Ukraine: from the horse’s mouth

By Richard North - April 26, 2022

The Meduza magazine (which calls itself the real Russia Today) has interviewed at length Oleksiy Arestovych, a Ukrainian presidential adviser. He also, in a past life, describes himself as a blogger, actor, political and military columnist, after having served as an officer in the Intelligence Directorate of the Ukraine Ministry of Defence.

In the interview, Arestovych is asked to cover a wide range of subjects, and all of his input – from the horse’s mouth, so to speak – is worth careful study.

Amongst other things, he was asked to comment on the Russian army problems during the invasion. Responding, he said, the Russian army is the Soviet army at its worst. It had relied on the Soviet offensive concept, using special forces and paratroopers thrown behind enemy lines to sow panic. It is a tactic of shock and awe to cause the authorities to panic and flee, to destroy the control and communication centres.

But when the attack at Gostomel failed, there were huge problems for the Russian army. You can’t attack a 250,000-strong army with a 200,000-strong army, Arestovych says, but exactly this happened.

This could only work if we had psychologically collapsed, and a significant part of our population had gone over to their side, he says. But the Russians got it wrong, forecasting that the Ukrainians would meet them with flowers and so on.

Those who did not know what to be afraid of kept the situation under control: they calmly fired on Russian tanks and shot down planes. If we were a centralised country that had not carried out Western-style reforms, I think we would have lost.

But we remained in our beloved Ukrainian mess, and no one knew that it was impossible to fight without an order from the central government. And when we had already restored control and stopped being afraid, on the third or fifth day, everything went very well.

Arestovych recalls the huge columns of Russian troops near Kiev. They looked extremely impressive. He admits that even he, a professional military man observing this situation, thought: “God, how many of you are there”. It was just crazy, he says. Phone messages read: a column of 200, 300, 350, 400 units is moving – in a continuous stream. He thought that with all our courage, we would not be able to hold it.

Then, he says, I realised that with the number of troops that they brought near Kiev, they simply clogged their own roads. “They stood in a continuous column of 20-30 kilometres and could not pass, because we blew up the bridges. They tried to a pontoon crossing, we covered them, continuously covered them. Plus special forces wings. The partisans fired on the columns”.

And the feast of disobedience began. The Russian system is highly centralised. They perform a task only when there is an iron will of an older commander. They shied away in a huge stupid mass, it was so spectacular. Covering with our artillery – bang, smoke, explosions. Look, they arrive at the same place six hours later in a new column – exactly the same place. Our gunners fired again, the second column was burned. And so five or six times a month.

What is the Russian way to fight? You drive out to a crossroads, there are 60-90 units of burned-out equipment, corpses are lying around or torn pieces – and you still drive out and stand there. The shells fly over you, but you still stand. Because the authorities from the headquarters in Moscow told me to go to this intersection, and they go there stupidly over and over again. They are terribly over-centralised.

Many say they started the war wrong, Arestovych concludes, but in his view they started right. It’s just that this war was designed for the type of hostilities where we give up and raise our paws in three days. But we didn’t raise them.

What is then especially interesting are Arestovych’s comments on the progress of the current battle for Donbass, which is just getting underway. Russian forces, he says, are on the offensive quite actively but the problem for them is “unfavourable terrain”.

Their forces, he says, are not enough to decisively win and, in the Izyum area, they are trying to squeeze 25,000 troops down five forest roads. The area is criss-crossed with ravines, beaten railway tracks and crossings. There are numerous structures with long concrete channels which have the effect of anti-tank ditches. Furthermore, it has rained in the area for almost two weeks. The fields are soggy and impassable,

This is no more or less than I have been writing for many days, in blogposts such as this and in numerous interventions in the comments, contradicting the great sages who are telling us that the “open terrain” in Donbass is more suited to the the Russian heavy armour and artillery.

Unfortunately, Google “street view” doesn’t cover the area, but it does produce a number of photographs of the area south of Izyum where the fighting is currently located. It have reproduced one of these, showing one of the roads on the edge of the forest (above). You want to take tanks down that? Good luck.

Arestovych notes that, ranged against the Russians are “our most combat-ready units”. They are heavy mechanised infantry and tank units, which have been standing there for eight years. They know the area perfectly; they are angry and motivated.

For the Russian troops, he says, this is a hopeless situation. It was a crazy idea from the very beginning to conduct an operation there. From a military point of view, it was not needed: it was purely a political decision to occupy the entire Luhansk and Donetsk regions and declare victory.

