Zelenskyy should ask for help from Britain and Scandinavian countries bypassing NATO and EU - Colonel Grant

I would like to start our conversation with the military summit that took place in the United States. The term "military summit" was used in our broadcast by Daniel Fried, former coordinator of the US State Department for sanctions policy, now a member of the Atlantic Council. He said that America does not want to go to war against Russia, but we understand how much the military scenario is unfolding now, which can affect the entire continent. I would ask you to evaluate the summit, in particular the meeting between Presidents Biden and Zelenskyy.

I think that your previous guest is right. The US is trying to do what it can but keep everything at arm’s length. In other words not to get any closer to the conflict than it is at the moment. And they're moving forward in steps each time they realize that the steps they took previously and said “no we're not going to do this we're not going to give you Patriots. That is not going to change the situation at all”. So they can afford to give Patriots. The problem with this way of working is that it's slow, and at the moment we're in a very difficult time on the battlefield. It's a time when initiative is needed to move forward quickly, to put Russia under pressure. But we can't have initiative if America is being slow with its delivery of weapons and support. And at the moment I don't see this support is going to move quickly and cause problems for the battlefield.

In any case, the Americans promised to supply us with the Patriot battery. This is extremely serious, although our military in particular are waiting for heavy equipment on the front line. So to what extent are European countries, Great Britain or the United States ready to supply us with heavy equipment? First of all, we are talking about Abrams tanks or, perhaps, Leopard-2.

That's a good question. I think going back to Patriot in the first place. This is not going to be a game changer. What it will do is it will increase the quality of the air defense, and it might stop Russia sending bombers over Ukraine because that's the sort of weapons system that can actually take out their bombers and take out cruise missiles. But there's not going to be a huge amount of Patriot, and it's not coming for probably six months. So it's not something that people should be looking at particularly, it's just another weapon system. Talking about the heavy weapons like tanks and more armored vehicles, I don't see any action towards that at the moment in the European Union but the one country that has actually mentioned that it might do something and provide tanks is Finland. So frankly I think that if Zelenskyi is going to leave the country and go and talk to people, his next trip should be to Finland and Sweden, because neither of those are yet in NATO, so they are not bound by the NATO discussions and consensus. They can do things that other countries cannot. Maybe he needs to go to London, Stockholm and Helsinki and start talking hardball work with those people, because they can do it possibly outside of the European Union outside of NATO consensus. Other than that I don't see any action coming at the moment and this of course then comes back to what is the government and what are the General Staff doing to try and improve their own situation with the armor that they've got already. Because there is a lot of armor in Ukraine. And are we looking whether we can actually produce better sites for those guns or even better ammunition. There must be ways of actually improving the tanks that we've got. That needs to be looked at as well as waiting for gifts from other people.

Russians regularly launch massive missile strikes on our territory. They are trying to completely turn off the light in the country. But we see how well our air defense systems work. But the main thing is that we have also started to inflict, that is, we have started to have quite strange explosions at the airfields of Russian strategic aviation, in particular, the airfield in the city of Engels.

The Russian air defense systems suffer from the same problems as Russian infantry - firstly alcohol and secondly bad preparation and training. I mean it's quite clear what they've been doing is just enough to show the generals that they're hard-working boys, but what they haven't been doing is actually training themselves to the same level as the Ukrainian air defense currently is. Air defense is a system that has to work all the time and it's even small things like who's on duty at the radars at night, and what is the link between the radars and the missiles at night on the Russian side. Are they sleeping or are they working? And you know if you've got soldiers or you don't have enough soldiers that are trained, at some stage in day or at night you have people that are not very good, so I suspect that their overall system doesn't work as well as the Ukrainian system. That's the only answer I can have for why they're not shooting down our drones.

Now why are we not attacking more? That is a question for the General Staff. I can't answer that and that may be a resource problem, we may not actually have as many drones or as good drones as people think or it may just be that they're saving them for something else, I don't know. But I think that the Russian air defense has shown itself to be not as good as we might have thought it would be, and so it's an opportunity for us if we can attack.

And what kind of strikes on Russian troops would be the most painful for the russian empire?

I think definitely on the territory of Russia because that actually makes them realize that the war is coming to them. If it's on the occupied territory, nobody in Russia cares at all. So you have to do things against military targets because that actually brings a positive effect for the army. I mean their air force has shown itself to be weak and that is probably the biggest area that we can attack followed by the Navy, because you're not going to do much killing just a few more soldiers, as there are so many of them on the other side that killing 20, 50, 100 doesn't have any effect in the total numbers, but sinking a ship or taking out two aircraft or three bomber aircraft does have an effect and reduces the operational capacity of the Russians quite severely.

