Ukrainian Armed Forces General Staff must change from defensive to offensive mindset – Colonel Glen Grant

The key story is the unfolding of a major battle in Donbas. Our grouping near Bakhmut stymied the Russian strategic offensive and attempts to advance. The battle of Vuhledar demonstrated that the Russian attempt was stalled. They lost a lot of personnel and armored vehicles. What is your vision of the big battle in Donbas now?

I think we have to look at the battle in the East, as being across the whole length of the East, not just specifically Bakhmut or Vuhledar, because those are places where there are concentrations of Ukrainian forces and so yes, they're actually being relatively successful against the Russians there. But there are other places where Russia is looking for weak spots or gaps in between the towns, places in the forests, where they can move forward. And they are moving forward slowly but surely in places. And this is not much, but it is moving forward. And the big question is - Are we getting the overall strategic value from what we're doing in Donbass? What's next? Because if we're just going to fight in defense there and wait for the next round of attacks, then it's costing us a lot in blood. Then the question is how long can Ukraine sustain this high level of battle in this one to one fight, which is what it is. It's face to face fighting. Everybody is told in the military, when they're trained, is that if you have to do any sort of fighting like this, then you fight with the intention of gaining the initiative, not just to kill the enemy, but to actually break through to get behind him and to actually capture rather than trying to kill. Because when you go for killing one to one, it's extremely expensive in ammunition, extremely expensive in manpower. So the aim always is to break the enemy and then do something.

What worries me is that I'm not sure that we're going to do something straight away, that we're going to wait for vehicles and tanks to come from the West before we do something. And that time between now and a counter-attack gives the Russians time to bring more soldiers and equipment forward and to continue the attack. So my feeling is that there's got to be something else. If we're going to fight like this at some stage, we have to try and get behind them in any way possible and don't forget that in the Second World War and in the First World War most soldiers were walking for long distances during attacks. They weren't waiting for vehicles. Maybe we've lost the idea about how to do this. I'm not going to be critical. I just want to say that when you fight, you have to gain the advantage and then you have to do something with it and do it quickly, because you must never give the enemy time to get himself unbalanced and rebalanced again.

We all live now in anticipation of large-scale hostilities along the front line. What are your premonitions, what can we expect from the Russian interventionists now? Because they have brought together an enormous amount of manpower. Their plans can be read and predicted. What do you think the enemy is planning? In particular, we are talking about the south and the deployment of their units in the Kharkiv direction.

Working from the north. I don't see that they're going to do anything out of Belarus at the moment, because they've taken away so much ammunition and equipment from below Russia. So they will just keep doing things there like exercises to make sure that we leave as many troops as we can on the northern border because they don't want those troops to come into the main battle area around Kharkiv and Summy. It's always possible that they could be trying to get ready to do something there but there is no intelligence that they are. So one has to assume that if we're not getting any intelligence from satellites, from the Americans or someone else that all they're doing is just continuing with destruction of houses, destruction of schools by artillery and rockets, and that they will continue to do that. The main front still seems to be in the East. It seems to be that their aim is to break through and then either take the Donetsk region, if they can. They're not going to, it's too big, and it would take them too long but that seems to be their main aim and then down in the South. Well you have the nuclear power station and at the moment they're draining the water around the nuclear power station which is dangerous, because if you take cooling water away from a nuclear power station, then you can end up with a major nuclear incident. But again they seem to be weak on the ground down the South. Now it is possible that the attacks on the East are designed to pull the whole of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into one place and then attack somewhere else, but at the moment there is no intelligence evidence that they're going to do that. It seems to be that they are acting in the same way that they acted when they were fighting around Kyiv and just keep trying to do the same thing - time and time and time again and failing each time, so we haven't seen any evidence of any clever strategic move yet. I guess we have to wait and see if it's just more of the same or if there is something that they're thinking of doing.

The use of tactical nuclear weapons. The Russians have once again started to repeat that they are a nuclear power, withdrawing their navy and deploying submarine flotillas, which are carriers of nuclear weapons. They keep coming back to this point, but this means that they have no other plans, including the launch of a military campaign on the ground. That is, it is rather a last argument that will not matter for the course of hostilities.

I think that the nuclear threat is just a political activity that is designed to put uncertainty into countries. For example, let's take Finland and the uncertainty there. Finland was going to give tanks. Now perhaps they're not going to give tanks until they're in NATO and the other countries were going to give tanks and now they're not going to give them. This is Russia playing on the weaknesses of many of the European politicians, and some in the White House that he will do something worse. And this weakness creates delay and I mean even a day or two delay as we know down in Donbass means dead Ukrainians and that is what Putin wants, and he will try and use every hybrid method that he can to create stress in the minds of the European countries for them to to make delay by indecision. We can't, we're thinking about it, we haven't decided, we must do it all together in NATO. This sort of weakness coming out of Europeans is dangerous for Ukraine because it just means that everything is a day or two or three or four slower than it should be and that slowness means death and it means that Russia has the advantage during that period.

When we talk about the Russian plans for a war of attrition voiced by many experts, this means they have no strategic plan of action. A war of attrition is always about dozens and possibly hundreds of thousands of dead. Field Marshal Douglas Haig was once famous for this, and I don't even want to mention Field Marshal Zhukov. Now they are offering this version with the use of possible nuclear blackmail, am I right?

I think you're right and this is very much what Russia is doing. But my worry is that Ukraine is matching this as well, and that we are trading time with bodies instead of trading time with space. We have to ask ourselves is Bakhmut which is now leveled to the ground such an important thing that we need to keep it at all costs, and what does all costs mean? It means we just stand in the same place and we die, and that means that we lose a lot of soldiers, a lot of precious soldiers that we need for later. And this is a decision, it is a political decision made by the president that we stand and die, but there should be some argument about whether this is the best decision, whether the Bakhmut line is so important, remembering that we've already moved back several lines. It's not as though we can't do this. We may have to do it again. So if we have to do it again, then it wasn't so important. But we should be trading space to create gaps, to get through in other words to throw the enemy off and not just lose people. I'm unhappy with just standing and dying for a piece of ground that we're going to take back at some stage anyway.

I would like to ask you about the pace and number of the promised tanks. We started talking about tanks a long time ago, and now we seem to have reached the final stage, that tanks will be allocated and certain exercises are already underway. What is the current situation in the tank business, and why is there so little progress?

The first thing is that these tanks are not all going to come at once, they're going to come in twos and threes and fours and fives during the summer, and this leaves the General Staff with a big decision and that big decision is do we use them as soon as we get them or do we hold them and keep them until we have a large number and then punch the enemy somewhere and break through and that is their decision. My worry is that whilst they have a defensive mentality, they may start using them straight away. Fingers crossed that they have enough sense to hold them until there's a breakthrough number. Why is there a delay? Well a lot of these tanks have been in store and therefore, they have to be brought up to standard because there will be nothing worse than tanks coming out of Germany which broke down on the first day. That would be intensely demoralizing for soldiers and for the country. So the tanks have to be brought up to standard before they're used.

Why are countries not giving so many? I go back to what I said before, partly this is political and it's about the pressure that is being put on countries by Russian hybrid warfare, hybrid comments about nuclear and everything else. We have what we have, and my worry again is that we will wait too long for doing things without even thinking about how to attack and how to do something, and we will wait for the tanks and then it will be too long. So there is a critical point of which we have enough equipment, not just tanks, but Bradley vehicles and there are 60 in the port at Rotterdam now. We have to use everything we can to break through and to break through as quickly as possible because delay means Russia has the initiative and that means we have to defend.

What is your vision of the outcome of the recent Ramstein meeting, and I would like you to decipher what General Mark Milley and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin meant. They were quite clear in their statements, but what is your vision of the trajectory of the United States? Because the issue of long-range missiles remains open, and the same is true for aviation.

