and you remember, the Kharkiv region was liberated,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

But things have changed dramatically since then, for the Ukrainians as well as the Russians. Incidentally, a closer look at the Kharkiv offensive reveals the Ukrainian success was due mostly to luck and Russia\u2019s poor defense rather than tactical skill.<\/p>\n

In fact if one objectively looks at Ukraine\u2019s biggest \u201cvictories\u201d of the war \u2014 Russia\u2019s pullback from Kyiv and northern Ukraine in March and April 2022, the Kharkiv offensive in September 2022, and Russia\u2019s evacuation from the right bank of the Dnieper in the Kherson region in November 2022 \u2014 it\u2019s easy to come to the conclusion none of them were the result of Ukraine\u2019s military talents.<\/p>\n

And the situation has only gotten tougher for the Ukrainians after a full year without any major successes. An October 30 article<\/a> in Time <\/em>magazine highlights the Ukrainian army\u2019s worsening problems with recruitment and desertion, mounting battlefield losses, omnipresent corruption, and growing difficulties in keeping up Western support. It centers on the waning confidence of many around the president. Zelensky himself is singularly convinced of Ukraine\u2019s eventual victory however, and he seems to be one of the few. One adviser is cited saying of the president, \u201cHe deludes himself. We\u2019re out of options. We\u2019re not winning. But try telling him that.\u201d<\/p>\n

After considerable fanfare the author of the piece clarified<\/a> that all his sources were current aides and advisers to Zelensky, noting he did not talk to the outspoken former insider Alexey Arestovych<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since leaving the presidential administration in January, after claiming a Russian missile that hit an apartment block in Dnipro could have been knocked off course by Ukrainian air defense, Arestovych has been labeled a traitor and a criminal. In turn, he\u2019s become a harsh critic of the way the war is being conducted and recently called Zelensky a dictator who is \u201cdivorced from reality<\/a>.\u201d Last week Arestovych announced his intention to run in the next presidential elections. He is also currently under surveillance<\/a> by Ukraine\u2019s special services for advocating negotiations with Russia.<\/p>\n

Owing to his adept use of social media and comforting predictions of victory, Arestovych once had the highest approval rating of any Ukrainian official apart from Zelensky. But he fell out of favor by the beginning of this year, and in July openly floated<\/a> the idea of making territorial concessions to Russia in exchange for peace and NATO membership. With the summer offensive now an undeniable disaster, he\u2019s decided to step things up, announcing his own presidential run. Like his old boss, Arestovych is a native Russian speaker and a former actor. He\u2019s also a veteran of military intelligence, and nowadays an amateur psychologist. He could end up as a formidable rival to the incumbent.<\/p>\n

Reality is quickly catching up with Zelensky, his differences with Zaluzhny and the boldness of Arestovych prove it.<\/p>\n

If he definitively cancels<\/a> the elections scheduled for March 2024, and continues to disregard Zaluzhny and others, he may be running the risk of being forced out of office.<\/p>\n

The Ukrainian president is not the only one still deluding himself though. Zelensky\u2019s delusions didn\u2019t come out of nowhere. He was fed them by Westerners, and none more so than Americans. Ukrainian victory was always a pipe dream. One only has to look at the difference in size and industrial capacity between Russia and Ukraine to know that. But the obvious truth hasn\u2019t gotten in Washington\u2019s way. These are the same people who thought removing Saadam Hussein would weaken Iran.<\/p>\n

Zaluzhny says the war has just now entered a stalemate, but that determination could have been made long ago. It was apparent in the opening months of the war that neither side would win an absolute victory. And it has long been understood that the conflict would end in a negotiated settlement. But the Biden administration worked to undermine peace talks in both Belarus and Turkey<\/a> in spring 2022 and later rejected the advice of General Mark Milley when he suggested negotiations this time last year.<\/p>\n

Despite all logic, and with the world shifting focus to the war in Israel and Gaza, President Biden doesn\u2019t seem to be giving up on the delusion of Ukrainian victory even now. He\u2019s just requested<\/a> Congress approve an additional $61 billion in aid for Ukraine, a sum equivalent to half of what the US has given Kyiv over the last 20 months. It\u2019s as if these people aren\u2019t familiar with the definition of insanity.<\/p>\n

For all the rumors<\/a> Western governments are pushing Zelensky to the negotiating table, Biden\u2019s attempts to equate Vladimir Putin with Hamas terrorists, and his plans to send tens of billions more dollars in aid to Kyiv, show just how uninterested his administration has in changing its strategy.<\/p>\n

Jack Stevenson holds a BA in history. He recently started a Substack called Foreign Entanglements<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Commander in Chief of Ukraine\u2019s armed forces Valery Zaluzhny admitted last week in the pages of The Economist that the war with Russia has become a stalemate and there will \u201cmost likely\u201d be no breakthrough. It has been clear for months that Ukraine\u2019s much hyped summer offensive has been a massive failure, and military leadership […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":596,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-44722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/596"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44722"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44724,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44722\/revisions\/44724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44722"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=44722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}