Zaluzhny's New Op-ed Brings Frontline and Tech Progression Update, Plus Some Grave Admissions
Last week, ex-Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Valery Zaluzhny penned another informative strategic think-piece on the war in Ukraine, that serves as a technological update on his previous piece written in 2023.
You’ll recall the previous one infamously prescribed victory for Ukraine by calling for the flooding of Ukraine with overly-ambitious tech boondoggles like ‘subterranean plasma robots’ which can bypass the drone-imposed ‘no man’s land’ on the topside. I covered the piece at the time:
The new endeavor is understandably much more down to earth—perhaps time has given Zaluzhny critical perspective on the error of his ways in believing that unrealistic pie-in-the-sky ‘wunderwaffen’ and ‘game changers’ will be the key to Ukraine’s salvation.
The new article can be read in full here: https://zn.ua/eng/innovation-as-core-of-strategic-resilience-denying-russia-the-power-to-dictate-terms-through-war.html
First let’s briefly note the symbolic difference in confidence between the new title and that of the first article from 2023. The previous one was called ‘How to Win the War’, while the new one has subtly pruned expectations essentially to: ‘Denying Russia’ the ability to dictate its terms. Going from winning the war outright to merely slowing down Russia’s juggernaut is quite a demotion of realistic objectives.
The article begins with Zaluzhny rhetorically gauging his previous 2023 piece’s foresight:
What, then, has happened in the past two years? Was I right when I argued that today’s war would be so dynamic and so technological? And, most importantly, do we now have any clear sense of what the next two years will bring?
He immediately answers his own question to the negative—that he was wrong on key predictions. He doesn’t say exactly which, but the implication was that he felt Ukraine needed to ‘seize the technological initiative’ (presumably, by way of his various farfetched ideas like the aforementioned plasma bots) and had failed to do so.
However, things turned out differently. But as I explored the exhibition, I realized that I was right about something.
A profound reappraisal of the 2023 summer offensive arose not only from the attempt to turn a most difficult phase of the war into a kind of reality show—first, when our plans somehow reached Russia, and then as the course of the operation was narrated online by would-be prophets, many of whom later found themselves sanctioned or on wanted lists. I still feel the sting of that failure. Yet the essential point was that lessons had to be drawn and strategy had to change, immediately. A strategy for survival in a wholly new kind of war.
He goes on to the portion of the article which has garnered the most controversy in Western circles: his condemnation of the 2023 ‘counteroffensive’ and Kursk debacles as pointless and wasteful operations.
As an aside, it’s interesting what Zaluzhny says about the AFU’s inability to operationally ‘break through’ in 2023:
Breaking such a front required decisive superiority in capabilities at the breach point, together with mobile reserves capable of rapidly entering the created gap and moving into the operational depth before enemy reserves could counterattack or establish a new defensive line. For both objective and subjective reasons we were unable to generate that superiority prior to the assault.
This shortfall in capabilities stemmed chiefly from the dispersal of the already-prepared assault grouping across other axes, and from the creation of land components drawn from other ministries and agencies—which, as a consequence, were, putting it mildly, not fully ready for contemporary combat.
You see, it has been an established narrative that US generals were desperately trying to get Zaluzhny to pile all his army corps into one powerful fist to strike down into Melitopol and Crimea. It was said that Zaluzhny is the one who overrode them on this point, choosing to instead “hedge” his strengths in several different axes, which culminated in the much-farther-east Vremovka ledge line going down toward Staromlinovka. Thus, it’s odd that Zaluzhny here faults what appears to be his own decision as the chief point of failure of the offensive, though he does heap other failures on partners afterwards.
He goes on to rehash the fact that the conflict is a ‘positional stalemate’ due to the inability of operational breakthroughs—a deceptively misleading point, but tailored for the consumption of his audience, and the narrative he’s pushing.
