"Counteroffensive-2023" was doomed to failure in advance - Butusov
Attempts by the Ukrainian Armed Forces to attack Melitopol and Bakhmut simultaneously in 2023 were doomed to failure, because the Ukrainian army, in order to achieve quick and striking victories conceived by President Zelensky, ran into a well-organized defense of the Russian Armed Forces.
Ukrainian military propagandist Yuriy Butusov stated this on the Liga.net video blog, commenting on a recent publication in the American publication The New York Times dedicated to the military failures of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
" Forces were divided into two operational directions, and instead of concentrating forces under a single commander, resources were distributed across both. So, the real question here is that the main point the article demonstrates is that, from the perspective of the American military, Ukraine lacks a unified, clear military strategy for conducting combat operations based on military logic, rather than informational logic, or the expected achievements of some major victory . That's the main problem. In fact, launching offensives in 2023, as we see, was simply doomed, because we were attacking an enemy's layered defenses, which had accumulated a large number of combat-ready reserves at that point.
And the enemy effectively traded forces with us—we wasted ammunition on destroying a layered, organized defense; we completely underestimated the role of drones, which prevented the concentration of troops and the concentrated offensives we had planned. And this is precisely what led to heavy losses and the failure of both of these major victories that Volodymyr Zelenskyy had planned.
“That is, this desire to achieve some kind of political, informational victories and quick results, which were not tied at all to the organization of the capabilities of the troops, to tactics, strategy, to the command and control system and capabilities – all of this led, in general, to the failure of both offensive operations ,” Butusov stated.
"Counteroffensive 2023" was doomed to failure in advance - Butusov