For this task, the Russians have now mobilised their penultimate operational reserves. There are also about 15 thousand troops in the Belgorod-Valuyek region. But, he adds, these are the unfortunate ones who came out from under Kyiv, Sumy and Chernigov – “they have the psychology of the executed”. They really don’t want to fight.

Because of the tempo of the fighting, the ammunition expenditure and the losses incurred by the Russians, Arestovych believes the current offensive will only last two or three weeks, no more. This does not mean, he says, that the fighting will stop completely. Simply, that this active offensive will stop come to an end, as he doesn’t know where new reserves will come from.

To prepare them, you need at least a month, or even two. During this time, a lot of things will happen. And the sanctions will begin to take effect, and something will happen internationally, and the Ukraine forces will be greatly strengthened during this time.

Russia, in his view, “has nowhere to strengthen itself”. There is little ammunition left, and few troops left either. We see some attempts at mobilisation, he says, when people without a military education are taken to officer positions. But “when old tanks of the 1960s, old armoured personnel carriers and an old artillery gun drive by, it becomes clear that you won’t really fight with this”.

This is the first time I have seen this in print, expressed so directly, other than in this blog, where we commented about the “antiques roadshow”. The geriatric nature of the Russian army was one of the reasons why we thought it wasn’t going to invade. As Arestovych says, “you won’t really fight with this”.

Asked on the prospect of reaching a peace agreement with Moscow, Arestovych dismisses the idea, as long as the fighting is in progress. In this, he thinks that the Russians may even achieve partial success but then the two sides “will exhaust each other”. However, while the Russians have nowhere to get help, the Ukrainian forces have artillery and everything else that the Western countries are giving us.

In addition, he observes, a war that has entered a positional phase is more profitable for us. We are on our own land. Partisans work for us, nature works for us, and the West helps us. The Russians will have to stand still and supply their army in a territory that does not like them very much.

Now, he says, they hold a line of about 1200 kilometres in length from Kherson to Kharkov (there is a shorter distance in a straight line, but the line is uneven). And they have 90,000 troops for everything about everything. It is impossible to hold such a line without rears.

Again, this is a highly pertinent observation which has rarely been made elsewhere. Readers may recall my comments here where I noted that the entire Western Front in WWI ran roughly 760 km from Belgium to the borders of Switzerland. During that conflict, 15.9 million allied soldiers served on that front, against 13.2 million from the central powers.

This puts into perspective Arestovych’s own comments. “Do you know that behind the backs of the Russian troops, except for the most key ones, there are no settlements, there is not a single Russian soldier?”, he says, adding:

If we pierce this line, we can go further to the Crimea. They will now spend their reserves, weaken, and we have a green zone further: our partisans, special operations forces will go to cut them in the bushes. This madness will continue for another month or two, because we will simply kill everyone, destroy all their troops.

It is clear, he says, that they can hold Crimea, because there are well-established supply routes, there is no Ukrainian resistance there, and our artillery has not reached it yet But in all the territories that were captured after 23 February, they are in big trouble.

They have nowhere from which they can call in reserves. It is possible to call up people in Russia, but how to arm them, how to feed them? They are not in the game, where you can just buy a thousand soldiers. Therefore, Arestovych concludes, the Russians have one way out – negotiations.

After two, maximum three weeks, the active phase of the hostilities will fade. By 9 May, the Russians will announce some intermediate victories, saying that the task has been completed. Then they will offer to enter into negotiations.

At that point they will start shouting loudly that they have defended the people of Donbass, that they never had anything against Ukraine – forgetting their words that they were going to denazify us in 72 hours.

Here, Arestovych thinks the question is: will we go to negotiations or not. Because the people demand from us – to fight, destroy them and drive them out of our land. If only the negotiations are successful … but our position is very tough, I don’t know if Russia will agree to it.

If they don’t, he says, it will be a positional war – with artillery strikes and special forces raids, small and tactical. It will not be a “we will capture everything in 72 hours” type of war, but a war for a crossroads, for a specific hut.

Russia will try to accumulate more reserves, periodically to undertake some kind of semi-offensive. And somewhere by the end of August they may try to attack somewhere else. It will be like the operation in the east which has been going on since 2014, only on an even smaller scale.

If this cycle fails, the Russians will try to build up more strength. Sometime in October there will be another attempt. Then everything depends on how the sanctions will work, whether new ones will be introduced, and how Western aid will go to Ukraine. So the war may go until the New Year.

Arestovych stresses that is must be understood that this will no longer be an active war. Mostly it will be trench warfare with rare, sporadic attempts to capture positions along the front line. But all future operations will still be less than this one.

This is perhaps the perpetual state of war that I wrote about recently. Over term. we will see whether it comes to pass.