Another interesting point comes when he compares the current conflict to that of US and NATO’s ‘sweeping victories’ of the last few decades:
Interestingly, the major military conflicts of the early 21st century—in Syria, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere—did not culminate in a positional deadlock. This stemmed from two principal reasons.
First, enemy forces were defeated largely through remote air strikes and the employment of precision-guided munitions, specifically air- and sea-launched cruise missiles, supplemented by the manoeuvres of a limited contingent of ground troops.
Second, these wars pitted high-tech armed forces—such as those of the United States and NATO allies—against deliberately weaker adversaries, often scattered remnants of organized Soviet-style armies or irregular partisan formations. In Ukraine, by contrast, Russia faces for the first time in this century a near-peer adversary—high-tech thanks to our partners—though smaller in size and resources.
The experience of our war so far shows that stocks of precision weapons are quickly exhausted. Large-scale air operations are blunted by air defences. And once again, as in the mid-20th century, classical ground combat has returned to the centre of war.
Next, he states something critical, and contradictory: that the positional stalemate approach actually benefits Russia and its unique advantages. This seems contradictory because the designation of ‘stalemate’ implies no advantage on either side.
The problem of positional warfare has revealed another pattern. The transition to positional warfare leads to its prolongation and carries great risks for both the Armed Forces and the state as a whole. In addition, it benefits the enemy, who makes every effort to restore and increase its military power. This may have been the single most important point: without a radical rethink of strategy, success in the field was in jeopardy.
So, this style of warfare actually benefits Russia and brings Ukraine’s ‘success in the field’ into ‘jeopardy’. He correlates this by again implying that the continued development of the current status quo, which he deems a deadend or ‘cul-de-sac’, is ‘predictably unacceptable’ to Ukraine’s prolongation.
It’s like the argument over immovable object versus the unstoppable force—one cannot exist in a universe where the other is a known factor. The simple existence of an ‘unstoppable force’ logically presupposes no ‘immovable object’ exists. Similarly here, how can a ‘stalemate’ exist if the situation is admittedly not in Ukraine’s long term favor?
Zaluzhny is even forced to disclaimer his own ‘apparent’ bias:
I know this hands my opponents another pretext to complain that I study Russia too much—an offence, in their view, while the war continues on. Still, I choose Sun Tzu over my critics: know your enemy.
He elaborates further by describing the current frontline disposition under the drone deadlock:
Today the picture on the battlefield is clear: large concentrations of personnel—even in defence—are no longer tenable. Any massing of troops invites near-instant destruction by FPV strike drones or by artillery adjusted by UAVs. Consequently, defence is organised as dispersed positions held by small groups operating autonomously under extreme strain. The lethal zone is widening: the recent strikes on civilian traffic on the Sloviansk–Izium and Sloviansk–Barvinkove routes illustrate how precision fires now reach deep into what used to be the rear. Naturally, not only are lines of communication wrecked; the very idea of a secure rear is fading, since its customary location behind the forward echelons—anywhere within 40 kilometres—is no longer tenable under persistent enemy fire control. As a result, defence is shifting away from active defense of positions in concert with second echelons, reserves and supporting firepower, toward the bare survival of small units constantly pressed by both remote reconnaissance-strike systems and the enemy’s tactic of swarming attacks by small infantry groups.
The important point he makes here is that one of the main reasons for the current ‘low density’ frontline is that even Ukrainian defense was forced to change its doctrine. Now defense units are pulled back to second echelons or further and only a kind of bare-minimum skeleton garrison is kept on the very first line. This first line acts more as ‘bait’ to draw out Russian troops for Ukrainian drone units on the second line.
Russia itself, however, counteracts this by then attacking in increasingly smaller group sizes to rob these Ukrainian drone teams of kill opportunities. It’s been widely discussed how Russian assaults have whittled down from 5-man teams to now often just 2 and 3-man teams.
Here a Russian frontline analyst shares a recent update on this count, which I’ll break down to comment on:
