Ukraine's army chief must reform strategy, tactics to secure victory - Colonel Grant

Ambassador General Valeriy Zaluzhny's speech in London was extremely important. We understand that he outlined strategic prospects and clearly indicated the things we need to change and prepare for in the West. He called the Russian aggression against Ukraine in its current phase a “war of transition”. I would like to ask you to analyze the crucial messages that General Zaluzhnyi gave and how they were interpreted in the West, particularly in London.

It's important that people understand that this was actually a very significant speech, because it was given at the Royal United Services Institute which is the think tank for the British government on defence.

So it's got the same role in Great Britain as Rand Corporation has for the American government and the Pentagon. So it was an important speech and it was a well-filled room. There were a lot of people there and there will have been, because they don't do these very often, there will have been a lot of senior people from the Foreign Office and also from the Ministry of Defence there listening to him.

So because it was his first and because it was straight after he came there, it will have been taken with huge significance about what he said. Now what were those things that he said? Well of course the first one is he outlined the challenges of the war as it is at the moment.

But then he hit this point about transition, which is important because he's highlighting that although the war is much the same as you could say Second World War and First World War, the tools that people are using now, like the drones, like the electronic warfare, are changing how we do war, how we actually fight the war.

The war itself doesn't change. People are still dying, and they always will do, and there will always be bloody contact between man and man. But the overall shape of how war is going to be fought is under change.

Now, the significance of that will be, do people believe this? That's the first thing. Do people actually believe it? Although it's coming from the former chief of defense, there are a lot of people in the West who still think that how the West fights its battles now will still be the same in the future.  In other words, the use of tanks, use of armored formations and things, and use of drones, but not to the same way, not not using them in the same way, and not to the same amount as are being used in the in the Ukraine fighting because people will see that, there will be much greater use of airpower, attack helicopters, and artillery on the western side than there can be from the Ukrainian side. So that will change the balance back to the way that the west would like to fight.

But, and it's a big but. If Zaluzhnyi is right, which I suspect that he is to a large degree, may not be one hundred percent, but but if he's right that we are in a transition to a different type of war, and he's only sixty percent right, not even more than sixty percent, it still means that most of the western armies are a long, long, long way behind in their changes and in how they think the war is going to be fought. That has implications for training for the people, it has implications even for the people they select because, you know, Great Britain is not selecting IT experts for battalions, for example, which now every battalion in Ukraine is looking for its IT person. It's looking for its engineer to manage the drones and everything else.

Well, we're not doing that in the UK. And I wonder if, after this conference, people are going away saying, “Oh dear, we need to change how we're thinking,” or if they're going away saying, "No, he doesn’t understand how good we are or how we are going to fight."

I agree with you, this is an extremely serious challenge. On the other hand, I reluctantly draw parallels with the events that took place 100 years ago. We are talking about the so-called Little Entente and the Polish-Ukrainian-Bolshevik war of 1920. We understand that Poland also wanted more help 100 years ago. Unfortunately, a lot of things have not been achieved, have not been realized. And so, we need to understand whether the story of a powerful Central European military power will be supported by the proper amount of resources. That is, not just political statements, but concrete military resources. If we wage the war until we win, that is, regardless of what happens in the United States, whether Trump comes into office, whether Kamala Harris comes, and so on. We have to consider different scenarios. War is also about resources. Human resources are now being worked out by the personnel department of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, in regards to mobilization. But a long war, which would work to the full depth of the enemy's strategic defense, requires very clear coordination.  It shouldn't be that we were promised something and not delivered.

There's a lot of things in your points. I mean, if history tells us anything from the last two years, then we are not going to get all the things we are promised. And I'm sure that that will continue to be the case, that the promises will be greater than what actually happens. But let me just take one point on that, F-16. Everybody's saying, you know, the delays on F-16. The delays on F-16 are purely from the Ukrainian side, not from the West. The delay is there were not enough pilots who had English language to actually do anything, to learn. There were not enough technicians, engineers to actually learn.

Now, I know from just my own experience that there are engineers in the defense forces who were not taken into the program. And that's because the personnel system in the defense forces does not work. It's not only that it doesn't work. It's broken. There is no proper personnel system. Despite the fact that the Ministry of Defense is trying to change it, the General Staff has not itself changed how it runs personnel. And you can see this from the work of the TCC.

So let's, you know, let's look at those things in separate order. Ukraine will not get all the equipment it wants. And some of it will come, but it will come much, much more slowly, which means that the General Staff have got to start planning ahead into what is not going to come and why, and how do we deal with it ourselves. Now for me, the big problem is the frontline. It's the frontline where we're losing people, and it's the frontline where we're going backwards.

And we are doing that because the units are not properly equipped. There's no question.