Yes, it's very difficult, there are two or three sides to this. One is that there are still people going back to the political bit, they are frightened of pushing Russia too far too quickly - that's one thing - there is a delay. The second thing is that people understand that the aircraft is not actually going to change the battlefield as much as some other things, like artillery, and that it will be extremely costly in terms of energy for the Ukrainian General Staff to actually manage expensive aircraft and all the spares and the training. And I think they believe that this is not possible at the moment. If it is possible, then it's an argument that the General Staff have not made strongly enough or well enough, but that argument has been lost, so there is the argument for long-range weapons although it may not have been lost with Great Britain, it may only have been lost with the United States. But I think the bottom line that America is trying to say to Ukraine is that Ukraine has to change what it's doing, that it has to think about fighting differently, not just fighting in the same way as Russia and that it's got to start working out how to conserve ammunition more and how to fight with maneuver, not just fighting in straight lines - punch against punch which is what is happening. And because America and the West have a limited amount of ammunition available, it's got a limited amount of really good equipment available. They are already giving a lot of this equipment and there is a limit to how much and how quickly they can service and process equipment to get it into Ukraine. And therefore, what Ramstein is saying is we're giving you what we can, but we still need you to think about how you're using it, and I think that is the message.

What is your assessment of Russian military resources and the potential use of additional options, in particular from Asian countries and CSTO satellite countries? We are talking about the production of additional weapons and, of course, the use of additional human resources.

Russia is not going to be provided much by the old satellites, most of them are keeping a low profile in this war but they will get equipment from North Korea and they will get equipment, rockets and drones from Iran. The challenge with Russia - Russia's still got lots of equipment in store - old yes, but it's still there, and they've got a bottomless amount of people they can pull on. What they haven't got is the ability to train those people to fight, and you saw the videos of Vuhledar - soldiers are in vehicles but they're not really soldiers, they're civilians in uniform. They don't know what to do, they don't have any skill at fighting, they don't have any drills or understanding of what they're doing. There will be lots more of those and yes they can be killed, but Russia can keep this going I believe for a lot longer than they are doing at the moment. The thing that Russia must not be given is time because if they're given time, then they have time to bring more vehicles, more people. In November and December they were weak but we gave them the winter to bring more people forward and they've done that. Every time we give them time they will bring more people forward. I think they've got another year or two of equipment and ammunition that they can bring forward, given time. That's why it's important to pressurize them and pressurize them quickly pressurize them quickly.

The classic Russian formula is to carry out an offensive until you run out of people and equipment. They have been using this approach for many years, so we are talking about Russian resources. At the same time, we are also living in anticipation of our offensive. We understand that the southern foothold is an extremely complicated story, because the Russians regularly brought manpower and equipment there. But history shows that it is always difficult to sustain a powerful counteroffensive in the south, particularly if there is a proper amount of armored vehicles.

I agree with you, it's about breakthrough. The question always is where and you're not going to break through in Bakhmut and you're not going to break through on that line from Donetsk North that is 200 kilometers because there's too many

Russians there. So the breakthrough has to be somewhere else. You don't actually need much to break through often, it's a matter of actually breaking the line where it's weak and then going through it and getting inside the cycle, getting inside the thinking of the enemy and convincing them that you're bigger and more powerful than you are. That is a psychological activity as well as a military one, and you could see this from the Russian front and you can see it from the Allied attack across Germany, across Europe towards Berlin. One of the big things is making sure you have commanders that are good that will keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing and take risks because once the enemy starts going backwards, then the whole thing unravels very quickly and the Russians are weak in command and control, they've got very little command and control, they've got very few radios and therefore, they have to be broken somewhere and once they're broken they will unravel, they will have to go backwards because they don't have the means of controlling the soldiers. The only means they have of controlling the soldiers is to put them in the front line and say go forward. So they cannot do combined arms fighting and this is where they are the weakest and therefore, this is where we need to hit them and to unravel through breaking up their ability to do things. We are letting them have the initiative at the moment, and because of that we're losing lots of people.

What do you think will happen in the Zaporizhzhia direction?

