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Conflitos do Presente / Re: Invasão da Ucrânia
« Última mensagem por Cabeça de Martelo em Hoje às 12:46:57 pm »Citação de: Branislav Slantchev
The former commander of the Russian Ground Forces, General Chirkin, made some rather startling admissions in a live interview:
"There are goals in every war, and in this special military operation, the President of the Russian Federation set the goals of denazification and demilitarization. Any goals are achieved through the solution of a succession of problems -- tactical, operational, and strategic -- which we have been trying to see since the start of this military operation. To be honest, I do not intend to criticize anyone, but I think that Russia, yet again, was not ready for a war, just like it had not been in previous years, in previous centuries. Moreover, we had the traditional underestimation of the opponent and overestimation of our own military.
If you recall, in February 2022, everyone was saying that the war would be over in three days. We will finish them off anytime now. Something like the Tbilisi Syndrome, and the events of the five-days war with Georgia, but unfortunately it did not turn out that way.
I would assign a failing grade to the entire Russian intelligence community. In essence, the country's leadership was given -- I would say -- false information that 70% of the Ukrainian population is with us and 30% is against us. It turned out exactly the opposite: 30 for us and 70 against. [That's actually a wild overestimate as well. If we take the support for Medvedchuk's party OPZZh as an indicator of pro-Russian sentiment throughout 2021 and early 2022, it was between 10% and 14%.]
We all know what this led to: literally during the first few weeks, we were taught a serious harsh lesson, and the former Minister of Defense tried to find a face-saving exit from the situation, calling what was happening a "gesture of goodwill." [This is a key admission as Kremlin shills and Moscow always talk about the withdrawal after the failure to capture Kyiv as if it was done to facilitate negotiations. Note that the General is prevaricating a bit here too: it wasn't Shoigu who called it a "gesture of goodwill" but Kremlin spokesman Peskov, who also explicitly tied it to "creating favorable conditions for negotiations" and said that Putin had ordered the withdrawal for that purpose. I wrote about this on March 28, saying that the need to withdraw must have come from the miltiary, which had realized the original plan had failed, and then the Kremlin had to put a positive spin on it: https://slantchev.wordpress.com/2022/03/28/putin-and-the-generals]
Our army knows how many dead, wounded, and maimed people we left there, and I think that this sorty has not been fully revealed yet. [At this point, the visibly shaken host says, with a breaking voice, "To be honest, I did not expect this turn of events and this sort of frankness at the very beginning of our conversation." He has reason to be fearful: what the General just said would definitely be "discrediting the armed forces" and punishable by lengthy prison time.]"
The only prominent person talking like that used to be everyone's favorite war criminal and Russian imperial doomer Igor Girkin, and even though many milbloggers had been echoing his analyses, this is the first time that I am aware of that an actual General has said the same thing out loud.
He basically confirmed what many of us have been saying all along: Putin was misled by rosy estimates of the prospects of victory and support for Russia among Ukrainians, and made the worst strategic error one can image.