They are not properly equipped. The brigades do not have what the brigades need. I understand the shortage of 155 ammunition. Nobody could have expected such a high demand for 155 ammunition. Nobody did expect it across the whole world. So sorting out 155 ammunition and ammunition for the frontline is something that's got to take place. But, hey, we all knew that soldiers on the front line are gonna need drones. They're going to need armor plates for their jackets, that they're going to need new boots, that they're going to need food. There are hundreds of things that they're not getting properly, and are still having to fill in pages and pages and pages of paper. Pages of paper for everything that’s lost.

And that is being done by battalions. So we're losing time on officers on the front line who should be spending their time with their soldiers fighting when in fact they're spending their time filling in paper. Soldiers spending their time digging trenches, which should have already been dug when the money has been spent to dig those trenches. And these things are because the system does not work. Okay? So the system doesn't anticipate these problems. Why does it not do that? It's very simple.

The General Staff is involved in fighting the war instead of planning for tomorrow. The Joint Headquarters should be fighting the war, not the general staff. That's the job of a Joint Headquarters, to fight the war. Not the Chief of Defense running around to brigades helping them. Not the General Staff wasting their time on today's details.

So there's a big problem area there from the things that you said at the beginning. And all these systemic problems have to be fixed if we're going to move forward because we won't get all the equipment we need. So how much preparation are we doing for mortar ammunition, for mortars, for grenades, for anti-tank ammunition, for air defense ammunition? These things are not all going to come from the international community. We have to find a way of creating them ourselves. That means planning, and it means organization. And I don't see that that is happening as well as it should be. We are spending too much time thinking about the big things: F-16, sea drones, attacks on the Kerch Bridge, and not enough time making sure that each of our soldiers could stay alive to fight tomorrow and is properly equipped to fight tomorrow. Because this war will be lost not in the sea, not at the back. It will be lost on the front line by soldiers dying and we run out. We simply can't deal with the mass of soldiers coming towards us somewhere. We're managing brilliantly at the moment, but how long we can keep doing that depends on making sure that the soldiers on the frontline are trained, equipped, and properly led by the best officers.

Now I got a lot from what you said at the beginning, but we are in a position of a time of transition. And I think you will ask me about Syrskyi’s comment on his recent article. But, there is lots to do still, and most of those things require planning, planning and, in some cases, legal change.

Planning is very important, but there is also such a thing as a general concept of war. It is very good that you mentioned Colonel General Syrskyi, the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. He warned very clearly about Russia’s plans. He decided not to talk about Ukraine's plans in the public space. We understand that what you have said and more, even more, must be done. But there is also the question of what Russia is preparing, and Syrskyi gave very specific figures: 690,000 offensive troops. That is, an increase of 150,000-170,000, at least. There is an impression that Russia will try to achieve some concrete results in the next couple of months. I think it is unlikely that they will succeed, but... So, Syrskyi's conversation in the Guardian, a British outlet.

Yeah. I think the first thing is that in terms of public relations, it was probably a good interview. What worries me and I'm sure worries many others is what are the actions that lie behind his words? It's quite clear that Russia is going to keep sending people to fight in the way that it has done. I see no evidence that they're running out of people, and I don't think there is any evidence that they're running out of people, that they just keep recruiting. They don't have to pay the people that they're recruiting because most of them die. So they're not paying anything. This has not yet reached the point in Russia that society is understanding what is going on. Maybe each month, there could be a change. But at the moment, Russia is set for a long war. Putin is working negotiating with China, with North Korea, with Iran to keep the weapons coming. They are trying hard to regenerate their own defense industry, although it's not as clever as it could be because they've already taken a lot of the best people and sent them to the front line, and actually ruined some of the things that they were going to do. But I don't think we should look at that too much. I think what we've got to concentrate on is on our side.

And if Syrskyi said he's got a plan, the question is: what is that plan? If that plan is to continue in the way that we've been fighting, small Soviet army versus large Soviet army, we are not going to win because we can't manage the numbers. The numbers are against us, and the numbers of equipment and people will always be against us, which means that we have to fight differently. Now, I ask the question: if we're going to fight differently tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, we should be teaching people to fight differently today. And we're not doing that as far as I can see. That means that the best officers have got to be trained to fight differently, the best ones. That we've got to find more officers who can fight differently. Because fighting in the same way, the Syrskyi way, I'll call it, of just pushing people forward and telling them to stay there and die is not a war-winning tactic, strategy. It's not going to win. We will just keep losing people and losing people, killing people on the other side. Alright. We're killing 1,200 a day. Has it made any difference? We were killing 1,000 a day a year and a half ago. Has it made any difference? The answer is no. We're still in the same situation of doing that, but we're weakened on our side because we're losing people. So there's got to be – I go back to it – there's got to be planning, and there's got to be some change in the way things are done if the Syrskyi way of talking is turned into a Syrskyi way of acting.

