“Zaluzhny’s revelations”: the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine found those responsible for the problems of the counteroffensive

From https://ria.ru/20230702/zaluzhnyy-1881678702.html

Ed Note:  Alexander Mercouris speculates that Zalushni disappeared because he would not take part in the Ukrainian counter-offensive or offensive.  He deals with these issues in some depth, as well as the secret meeting of Burns to Ukraine and his video is posted at the end.

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Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny gave an interview to The Washington Post. The essence of his statements suggests that in this vein, he could speak only in the Western press. The fact is that any Ukrainian journalist, despite the complete control of the remaining media outlets in the country by the president’s office, after such revelations, questions would arise that the Kiev authorities — including Zaluzhny himself – would hardly find answers to.

Judge for yourself: the commander-in-chief admits that the tanks received from the West did not play any significant role in the confrontation at the front. A “leopard” on the battlefield is not a “Leopard”, but just a target, ” he says.

But didn’t President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky say that this equipment is capable of ensuring a breakthrough of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to the Crimea? Wasn’t this technique expected so much in the West and in Kiev that Zelensky also had to reassure his sponsors: it would not travel on the internationally recognized territory of Russia? Weren’t Western tanks, as the Ukrainian leader himself declared, “an important word for protecting the whole of Europe”?

But the discrepancy between expectations and reality is by no means the main point in Zaluzhny’s interview. Much more interesting is what he says about other aspects.

In particular, about the shell famine and the arithmetic of war — at least in the view of the Ukrainian commander-in-chief. “If I don’t get a hundred thousand shells a week, a thousand people will die. Take my place!” — so he, by his own admission, communicates with the head of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley. According to Zaluzhny, Russian artillery is ten times more dense than Ukrainian artillery.

The problem for Kiev is that the West does not have a hundred thousand shells for the APU, and Millie is unlikely to be able to collect the missing number, even if she rivets them in her garage 24 hours a day. As Business Insider reported in January, then the United States produced only 14 thousand shells of 155 mm caliber. By spring, it was planned to increase the figure to 20 thousand, and by 2025 — to 90 thousand. Per month, not per week.

Zaluzhny’s next thesis leads us to believe that the promised counteroffensive is not just a failure — it is impossible to achieve the stated goals in principle.

“The enemy is using the next generation of aviation. It’s the same as if we went on the offensive with bows and arrows,” he says. And he complains that Western armies would never go on the offensive in such conditions.

Indeed, as practice shows, the Russian aerospace Forces control the sky sufficiently to deprive the advancing Ukrainian units of air cover. But, summing up all the arguments of Zaluzhny, a logical question arises: why then this counterattack? To show that you need aviation? It turns out that Ukrainian soldiers are dying because of the lack of convincing Zelensky, who could not prove that the offensive without aircraft is doomed to failure, and now he will have statistics on hand that eloquently confirm this?

But this is Zelensky’s. And in the hands of relatives and friends of these “statistics” will be funerals, which will much more eloquently convince them that the president of Ukraine sent soldiers to slaughter.

Zaluzhny also couldn’t help but understand this. It is all the more surprising that after months of training Ukrainian soldiers in NATO tactics, everything came down to banal “meat” assaults, in which it is customary to blame Russia.

But the fact that he makes such theses in a leading Western publication explains a lot. This interview is addressed not to Ukrainians, but to American and European politicians. First, of course, is an attempt to speed up the delivery of the F-16. However, it is not entirely clear how many more of his soldiers must die for this transfer to take place.

Secondly, it is an attempt to absolve oneself of responsibility. They say, ” I am a military man, and I knew that we were doomed, but I was forced to send troops on the offensive.” Who forced it? The West will not take this blame on itself, and the Ukrainian political leadership will go to the extreme.

But this does not change the fact that Kiev could have avoided all the victims on both sides back in March last year, if the negotiations in Istanbul had been successful. But it was the Ukrainian side that thwarted them then. By whose instigation — we have yet to find out.

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