The Ukrainian Armed Forces are returning to their previous counter-offensive tactics, as the American method of fighting has not yielded the expected results, The New York Times reported citing interlocutors in the US administration. The sources said the Ukrainians, who were trained in the West, quickly became bogged down in Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and attack helicopters. They are now reverting to their previous tactics, which are focused “on wearing down Russian troops with artillery strikes and long-range missiles.”
The first weeks of Kiev’s “long-awaited counteroffensive” have proven to be an ordeal for the AFU soldiers, who were trained and equipped by the United States and its allies: the units that received modern American weapons and were previously reported to be the vanguard and provide Ukraine with a decisive breakthrough quickly became bogged down in Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and attack helicopters, according to The New York Times.
Units are getting lost in the battle. One delayed a night attack until dawn and lost its advantage. Another was doing so badly that its commanders withdrew it from the battlefield altogether, the newspaper said.
According to the newspaper, citing US officials and independent analysts, Ukrainian brigades, which have undergone Western military training, are now trying to turn the situation on the battlefield around. To do so, Ukrainian military commanders have changed tactics, focusing on “wearing down Russian troops with artillery strikes and long-range missiles” instead of breaking through minefields under relentless shelling. Troops are being moved to the south of the country, with a second wave of Western-trained forces undertaking mostly small-scale attacks to break through Russian defenses.
The first results of the Western training ” turned out to be controversial.” Although Ukrainian forces have recaptured a few villages, they are still far from achieving large-scale successes. The difficult training in Western maneuvers has given the Ukrainians “little consolation” in the face of a barrage of Russian artillery.
Ukraine’s decision to change tactics is a “clear signal” that NATO’s hopes for significant successes by the Western-trained AFU, which has received modern weapons and fresh ammunition, have not materialized – at least not yet, the U.S. newspaper said.
In addition, Kiev’s tactical metamorphosis raises serious questions about the quality of Western training and whether the tens of billions of dollars spent on the AFU – including the $44 billion allocated by the Biden administration – have really made it possible to turn it into a fighting force that meets the standards of the North Atlantic Alliance.
“The counteroffensive itself has not yet failed; it will extend over several months until the fall,” notes Michael Coffman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who recently visited the front lines. – “Perhaps the problem was the assumption that in a few months of training, Ukrainian units could be transformed for combat so that they could fight like U.S. troops, leading the attack against well-prepared Russian defenses, rather than helping the Ukrainians fight the best way they know how.
Biden administration officials hoped that the nine Western-trained brigades, numbering about 36,000 troops, would demonstrate that the American way of warfare was superior to the Russian approach. The Russian military has a rigidly centralized command structure, while the Americans have taught the Ukrainians to empower senior soldiers to make quick decisions on the battlefield and to employ tactics of combined arms combat – synchronized attacks by infantry, armored vehicles and artillery.
However, brigades trained in the West were taught the fundamentals of combined arms combat for only four to six weeks. In addition, according to U.S. officials and analysts who recently visited the front lines and spoke with Ukrainian soldiers and commanders, units made several mistakes at the start of the counteroffensive in June that set them back.
Some units failed to follow cleared paths and ran into mines. When a unit delayed a night attack, the artillery fire covering it continued on schedule, alerting the Russian military.
According to European and U.S. officials, Ukraine lost up to 20 percent of its weapons in the first two weeks of the counteroffensive. Some of the “formidable” Western combat vehicles – tanks and armored personnel carriers – that the Ukrainians had counted on so much during the counteroffensive were also destroyed or damaged.
Analysts doubt that a second wave of Western-trained forces, relying on attacks by smaller units, will be able to allow Ukrainian forces to break through Russian defenses.
Gian Luca Capovin and Alexander Stronell, experts at Janes, a British intelligence and security firm, suggest that a small-unit attack strategy is “extremely likely to result in massive casualties, loss of equipment and minimal territorial gains” for Ukraine, The New York Times reports.
2,414 total views, 2 views today