It will not happen without fundamental change in the system. New doctrine, new written ways of working, removal of the nonsense paper everywhere, better training. All these things need to happen, then we can win because we will be better than they are.

Dear Colonel Grant, look. Russia’s plans have become clearer, and it has become clear that it will now be pulling in additional manpower and will be trying to achieve very specific results during the end of the summer campaign and the beginning of the spring campaign. The second point will be the destruction of Ukraine’s energy structure. They have already started to do this, and we understand that while additional air defense systems are being supplied, Ukraine’s population will go through additional suffering. Russia is also betting on this, hoping for an internal Ukrainian scenario. I hope that we will be able to keep the situation under control, but the Kremlin is counting on it. And the third point is the uncertainty associated with the American election campaign. We don't know whether Trump will come into power, what Trump will try to do, what results he will try to achieve, whether Trump will listen to Orban, or whether Trump will listen to Ukraine’s president. But Trump is a system of uncertainty, and the Kremlin is relying on it. That is, the concept and vision of a defensive war is justified, because the Russians are already having some problems with recruiting and mobilizing additional personnel. They are significantly raising the payment for those who go to serve in the Russian armed forces under contract. That is, the Russians are in a great hurry, and that is why they are raising the intensity. Speaking of Russian plans, how do you see them?

Let me go back to your first point, which is that Russia is banking on Ukrainian society, fractions in Ukrainian society because of energy. I was in Ukraine this month for a couple of weeks, and I didn't see any tension on that point. In fact, lots of people were laughing about it. And I went into one bar in Kyiv, and the main waiter stood in front of everybody and said, we're on small power. You can't have French fries, but everybody can have a hot dog. And he said it, and everybody laughed. So there is a degree of acceptance that Ukrainians are not going to be beaten by something as small as power, whether it's headlamps, whether it's candles, or whatever. People are not going- I did not see anybody complaining in a really bad way about this.

But in the spring, the mood may change. That is, if this goes through the winter, the winter can be very, very hard and harsh.

Always. In the winter. Yes, it might do. But, also, there is the thing that the Ukrainian personality is a strong one. And bad times did not defeat Britain in the Second World War, and I do not see that bad times are going to defeat or change anything in Ukraine either. I just don't feel it. I don't hear those conversations from people. I hear the reverse. I hear the stubbornness that, you know, the stubbornness of the conversations that we're Ukrainian, and we're not going to be beaten by this. So that's what I hear. You may hear something different in Lviv, but what I've heard in Kyiv and in Sumy where I went last week is different.

Anyway, we keep going back to the Russia bit. I think that Russia is not having a problem with recruiting in the way that we might think it is. It might have a problem finding the people, but when you start offering large amounts of money, there are still tens of thousands of people over Russia who will join the army for that money because it's such a big amount of money that they almost can't not join. I mean, when you're talking about someone being offered a year, two years, three years worth of money in one month for one month soldiering, they'll join. So I think that Putin's got a long way to go on people yet, but his problem actually is not those people. His problem is the leadership and running out of officers to manage those people and to train those people. Because a lot of the people that he needs to actually to manage the organization have already died. And so they were in the early days. We killed lots of generals. We killed lots of people that that they need. So there's that for him to to deal, to promote new people and to change the people and to find new leaders for battalions and things. And I suspect that most of the leaders of the battalions are incapable of actually leading a battalion. And they're just there because they're someone's friend, not because they're they're they're experienced and clever. So he's got that.

But I think with Russia, I think we've always got to be careful about the unexpected. I've said this before. You know, the unexpected. They came through Kharkiv. We weren't expecting, nobody seemed to be expecting that. Okay. So what are they going to do next? They will do something different. This is Russia. They always do something different. So whether that the war starts again through Belarus, whether they attack somewhere else, I don't know, but they will do something different. And that's the main problem that we have with Russia is they keep the numbers going. They keep wearing us down bit by bit, and they outdo us in resources. So if they throw the army in somewhere else, we'll manage to stop them again. But each time we manage to stop them, it also stops us developing counterattacks. It stops us training battalions and brigades to do something different. So we just end up becoming as we did, as we were between 2014 and 2022, just a defensive army. We just become a defensive trench army rather than being an army that can do attack, and that's dangerous.

If we become defense minded too much, we will choose the wrong officers. We won't choose officers with capability. We'll choose officers with stubbornness, who just send people out to die. And we don't need that. We need entrepreneurial officers. Same as the entrepreneurial business, risk takers, people who are willing to do things.

I go back. Don't worry about Russia. Worry about us and how we're going to fight because that's much more important.

Thank you very much, Colonel Grant, for this extremely important conversation on Espreso TV. I would like to remind our viewers that Glen Grant, a retired British Army colonel and military expert, has been working for them. God save the King!

Slava Ukraini. And God save the king. May he live long. May he live long.