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Ukraine war: Zelensky admits slow progress but says offensive is not a movie
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65971790
Speaking to the BBC, Ukraine's leader stresses that the counter-offensive is not a Hollywood movie.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65971790
Speaking to the BBC, Ukraine's leader stresses that the counter-offensive is not a Hollywood movie.
Steady pace with proper planning is of course way better than rushing into things head first. Ukrainians will take their time and it's definitely a good thing. They'll use what they have wisely to get the best out of limited resources and minimizing casualties, time is on their side right now and they don't need to impress anyone. There's plenty of time to cut the supply routes to crimea and continue pushing back to 1991 borders, take your time and once you're done I'll definetly visit your beautiful country.
I 100% agree, Russia made a mistake thinking it could defeat Ukraine in a few days.
If I've learnt anything, it's that the Ukrainian army know what they're doing.
Agreed, also they have to move slow to reduce losing to many troops, cause Russia still vastly out numbers them in just quantity. If you get reckless and start losing to many people/equipment it could go south.
Still a whole lot faster than anything Russia was attempting. They're attacking several places to find where is the best location to push though and exploit
I think Bachmut is the best example for this. It took them months and they couldn't even control all of it.
Meanwhile Ukraine seems to make quite some progress.
I think we've just thought the Russians are more incompetent than they actually are, because we haven't seen the Ukrainians attempt an offensive on an equally prepared defense. It seems as though the pace and collateral of this war is much closer to WW1, than WW2. In WW1 offensives would take place over a period of months only to pierce about 10km into the front.
While I think the Ukrainian army is more organized and effective than the Russians, I doubt we'll see a breakthrough anywhere along the front, especially now that Russia has more men to hold the lines. Instead we'll just see the gains being slightly larger than the Russians ones when they were on the offensive. In fact that's exactly what we're seeing. It's been almost a month of heavy offensive fighting and only a few hundred sq km of territory has been taken, and the Ukrainians haven't even arrived at Russia's main prepared defensive lines.
I'd say it looks like the war is going to go to a stalemate without NATO getting directly involved or Russia doing a full mobilization. Maybe Russia can just keep grinding out Ukrainian over a few years but there's no way to tell for that at this point.
I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
Let's be honest: we'd all like to see another Kherson blitzkrieg. And the Russians are fighting back harder than we expected. But fate favors the side with the best weapons and tactics, and that probably isn't Russia
How about we send Ukraine some actually meaningful amounts of jets and missiles, and other necessary equipment? The attack would probably be proceeding much faster, if Ukraine at least partially owned the sky and could reach any point in occupied areas.
This circus looks like NASA, when it's building a moon rocket. It can't fail, as then that would be seen as an excuse to cut it's budget. Without larger support Ukraine is kinda stuck in a position where they can't take too much risk, as "failures" could make western seem ineffective.
they can’t take too much risk, as “failures” could make western seem ineffective.
There's maybe a part of that, but taking risks on offensive operations certainly means more losses. And that's what Ukraine seems to care more about, which makes perfect sense. You can always build more tanks and other hardware, people (and trained people specifically) is much harder to replace. Additionally for the country itself and it's future the people are way more important than western hardware.
I can definitely see your point. It's just a shame to see that western countries drip feed their help. A larger amount of help provided at an earlier stage most likely would lead to less cost overall in all aspects to Ukraine and western countries.
If we intend to keep supporting Ukraine for the long term, then why not pay the price now instead of later? For example atacms looks to be happening in the near future, so why did the US have to wait so long with that?
Hard to tell for sure. At the beginning of the war there likely was incentive to hold back as the assumption was that Russia will just overrun Ukraine and/or they'd more or less willingly join Russia as a country. In that scenario we would've just given Russians loads of western technology to study/copy without anything in return.
Reality was of course different than assumptions and now it seems quite inevitable that Ukraine will win the whole war, so I agree that it would make sense just to give enough hardware for them to end the war quickly. But then there's the threat of nuclear weapons and maybe more importantly the manufacturing capabilities. It's a lengthy process to evaluate what can be given so that it doesn't hurt origin country too much (like Finland with our artillery/tanks, we need those ourselves) and how long it takes to replace the donated gear. The whole western world was struggling to even manufacture enough just artillery ammunition and in the scale of world wars the frontline is relatively short.
Then there's capabilities of AFU. They're of course proven their skills over and over again, but training for the new weapon systems take time and specially US made systems depend on ridiculous amounts of logistics which would cause challenges to every other military on the planet and even more for ex-soviet country.
And on top of that there's politics and money. Someone paid for that hardware and weapon exports in general is a controversial topic even at peace, so everything is a bit more complicated than to load a train and send it to front lines. Apparently it's easier politically to give something small at first and increase the pace slowly. "We already gave 10M worth of hardware, what's another 2 on top of that" kind of thinking.
But all this is of course just a speculation from an armchair general.
More weapons will become ready later in the year, but f16s probably not this year. So that sucks. Their goal in this "offensive" should be to put pressure on, but keep be careful not to have to many loses. Those two things don't go well together.