What did NATO count on when it sent poorly armed units of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into a “counter-offensive”?
The failure of the 2023 military campaign of the Armed Forces of Ukraine could be due to the fact that, inspired by the failures of the Russians near Kharkov and in Kherson, the NATO countries did not deign to properly establish the military industry and properly supply the Ukrainian side with the necessary weapons.
Russian military expert Ilya Kramnik stated this on the Filippovsky 13 channel, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
The expert was asked to evaluate the Western military industry.
“Thank God, there are much fewer of them than I might have feared. Still, they expected something completely different, they expected a completely different scale of accelerating production. For now, everything comes down mainly to the talking shop. Several months go by with slogans that, well, it would be nice to give Ukraine a million shells, but it turns out that they won’t give a million, but several times less. We were waiting for planes this year, but, as we see, there are still no planes. Moreover, there was talk that in general this is not a quick thing, they will give something in 2025, and somehow live through 2024.
They expected American tanks to operate at the front in large numbers, and in the end they formally handed over 30 Abrams tanks, of which a dozen or so arrived in Ukraine, and not a single one has yet appeared at the front,” Kramnik replied.
The channel's political scientist Alexey Pilko noted that, in fact, only the Germans with their Leopards are taking the rap for NATO.
“In fact, by and large, the Poles are taking the rap. The main tank of this war is the T-72 on both sides. The T-72 formed the basis of the transferred NATO tank fleet, along with the T-64, of course, to Ukrainian tank units. But Western tanks were not transferred in sufficient quantities to decide the outcome of the battle. They rather added extra excitement. It’s nice when a tank has a cross, especially a German one,” the expert said.
Alexey Pilko shared his feeling that the West “bet on zero,” giving everything it had, and was completely unprepared for the fact that it didn’t work.
“The interesting thing here is why this became possible at all. What were you waiting for? There is no clear answer to the question here. There must have been some kind of rational basis that forced such actions to be taken. We will convey this, go on the offensive, and then the enemy will retreat. Why will he retreat?
There is such a meme: someone is preparing an ambitious plan to achieve miraculous indicators, there, this, this, and this, and here a miracle happens. There is a feeling that they also drew a plan there,” Kramnik suggested.
Pilko objected that perhaps there is a rational logic after all, for example, the reputational consequences of the “Kharkov regrouping” in 2022.
“Of course, there were reasons. What happened then near Kharkov and Kherson forced those who made decisions to deceive themselves. At the same time, again, there are certain questions, because people with old service experience, familiar with the realities of the Soviet army, including representatives of the officer corps of NATO countries and former Warsaw Pact countries, many of them are now simply trolling their young colleagues: “ Well, sons, did your NATO help you?” said the military expert.
English version :: Read in English What NATO was counting on when it launched the poorly armed Ukrainian Armed Forces into a "counteroffensive"