It appears that Russia is dug in and it's just in defense with the minimum amount of soldiers and artillery to actually hold the area, so at the moment there's a stalemate, neither side is doing anything - they're just holding and firing at each other. It's a very difficult area to break through around Zaporizhzhia because you've got the large fields and so much open space which is very difficult for people to move. I think that what they're hoping more than anything is some sort of incident around the nuclear power station.

We know that the Russians have built defenses around Melitopol, so it's quite clear that they imagined that Ukraine was actually going to start pushing South from Zaporizhzhia because they put defenses further south Melitopol and then towards Crimea. Then this hasn't happened, maybe this is where the General Staff will attack next, I think we have to wait and see for that.

It's really difficult to reshuffle and reform the Ministry of Defense now, it's an extremely sensitive issue, particularly in the context of war, preparations for both a counteroffensive and repulsion of even larger-scale Russian military operations. But in any case, Lieutenant General Pavliuk, an experienced warrior, a hero of Ukraine, a man with a good military reputation, has become the first deputy minister of defense. Accordingly, additional new processes are being launched there, we will not go into what may be a state secret, but in your opinion, where should the new team respond most quickly?

I think you used the wrong word as there haven't been any reforms, there have only been changes of people which is not reform. Reform is when you change processes and that means using IT much more, using sharper processes so that you can actually do things quicker and more effectively. It also means having processes that are much closer to understanding and supporting the front line than the processes are at the moment because we know there's been a complete failure on drones so far. The defense system has not got proper Lessons Learned, if it had proper Lessons Learned, then we would be already making our own mortars, mortar ammunition and our own drones and putting those forward. Not doing that shows the failure in the processes. The processes are not responsive to the front line. Civil Society is responsive to the front line but not the Ministry of Defense, it hasn't been. So that is the major change. There has to be a much closer relationship between what the Ministry of Defense produces, finds and buys for the front line than there is at the moment. I can't argue it's been very good at dealing with the International Community but it's not been very good at the internal work, especially dealing with, for example, NGOs, civil society and using the best people available. I mean we still have really great people working in society as volunteers who are not being used by the Ministry of Defense for their skills and that means across things like medical,  technology. There are people who are some of the world's best technologists, who are not even in conversation with the General Staff and the Ministry of Defense, they have no connection with them at all. But they're people who the Ministry of Defense should be using. Now that is a change in process, that is reform when the Ministry of Defense starts enabling and using all the skills in the country, all the best people in society, then we can say that there has been reform. Until then, it's not a reform, it's just changing the people, changing the seats, not doing anything else. I would say that general Pavliuk has a serious job, I hope that he has the skills for it.

What are the Russians afraid of now? When our drones flew to the strategic aviation airfields in Engels, the Russians were hysterical. So they are afraid of something, because some of our actions are disrupting their internal plans. In particular, Putin's attempts to stabilize the situation inside Russia. In your opinion, what courses of action would be the most progressive and successful here?

That's a good question. I think any action that takes place behind the front lines. They are vulnerable because they don't have, as I said, command and control. They don't have the responsiveness to deal with things, so any actions inside Russia, inside Crimea, any actions in around Melitopol or Mariupol, where they've got defense lines, anything that attacks where they are not strong and destroys things is a value. And that is why the General Staff wants longer range weapons. But then they have to, if they can't get longer range weapons, they have to look for other alternative ways of doing these things. I mean you saw when we actually put the drone into Sevastopol, that really caused a stir because it showed that the Navy was weak and that it wasn't doing its job properly. So we need to keep working on what in the West we call a deep attack. And deep attack is not done just by missiles, it's done by every method that you can do for deep attack because deep attack is always high value. You kill things and you could sometimes kill important things, so they're almost like they need a separate level of thinking now for deep attack because we're probably not using our special forces, even half properly. They're being used as infantry often instead of being used as a deep attack tool which is what they've been trained for and what they're supposed to be used for. So I think there are things we can still do in this area with deep attack that are not happening at the moment.