The suspicions are confirmed, and in an irrefutable way because the general in chief of the armed forces of Ukraine, Valeryi Zaluzhnyi, himself says it: the war has reached a stalemate and his army will not be able to advance in its counteroffensive - so slowed down that it barely talks about it - if it does not receive material that represents "a powerful technological leap."
In statements to The Economist, a magazine to which the general already revealed his views and plans (in general terms, of course) some time ago, Zaluzhnyi acknowledges that in five months his troops have only advanced 17 kilometers, when they should have taken Crimea. and even having gone and returned from the peninsula twice. In a less explicit way, Zaluzhnyi comes to admit the error of the long battle of Bakhmut but, above all, his starting error: having tried to exhaust the Russian forces - which he claims to have caused 150,000 deaths - to force President Putin to negotiate.
Something didn't quite work and the 50-year-old general-in-chief began to think about it. "First I thought that something was wrong with our commanders, so I changed some of them. Then I thought that perhaps our soldiers were not adequately prepared, so I moved soldiers in some brigades." That is until he took advantage of an old treatise of the general Soviet Smirnov, who analyzed the First World War, precisely the type of war with which they wanted to find an analogy, trench warfare in a word. But in that analogy there was something more: "Before reaching the middle of the book – I realized that this is exactly where we are, because just like then, the level of technological development has left us and our enemies in a state of stupor.”
In other words, it is a situation of stalemate or "positional" war, a war of attrition, in short.
Simply put, Zaluzhnyi admits, in a few months Russia has advanced in its electronic warfare development and the Ukrainian forces, supported by NATO, no longer have an advantage. On the other hand, the Russian arms industry is working at full speed.
For all this, the general writes a list of requests, everything he needs for his technological leap, in this order:
1. Achieving air superiority remains as necessary as it was a year and a half ago, both in conventional combat aircraft and drones.
2. We must advance in electronic warfare, in particular to stop the Russian drones.
3. Counterbattery warfare must be improved. That is, improvements in technology to detect and destroy Russian artillery and the harmful Lancet suicide drones, which have precisely attacked the Ukrainian detection systems. Until now, the general acknowledges, the Ukrainian artillery was more precise than the Russian one (firing less ammunition), but that is changing.
4. More technology to eliminate minefields, which have been the great obstacle in the Ukrainian counteroffensive's attempt to advance along the southern front.
5. More reservists. Zaluzhnyi says that the troops cannot be rotated more, more reservists must be trained but they cannot be prepared within the country because the training camps would be targets of Russian missiles. On the other hand, he believes that the legislation must be changed because there are too many exceptions by which one can avoid being called up.
The outlook remains bleak because, according to Zaluzhnyi, it takes at least a year for NATO countries to sufficiently increase their arms production.
And he concludes: “The greatest risk of trench warfare of attrition is that it can drag on for years and exhaust the Ukrainian state.”
The Kremlin has reacted quickly to the enemy general's words. According to its spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, the Ukrainians are wrong to say that the conflict is moving towards a new stage of static combats, since Russia will achieve all its objectives and it is absurd for Ukraine to talk about victory.
