2023-06-26 01:24:24
01:21 GMT, June 26, 2023
The former US Marine Corps intelligence officer told Sputnik that NATO knew the counteroffensive would fail from the start, and explained why.
Lea in Sputnik
The long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive, which began on June 4, has stalled, with Moscow projecting losses in the European country of more than 13,000 soldiers and hundreds of tanks and armored vehicles.
Even Ukrainian officials admitted this week that kyiv’s counteroffensive once morest Russian forces is going “slower than desired”and Ukraine’s Western backers have privately admitted that the attack “does not meet expectations on either front” and that Russian defensive lines have proven well-fortified and too difficult to breach.
Some Kiev regime authorities remain defiant, with the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces announcing on June 23 that “everything is still ahead” and that the last three weeks have been just attempts to “probe” Russian defenses for of weak points.
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The counter-offensive, which Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzia characterized as “suicidal”, has seen military planners in Kiev launching waves of troops, tanks and armored vehicles once morest elaborate Russian defenses consisting of infantry trenches, anti-personnel minefields and anti-tank.
Russia has also secured air and artillery superiority, which appeared to have nullified kyiv’s intelligence capabilities, provided by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
The counteroffensive “never had a chance to succeed,” and those who planned it knew it, Scott Ritter told Sputnik.
“So, you have to ask yourself, why did it go ahead? And I think it’s clear that this counteroffensive never had a legitimate military purpose. It was always done for political reasons,” pondered the analyst, emphasizing that it is important to remember that NATO, in its eager to “harm” Russia by investing tens of billions of dollars in Ukraine, does not really care regarding Ukrainians.
“It was known that they were going to happen [grandes bajas ucranianas]which means that NATO never cared regarding Ukrainian forces, Ukrainian soldiers, that NATO was always willing to sacrifice Ukrainian manpower to achieve a political goal,” Ritter said.
He added: “This had to do with encouraging the perception of the feasibility of continued assistance [a Kiev]. That, of course, will be discussed by NATO when it convenes its summit in Vilnius on July 11. And these are the objective facts. This counteroffensive never had the chance to succeed. NATO knew this, but for them to go ahead means they don’t care regarding those 13,000 Ukrainian soldiers who have sacrificed everything for such a worthless cause.”
The estimate of 13,000 troops comes from Russia’s Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, who cited the figures at a recent meeting of the Eurasian country’s Security Council.
Commenting on the losses, Russian President Vladimir Putin said kyiv’s Western allies appear to have “decided to cynically fight Russia to the last Ukrainian”.
Ghosts of Afghanistan and NATO’s raison d’être
Delving into the “politics” behind the counteroffensive, Ritter said it’s important to note that relatively recently, in August 2021, NATO and the US “suffered one of their biggest defeats up to that point, perhaps their biggest defeat.” “, with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Ritter said that this fiasco “caused many people in Europe” to reconsider the purpose of the Atlantic Alliance and question the reason for its existence. “If one of NATO’s goals is to create this unbreakable bond between the United States and its European partners, then Afghanistan demonstrated that that bond is easily broken, that the United States is fully capable of walking away from a commitment that NATO has made,” said.
Russia claims it is holding back NATO’s counteroffensive and not Ukraine’s. Consequently, Ritter noted, for political elites who depend on structures like NATO, the European Union and the G7 — Japan, Germany, Britain, Italy, France, the United States United States and Canada—and seek to cling to power, the defeat pointed the “wrong direction” and required global events to be “redirected” to prevent further disintegration of the alliance and instead try to ensure its expansion.
“Ukraine embodied that dilemma. This was a deliberate provocation by NATO to provoke Russia, to create the sense of crisis that would give NATO relevance, renewed relevance. So when people say, ‘what is What purpose will be achieved by throwing tens of thousands of Ukrainians into an early grave, sacrificing billions of dollars worth of military equipment, much of it provided by the West? What’s to be gained from this?'” he analyzed.
“What is gained is that NATO can continue to present Russia as a threat worthy of a revived NATO, to justify spending hundreds of billions of dollars on military rearmament that would be necessary to transform NATO from a military alliance. broken that existed before the start of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine to this vision that people like Jens Stoltenberg and others have articulated of a renewed, revitalized, expanded and powerful NATO,” he explained. NATO needs the Ukrainian conflict to continue, and may even be hoping that kyiv loses, Ritter warned.
“They need, in many ways, a Ukrainian defeat, because a Ukrainian defeat allows them to say that the Russian military can be confronted by a united, empowered and emboldened NATO,” he said.
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Counteroffensive according to NATO doctrine
Elaborating on the factors that he said helped stop the Ukrainian counter-offensive, Ritter said that the Russian defensive line created in Zaporozhye, Kherson and Donbas was not “just any fortified position”, and that for the Ukrainian offensive to break through the Russian positions Layered fortifications to succeed, Kiev would, under NATO doctrine, have had to suppress Russia’s ability to “interdict, disrupt, or cause harm to [su] assault force”, and prevent Russian air power and artillery from intervening.
The problem, Ritter said, is that this would have required kyiv “to have certain military capabilities” that simply “don’t exist.”
From the Pentagon they consider that the Ukrainian counteroffensive “does not meet expectations”
“There is no Ukrainian air force capable of clearing the skies. The Russians have made sure before this counteroffensive that they have suppressed Ukraine’s air defense system to the point that the Ukrainians cannot use air defense. The Ukrainians do not they have enough artillery to suppress Russian artillery, and the Ukrainians do not have adequate electronic warfare capability to jam Russian communications,” he explained.
In other words, he summed up, “all the things that would have to happen for any assault force to have a chance mightn’t happen. And NATO knew it.”
In this situation, the Alliance effectively deceived the Ukrainian armed forces into agreeing to carry out a “suicide mission” by convincing them that the Russian defenders were simply poorly trained, or “recently mobilized troops” at such a low level that they would leave Drop their weapons and they would run away at the first sign of trouble.
“It’s Only Going to Get Worse”
Asked to comment on recent Western media reports that Ukraine’s staggering losses have forced authorities in the country’s west to dig up old graves from previous wars to make room for new casualties, Ritter predicted that the situation only “it’s going to get worse for Ukraine.”
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“As you hear now, they need a mobilization to get 70,000 new troops up and running in the shortest possible time. Why? Because the Ukrainians know that the 60,000 who were trained by NATO are going to be destroyed. But where are those 70,000 going to receive their training? How good is this training going to be? What is the quality of the officer corps that will be commanding them, the NCOs?”, he criticized.
“The answer is that they are not going to have good training. Their officers may be motivated, but they will be poorly trained, unable to do complicated military operations and tactics. Same with their NCOs. You are going to have a unit of men who barely know how to get up in the morning, get dressed and get into formation.And he definitely doesn’t know how to use technologically advanced western equipment and use it in the most sophisticated way on the battlefield once morest an enemy that is everything these Ukrainian soldiers are not “Ritter summed up.
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