Ukraine's Top General Asking NATO for ‘Wunderwaffe’ to Forestall Defeat

Ukrainian Armed Forces Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhny admitted this week that there will be no “breakthrough” in Ukraine’s blood-soaked counteroffensive this year, and complained that info gleaned from “NATO textbooks” doesn’t match up with reality. Sputnik queried veteran geopolitics expert Mark Sleboda for his take on Zaluzhny’s arguments.

A senior official from the office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has slammed top Commander Valerii Zaluzhny over his comments to British business media this week disparaging Ukraine’s counteroffensive and demanding new superweapons from NATO.

In a TV interview on Friday, presidential deputy chief Igor Zhovkva excoriated Zaluzhny for opening his mouth, and expressed concerns about how his remarks will be seen by Kiev’s Western patrons.

“If I were the military, I think the last thing I would be doing is commenting for the press, for the open public, on what is taking place at the front, what could happen at the front, various options [for operations],” Zhovkva said. “I received a call from one of the heads of the offices of the leaders [of Ukraine’s partners, ed.], and they, in a panic, asked: ‘what should I report to my leader? Are you really in a dead end?’ Is this the effect that we wanted from this article?” the official complained.

In the offending piece, Zaluzhny compared the conflict with Russia to World War I-style trench warfare, and suggested that current state of technology has made “a deep and beautiful breakthrough” virtually impossible.

“The biggest risk of an attritional trench war is that it can drag on for years and wear down the Ukrainian state,” and Kiev could reach a point where it realizes “that we simply don’t have enough people to fight,” Zaluzhny said. Furthermore, the “NATO’s textbooks” and calculations by Kiev for the summer counteroffensive ran headfirst into hardened Russian defenses, with plans to reach Crimea and take Crimea failing utterly to materialize.

Zaluzhny’s interview served to undercut Zelensky’s own comments to US media this week, in which the somber Ukrainian president complained about the West’s “exhaustion” from and loss of interest in the Ukrainian crisis, and suggested that Americans and Europeans see the conflict as “a rerun” of “a show” that they’ve already watched multiple times before. At the same time, Zelensky again rejected the idea of a peace deal, or even a truce, saying that “for us it would mean leaving this wound open for future generations.”

An anonymous aid told the same US outlet that the Zelensky has become "delusional," refusing to recognize that Ukraine is “out of options” and “not winning.”

'Unrepentant Fascist Lionized by the West'

Zaluzhny “has been heroized and lionized by the Western media,” international relations and security analyst Mark Sleboda told Sputnik. “The Economist has had him on the cover, before [that] Time has had him on the cover. In fact there’s a lot of evidence that the West is actually seeking next year to replace Zelensky with Zaluzhny as the president of the Kiev regime.”

“The man is an open, unrepentant Banderite fascist. He has released images of his office. In his office, he has two busts and a poster featuring Stepan Bandera, the World War II-era Nazi collaborator and fascist ideologue who led the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army to fight alongside, often in the ranks of the SS with Nazi Germany and commit the Holocaust and atrocities against Jews, but also atrocities against Poles, against leftists, against ethnic Russians, against east Ukrainians who didn’t want a Banderite fascist Ukraine…And he also has a bust of Roman Shukhevych [another top Ukrainian Insurgent Army leader, ed.]. That’s because one bust of Bandera is not enough,” the observer quipped.

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi poses with his fellow commanders alongside busts of Ukrainian WWII-era Nazi collaborators, as well as red and black flags echoing that of the collaborationist Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

© Photo : Social media

Zaluzhny’s affinity for Bandera and Shukhevych tells Sleboda that this is not just a case of “a few bad apples in the ranks of the military,” or the Azov Brigade. “No, it’s their top general, it’s their Rada, it’s through in and throughout, with Zelensky putting medals on them,” he said.

In an article accompanying his interview with British media, Zaluzhny detailed what Ukraine’s armed forces would need “to win the war,” citing the importance of new technologies and more troops in a “positional” conflict against Moscow.

“Basically he says 'what we need to win this war is we need a real wunderwaffe, a real miracle new future weapon technology,' and that 'that is the only thing that will allow us to win this war,'” Sleboda said. “Basically this is what Nazi Germany counted on to win World War II, when its military industrial capacity was outstretched by the Allies and in manpower as well. It was hoping for some type of, you know, their V2 rockets, their Leopard tanks of the day and so forth [to] win the war for them. And this is what [Zaluzhny] is counting on.”

Pointing to Zaluzhny’s requirement of air superiority, Sleboda stressed that “there’s no way that the West is going to give the Kiev regime enough aircraft” to counter Russia. “They don’t have enough unless all of NATO committed all of their aircraft to a direct air war against Russia over Ukraine, and even though, I dunno, Russia’s air defense is looking pretty strong, and some of these new air-to-air missiles that they’ve deployed, like the R-37M, yeah, good luck with that. So that’s impossible.”

Zaluzhny went on to admit Russian superiority in electronic warfare and counter-artillery capability, suggesting this is what Kiev needs to achieve. “He says they need new mine-breaching technology, because the technology that NATO provided them to breach the mines isn’t doing the job. First of all also by far [there is] not enough of it,” Sleboda noted, pointing to fantastical requests for things like “plasma boring machines” to dig underneath Russian minefields.

“I have to admit that in all of the post-Soviet countries…there is a love of science fiction that even surpasses all but the most hardened of Trekkers and Star Wars fans and far more serious science fiction in the US… But Zaluzhny basically seems to be living in a science fiction novel now at this point,” the observer suggested.

Rounding out Zaluzhny’s demands for even further mobilization, Sleboda suggested that “if you read between the lines of the specific things he’s saying, what he needs to win this war is Russia’s military…So good luck with that, because all of NATO cannot buy you Russia’s military for this conflict. The Kiev regime has now lost their third army in this conflict. And NATO does not have the ability to build them a fourth one.”

Sleboda also challenged Zaluzhny’s characterization of the conflict to date as a “stalemate.”

“It’s not a stalemate. And The New York Times has admitted as much even before Russia launched their major offensive in the last two, four, six weeks. The New York Times ran an article where they said ‘no one is gaining any ground this year,’ and then deep in the article they admit that even before Russia launched its counteroffensive that Russia had gained 200 km…So it is not a stalemate. It is a war of attrition. Russia has said it was a war of attrition from the beginning, and they can win a war of attrition. Why? Because they do have more people, they do have a functioning military-industrial complex, and the West, all of NATO together, according to The New York Times, is outproduced by seven times in the most basic things needed to win a war of attrition, like artillery shells,” Sleboda summed up.