It's time for Zelenskyy to go to US and personally ask for ATACMS missiles - Colonel Grant

Kherson is the focus of attention of the whole world, without exaggeration. Military communities, military and political leaderships of many countries are reacting and carefully studying the situation. There have been suggestions that perhaps the Russians are preparing some kind of trap, it is about Kherson, but in any case, we understand that from a physical point of view, from a military point of view, they would not be able to hold the right-bank bridgehead given the current circumstances. But the story is extremely complicated.

 The Ukrainian army, which is doing an unbelievable job at the moment, is capturing weapons and equipment, including artillery. This is really quite significant because it tells you a lot. Because historically, as I’ve said, the artillery has always been the strongest arm of the Russian army, the arm that has worked well. If it means that the artillery is not pulling back properly, like everybody else, then it means that the command in control, the organization of the artillery is also breaking down. And if the artillery is breaking down, then the organization of the infantry and the battalions must be even worse. Because the artillery is actually quite successful in what it’s done so far in this war. Therefore, basically the army is falling apart in front of Kherson. 

People have suggested that this might be a trap, that is another question altogether.

I saw the video address of the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation, a war criminal - Shoigu. He looked like a beaten dog, but in the current situation no one started to criticize him. Prigozhin, Kadyrov begin to praise him and Surovikin. We understand that Russians have a certain strategic plan. Perhaps they really do not want to cling to this military bridgehead, because they understand that they do not have the strength to continue the offensive in the direction of Mykolaiv at the moment, and they are launching many different false signals about the so-called truce. It is clear that the main condition of the ceasefire is the liberation of our temporarily occupied territories, but I am more than sure that at the moment the Russians have a certain military plan.

That is all interesting. The thing that comes to my mind most is that they are losing, and the Ukrainian army is pushing forward. There isn’t any question about this. Russia is losing this war, as it is at the moment. Second, they would not do this unless they have some other intention of doing something else. So what is that intention? The most important thing for Putin at the moment is to buy time. Why does he want to buy time? He has arranged with North Korea to get equipment from it. He wants more missiles from Iran and both of those will take a bit more time for him to come. He needs more time to train mobilized soldiers, as well as to get people across the river in Kherson, because it is a slow process. All he thinks is that he needs time. Obviously, this is a war to the death, this is not the war where he is pulling back, because he wants to, he is doing so, because of strategic reasons.  And that strategic reason is either because he wants the troops to attack somewhere else, where he thinks we are weak, or because he wants to let Ukraine have Kherson and then by more time, to get the international community to say, ‘oo, you’ve got Kherson, let’s have a ceasefire now. I think that is what he is trying to do, because Putin sees this war always in a strategic fashion, probably more international and more strategic than Ukraine does. So Putin is concentrating on how much positive energy he can get for Russia from France, Germany and from other countries. How much from the Putin positive people in the Republican party and some in the White House. How much energy can he squeeze out of them by giving away Kherson. I believe the answer is quite a lot. Some people will be fooled by this and they will say, ‘Putin wants a ceasefire’, and they will try to persuade Zelenskyi to have a ceasefire, which is why I think this is dangerous in some ways to continue with the battle for Kherson. And perhaps we should be looking and fighting the battles somewhere else so that Putin does not get what he wants. 

 The situation in winter can be catastrophic for our civilian population. On the one hand, it is a war crime, on the other hand, it is part of the scenario of a great all-out war that Putin is preparing. Unable to achieve real results on the battlefield, he wants to destroy our civilian infrastructure. To do this, he is going to use Iranian ballistic missiles along with the available Iskarders-M.

What I hear from the trip to the ayatollah is that Russia did not get the answers that it wanted, that in fact Iran is not going to give so many missiles quickly as Russia was asking for. And that some of the missiles in fact may come only in spring. And this of course is another good reason for Putin to slow down the war, taking it into winter. He wrongly assumes that if he keeps attacking the infrastructure and the cities, it will change the attitude of the Ukrainian people. This only shows, as it was shown from the beginning of the war, that he doesn’t understand either the psychology or culture of the Ukrainian people, that they are not going to give in. In fact it just is going to get harder about winning the war, the more destruction that he makes.

In your opinion, what symmetrical measures should Ukraine use in the current situation, and is there a general feeling that the United States will help us with long-range artillery systems? Because the war should be ended as soon as possible with our victory, and without long-range systems, in particular without ATACMS, it will be much more complicated. 

 You are right on both counts. I think the response that you are giving at the moment by just keeping moving forward and attacking - is the best response you can give. Because if you start firing into Russia now, then you will play to Putin’s plans. And he will then say this is a bigger war, I need more mobilization, more money, more everything. 