But Russian generals are also afraid of something. The issue of the Russian General Staff is not only about military affairs, but also about military-political affairs. We see the strengthening of Putin's additional formations, the "zombie army", or the "army of convicts", headed by Prigozhin, and so on. We see different formations that begin to compete in parallel. Perhaps, we should use the internal gnawing between the Russian military structures?

That's quite complex, and I think that the one thing we have to get the hang of is that the longer Russia actually fights the more likely it is that some of it is going to get better because sooner or later in a war like this, competent people start to rise out of the mess. It was just the army before and the army was useless. We've seen that but we're not fighting the army now, we're fighting people that are becoming more professional. I'm not talking about the prisoners, but about those who are actually fighting for money on the front. And more and more private armies will come to the front so we have to be very careful because the longer that we give Russia to actually do things, the more likely it is that some of them will get to be good and maybe even as good as the Ukrainian soldiers so this is a very complex time. That's what we need to be careful of. They are learning, they've shown this. They're learning in all sorts of ways we have to learn as well to keep staying in front of them which means we have to get better in our organization, in our processes, better in the way that we fight tactically.

Now the Russians are trying to use the scenario of Stalin's war against Finland, the so-called winter war. More than 80 years have passed, so there are certain amendments. But their main doctrine is a long war of exhaustion of resources, both military technical and human.

You have to be very careful with using history in that way because let's take Ukraine first. Yes, Ukraine is fighting for its own country, it has got lots of support, but that support is not as fast as it needs to be for the battlefield, that's the first thing. The second thing is that Ukraine has got a limit on how much blood it can spill and it is spilling blood faster than perhaps it wants to or needs to or can afford to. So we have to be very careful. Fighting for our own country - yes but there are limits and those limits are determined by not just weapon systems but also by the quality of selection of commanders and the quality of training and both of those could be better, both could be improved.

On the Russian side - yes, it's not the army of Stalin. I think Putin's army really is pretty bad and it's still an army based on lies and passing untruths up the system but they still have huge resources and as long as we try to match them, resource to resource, they are always with an advantage in the long run, because their resources are still owned by them,  they are not waiting for the European Union to send something, they're not waiting for America to send something. They can send what they've got immediately to the front.

At the moment I still think the initiative lies with Ukraine. Ukraine has the upper hand but the longer this goes on, the more difficult it could become for both sides, and then we are unsure what the resource balance will be. Hopefully Russia will run out of everything and the lies will kill them, the lies will destroy them internally, and hopefully that the European Union and America Finland and Sweden countries will provide enough for Ukraine to be able to fight properly without having to use blood instead of weapons because that's not a good balance for Ukraine if it has to spill too much blood.

Making predictions during a full-scale war is a thankless task. But there are certain characteristic trends that are very well noted by military experts and analysts around the world. In particular, we are talking about the concentration of troops, troop movements, and long-term defense contracts. So what scenarios is the Russian Federation preparing for now, for example, in the next few months?

I'm unsure of what they'll do because there is a gap between the strategy that Putin and his leaders would like to do and the capabilities that they have to do them. So they may have a strategy of fighting from Belarus again but they don't have the capabilities to fight successfully from Belarus again. They may have a strategy to defend properly, but in many areas they don't have a capability to defend properly, because the soldiers that they have in the trenches and in the defensive lines are not good enough to actually to beat people. They can do two things - they can fight with artillery somewhere, and they are losing ammunition quickly at the moment because Ukraine is actually destroying their ammunition, that's one thing. And they can fight by throwing hundreds and hundreds of soldiers at the same place. They've been doing that in Bakhmut and they failed. So the strategies may change. They may try to do something else, somewhere else that the possibilities include retrying to attack Sumy , Kharkiv, anything. But I'm not sure that there is understanding at the level of Putin and Shoigu that they don't have the capabilities on the ground to do what they think they want to do.

If you assess the current state of the Russian army since the beginning of the full-scale campaign, what are the main trends in the Russian army now?

The first thing is that the Russian army is as bad as it was at the beginning. But now there's more than just the Russian army, we now have Wagner group and also other other private armies coming into the front line and it's much more difficult to assess than it is to assess the Army in its simple terms. Especially now there's not one coherent organizationю The General Staff no longer controls all of the fighting because Wagner group is taking a large chunk of the fighting itself, and they are definitely not under command or control of the General Staff. So it's quite possible that should Putin die, for example, or get killed, that there could be a complete internal fight between Wagner group and the army for power. I think that to assess how good they are is difficult. Also we don't know what they're doing in the rear area, what are they doing with all the other people that they've pulled in and how good those are going to be. My guess is that they will be the same low standard as the army troops fighting on the frontline. But if there are lots of them, it's the numbers that are the problem. Mass has a quality all of its own, numbers have a quality that is hard to defeat sometimes. That is the problem to assess them in qualitative terms. They're poor to assess them in numerical terms. That depends upon how the General Staff tries to use the Wagner group and its own soldiers. And at the moment they're uncoordinated.

