Ukraine’s Western Weapons Will 'Stop Firing’ in Cold Weather - Expert

Ukrainian soldiers have to grapple with a whole array of problems pertaining to military equipment, logistics and everyday life while at the frontline, Russian military expert and retired Colonel Anatoliy Matviychuk told Sputnik.

The Ukrainian Army enters the second winter of its armed conflict with Russian forces trying to tackle the biting cold, mud and an invasion of mice in the trenches and dugouts.

Ukraine has already lost its Soviet- and Russian-made equipment, which is fully designed to operate in northern areas with low temperatures, Anatoliy Matviychuk, a military expert and retired colonel, told Sputnik. According to him, such equipment was fitted with special heaters for the cold snap.

Nonetheless, Western military equipment is not designed for such scenarios, he explained.

"The military hardware that has entered into service with the Ukrainian Army, [including the US-made M1 Abrams tanks], is specifically designed to run in a tropical climate and it should be kept away from the cold. Have you noticed that the Abrams tanks do not appear on the battlefield? They are suitable neither for winter nor for swamps. They have rubber rollers and tracks, which is why they glide on the ice. While the Russian T-90 tanks break the ice and are capable of moving in any area, the M1s cannot do so because they slide," the Russian expert said.

He suggested that as with last year, the 2023-24 winter could see Ukrainian soldiers face the same problems pertaining to their military equipment being affected by severe weather conditions.

"The knobs in the guns will stop working, the tanks and combat vehicles will stop starting, and the weapons that the West supplied to Kiev will stop firing," Matviychuk said, adding that the Ukrainians had failed to learn lessons from last winter.

When asked what other factors are of importance to soldiers at the frontline, he mentioned the supply of medicine and food, as well as the replenishment of personnel and sanitary and the epidemiological situation.

"As far as I understand, the sanitary and epidemiological situation in the Ukrainian Army is complicated, with many soldiers receiving some strange vaccinations from Western doctors," the expert said. Commenting on the fact that an array of Ukrainian troops suffer from measles, he hinted that doctors may be conducting biological experiments on these soldiers.

Matviychuk also touched upon the problem of mice invading Ukrainian trenches, recalling that these animals spread a spate of infectious diseases, including tularemia.

He said that to tackle the issue, it’s necessary to carry out special measures against the vermin, which stipulate withdrawing Ukrainian soldiers from trenches or dugouts on a temporary basis. “This is quite problematic” given the deployment of Russian drones over Ukrainian positions, according to the expert.

His remarks come after the Ukrainian Army’s Сommander-in-Сhief General Valery Zaluzhny admitted in an exclusive interview with the UK's Economist magazine earlier this month that Kiev needs to take a massive technological leap to break the current stalemate in its counteroffensive against Russian troops.

“There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” he said, adding that “NATO’s textbooks” and “the math” that Kiev did to plan the counteroffensive had failed to prevent Russian forces from effectively tackling Ukrainian troops.

Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin called Kiev’s summer counteroffensive attempt a total failure, not just a stalemate, which he said cost the lives of more than 90,000 Ukrainian soldiers and led to the loss of over 500 Ukrainian tanks, including the much-hyped German-made Leopard-2s.

Shortly after Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine, the US and its allies stepped up their military supplies to Kiev. Moscow has repeatedly warned that NATO countries are "playing with fire" by supplying arms to the Kiev regime, which the Kremlin said adds to prolonging the conflict. For his part, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has emphasized that any shipment of weapons to Kiev is to be considered a legitimate target for Russian forces.