So what Ukraine is doing at the moment is successful and it needs to keep doing it, which is just keep moving forward. Because moving forward is actually what is starting to put cracks into the system. The Russian army on the front is very brittle and could break easily. If it is attacked hard again where it doesn’t want to be attacked, then certainly the mobilized soldiers will run away. Somehow we have to attack, find where the mobilized soldiers are the strongest on the Russian side and attack there, because if they start running away, the others will do it as well.  

ATACMS - is a real problem. I don’t know why, but someone in the White House does not wish to give Ukraine ATACMS. For some reason, they have the ridiculous logic of thinking that ATACMS are going to change the war. As general Ben Hodges says, ‘Russia hasn’t shown any ability to do anything different, so they are not going to be able to do anything different after the attack of ATACMS. And you are right, ATACMS would allow Ukraine to attack air bases for the back, command posts for the back and logistics for the back. And all of these three things would bring an end to the war quicker. 

It is now time for Zelenskyi to go to America, and I hope that people are going to repeat this loudly. He needs to go and face Congress, the President and have a man-to-man discussion with him. Not on Zoom, not on social media, but face-to-face. Churchill had to do that. He went and stayed in the US for a month, trying to get all his arguments clear of how we are going to win the war. It’s time Zelenskyi took a couple of very senior people with him, went to America and argued properly, face-to-face, why we need ATACMS and what we need in the future. It would do him good, because the American public needs to see that this man is human and they need to see him not only on TV.

And how ready will the UK be to support Ukraine now? The new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has spoken to President Zelenskyi and assured him of his support. When it comes to the realities of aid, particularly military budgets, how much will the UK be prepared to go all the way?

The UK will go to the end. Unquestionable. There are huge amounts of people in the UK who understand that this war is not just about Ukraine.

As you know, Putin has already started war activities against Norway, Britain, Denmark and Germany inside their countries. People are beginning to understand that this is a much wider war than just Ukraine now, and the UK will keep going, as it is preparing and working towards being ready in case this war gets more difficult or wider into a NATO country. Some countries are not preparing as hard as they should, but the UK is. They will support you as much as they can until Ukraine has won this war.

I talked to our soldiers who are actively fighting in the Donetsk region. They are amazed, as it seems that they are taking part in repulsing a zombie attack. Russians are driving their freshly mobilized soldiers to our positions - it's like a page from the Zombie Apocalypse. Why is Putin so much in a hurry?

 He is in a hurry because he is dying. Let’s be clear about that. Putin is dying. He's got cancer or something. So Putin wants to see a victorious end to this war before he dies. The second thing is that as far as finding zombies is concerned, he can keep going for a lot longer and that's why we must not give him support to get more zombies by attacking Russia. We have to split Putin from Russia strategically. So Russia and the Russian people have to turn against Shoigu, Putin and other people.  That's a strategic activity and it's something that the president's Administration and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs need to work a lot harder at because this is all about the inputs into Russia that can come through places like Israel, where there are a lot of Russians, or from other world leaders who have to be persuaded to try and actually to change the paradigm of these things. So he's rushing because he's in a hurry. I worry about delay,  I worry about the army not keeping fighting properly, Ukrainian armies during the winter. Because during the winter Putin's army is going to be at its weakest, because orcs and zombie apocalypse soldiers do not wish to stand up and fight when it's minus 10 or 15. And that is when the Ukrainian Army will be at its strongest compared to the Russian army. So winter is our opportunity to defeat them and we must not give them a time to delay, time to train, time to get more people ready, time to bring more equipment from North Korea. Remember North Korea has got an army of a million people and that means they've got a lot of equipment they can give Russia. So we mustn't allow that time for them to make that happen. Time is critical at the moment. Putin knows this. You think he's rushing, I don't think he is. He's fighting and attacking in front of Donbass just to make sure that as many Ukrainian soldiers as possible have to stay on those lines in Donbass. And that's the best place for him to attack because they've been attacking from there for a long time. He will keep attacking, trying possibly to just get the Donetsk  regional boundaries so that he can say we own Donetsk. That's the only reason I can come up with for attacking that place unless he knows something I don't know, about gold mines or there's some magical reason for. But no. 

The story of Russia's possible use of tactical nuclear weapons is like a sacred deer - it appears and disappears now and again from the agenda, but in any case, we should seriously prepare for such scenarios.

Our mutual acquaintance, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, very clearly voiced certain scenarios, in particular, emphasizing that a significant part of the Russian armed forces can be destroyed in a conventional way, that is, with the help of conventional weapons. But this would de facto mean a fundamentally new world situation.