Speaking about the situation in the East, in particular in Bakhmut and Kreminna, why is Putin now trying to storm Bakhmut with such hysteria?

This is purely internal politics. He's made statements about what the great Russian army is going to do, what he's going to do and of course it's not working. Therefore, he is beginning to look weak and the more he looks weak the greater risk there is to his life. And so he needs some victory at the moment to be able to say look what I've done.

Now if you take this from the Russian side and look at the map, Russia still has a huge amount of land that it's gained from 24th of February. Yes, it's lost in the north, it's lost down by Kherson, but it's still got lots more - Mariupol, Melitopol - all these areas down the South. It still held the line pretty much the old ATO line -  it's still got that and in the north it's got more, so he's actually got a lot of success to talk about, but he needs a bit more success politically. So Bakhmut is where he's trying to do it and Wagner group are his tool in a way to try and actually break through there. But they're just not good enough militarily, they don't have the officers, they don't have the command and control, they don't have the training and so it's just as the boys call them - it's meat. They're just throwing meat to try and actually break through and that is not working.  But we've been lucky so far. We've not run out of ammunition anywhere. It's lucky, although this sort of luck is only ever today.  There's always the problem of tomorrow and the day afterwards. So we have to keep working hard with our allies to get them to keep producing ammunition, because it's ammunition that we could run out of, as they could. So this is a very complex time at the moment and it's complex for Putin because he is at high risk of looking a fool and high risk of looking a loser to a lot of people in Russia.

What do you think the situation in the South looks like? And how much can it affect Crimea?

If there is a proper breakthrough, a counter-attack south of Zaporizhzhia and the Russians start to run, then I think we may just be able to keep driving towards Crimea and even into Crimea, because I think if the Russians break, they will run. The challenge is going to be able to sustain an attack in terms of planning and ammunition, in terms of energy of those people going forward. And it means having the right commander in charge, because to keep pushing forward when it's pressurized, when it's difficult is an extremely hard thing for troops, and that's why you go back in history and you look at people like Rommel, who was able to make his German troops move forward and attack, the same with Patton in America. Now to get through and to drive through into Crimea is a lining up of the right soldiers, the right logistics and the right commander. It won't happen just by chance, it has to be planned and thought through how they're going to do it, which routes they're going to use and lining up everything to make it 

happen.

I honestly think if Ukrainian troops actually set foot into Crimean soil, that everything in Crimea will collapse and that they will run away. The quicker we move towards Crimea, the quicker they are likely to run away. We saw this in the north, we saw it in a way with Kherson. Let's not make any excuses, they were not pulling back to make a nice defensive position, they were running away in front of Kherson. They were running away because they knew if they stayed, they were going to get destroyed and captured. Those people are still on the other side of the river, they are the same people who ran away last time. Trust me, they're not brave suddenly. If they're attacked quickly, they will run away again, maybe even faster this time, because they know what happened last time. So Crimea is a prize and it's there, but I just hope we get enough weapons and equipment to be able to do it quickly and not to have to do it in tiny little steps losing lots of Ukrainian blood on the way. The faster and harder we hit south of Zaporizhzhia, the faster and harder they will run away. No question.

What time frame or time limits do you see for the Kremlin to wage a full-scale war against Ukraine? Or, on the contrary, would they like to try to freeze the situation on certain parts of the front now?

I think that if Putin is not removed, they could probably keep going for another couple of years, because they can. If Putin manages to convince the country that this is a national war of survival against NATO and the West, then he will get a lot of support and he'll get money and  more soldiers. This is one of the reasons why it's so important for Putin to have the Donbas area, because he's already declared that Donbas is Russia, so he needs Donbas to be Russia to make an argument that we are attacking Russia, if you can follow that logic. And if he gets that, then he's got lots more people, and if he gets time from a strategic pause, because the West is slow bringing weapons, slow producing ammunition and Ukraine doesn't actually start to produce its own weapons and equipment. The longer time he is given, the longer he can keep the war going. Therefore, it's really imperative for the West - for NATO and the European Union to understand that they need to move quickly. By moving quickly they reduce Putin's ability to keep this war going for a long time.

So speed is the most important thing at the moment. Speed and aggression are the two most important things and the West can help with that or it can make it worse by being slow. Sorry but we do need tanks and we need them as quickly as possible and we need good ones and the argument that Ukrainians can't understand how to manage them or look after them is a stupid argument because we're going to lose some of them in the front line fighting anyway. And it may mean that the General Staff have got to completely change the logistics system for Ukraine but they need to do that anyway. At any rate, we do need tanks. I will finish on the point that we need those tanks.