And I agree completely with Ben Hodge's view on that, because Putin wants to win this war. The moment that he goes to tactical nuclear weapons he is reducing his chances of winning by a huge amount, because it will bring condemnation from all over the world, much more support for Ukraine and heavy support, though conventionally, from the US. Putin is dealing with democracies. He does not understand that democracies will not be bullied. He thinks of people having countries like his own. He thinks that the people think the same way as he does. He does not understand freedom, he does not understand democracy and he does not understand the strength of the Western resolve when it's pushed. Democracies do not like losing, because it means not fighting one leader but fighting the whole country. And people are not going to give in, just because Putin uses a tactical nuclear weapon.

Ukraine is now entering a protracted, winter phase of the war. We understand that we have to prepare for different scenarios, but in your opinion, what things should be fixed as soon as possible, or perhaps it is time to rethink some approaches? 

There are several things. The first one is the government. Government has got to understand that this could be a very long war and it must start working to understand how to change the economics. At the moment the economics are not being well run by the government. There's too much socialism and not enough supporting entrepreneurship. There are lots of areas like this where the private industry, defense industry in Ukraine, is much much more effective than Ukroboronprom. And the government should be supporting private initiatives as much as possible economically, because that is how they make money, get taxes and that is how the country will get better weapons. So there is a new thinking needed for the whole of economics and especially for the economics of defense systems and defense industry. That's the first thing. The second thing is if it's going to be a long war, we need to train more people and that means that the training for individuals, for soldiers needs to take place so that some of the soldiers can come out of the front line and rest. That doesn't mean that they stop being in the army, it just means that some of them need a two or three week break so that they can heal themselves mentally and physically before going  back again. There needs to be some thinking about what happens if we have to have a long-term war. How do we make more equipment ourselves? How do we train more people ourselves? How do we get ourselves ready for a long war in totality? And I don't think that that is going on. There's no discussion about it, and certainly there are a lot of people who could be trained to give the army more robustness than are being trained at the moment. 

But the third thing is that we are winning and therefore, the soldiers on the front line should only take risks absolutely when they have to. Battle discipline is absolutely everything. They need to stay alive because you can't win a war if your soldiers keep getting killed and injured, so they need to stay alive and do everything they can to stay alive without taking risks because they can fight another day. And I think this is really important. There are lots of very brave people but we don't want brave dead people. That is fundamental. 

My last thing is I think there needs to be some serious rethinking about lessons. What lessons are we learning at the front line and how do we train more officers and sergeants? This is why I say we need to bring people back out of the front line and give them some more formal training - for captains, majors, colonels, even brigade commanders, and we need to choose the best people for the future. If it's going to be a long war, then the best officers must be commanding everything, not just any officers but the best ones. So selection has to become more important across the whole system. I know and you've heard that there are still some commanders who hide in their command post, in their bunkers, who don't go forward with the soldiers. We have to make sure that those officers don't keep getting promoted and only the real warriors get promoted, because they are the ones who will win the war for us. Just if you want an example, go back and look at the stories of people like Moshe Dayne in Israel, how Moshi came through and what he did. These are the people that must be found, promoted and put in command. If that is the long war, that's the way to win it. Choose the best people, and they will win the war for you.

Danger from the North, in particular the Belarusian military bridgehead. This is not even about the involvement of Lukashenko's military on the side of the Russian Federation, but rather about the speed of the operational deployment of additional Russian forces. The question here is, do they have the trained military to try to launch an offensive or an attempted offensive from the North?

The answer to that is no. It's a very weak army at the top, not even properly trained, and a lot of its equipment has been given to Russia already. This is not an army that actually could attack. That doesn't mean that they won't be made to attack, because they might be, but I think that the answer to this is in Zelenskyi's hands and he has to make sure that politically the whole of the Belarussian system, the government understands that if Belarus crosses the border into Ukraine, that's it. Ukraine will then invade Belarus and will take Belarus, releasing it of the people in power. We have to make them clearly understand that there must be no crossing of the border, that it's one step too far for them and they don't have enough troops to do it sensibly. So if they do it, it's going to be a lot more deaths of both Russians and Belarusians, and I don't think the Belarussian soldiers want to cross the border at all, in fact I'm sure they don't.

Who, in your opinion, is leading the Russian army now? Is it Putin? A collective farm within the General Staff? Putin's dog? Shoigu? Prigozhin? Who is in charge of the Russian troops now? 

 I agree with you. Who's in charge? I don't know. I think it's Putin or Putin thinks he's in charge, but after that I'm really not sure at all. And it may well be Putin's dog, but whatever it is, they don't have the ability at the leadership level to control the army, as well as to control the soldiers. All they can do is force them to go and die. They're running out of skilled officers and it is shown, as you say, by the fact that they're pushing forward a zombie apocalypse. They wouldn't be doing that unless they had officers that didn't know what they were doing. So yeah who's in charge? A good question.