Ukraine and its allies made three mistakes in the war that Russia started unprovoked. And they should do everything they can to fix them quickly.
This was said by the former Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Lieutenant General Igor Romanenko, in an interview with telegraf.com.ua.
In his words, the first mistake was the mobilization law, which Ukraine began to change only in the third year of the full-scale invasion. “We definitely lost time. And now we start all the processes in an accelerated way. While in the Russian Federation, the mobilization has been going on since the fall of 2022, including secretly”, said Romanenko.
The second mistake has to do with the defensive fortifications that Ukraine has been slow to build to stop the Russian advance. “This is a matter of national importance! In six months, the Russians managed to build powerful fortifications, which became a huge problem for us during the summer counter-offensive in 2023. And there, not only the armed forces were involved, but also the state and private companies that had taken up the relevant work. We've had to do something like this since the middle of last summer. The results of these miscalculations are now visible in the situation in the Kharkiv region, where Russian troops reached Volchansk in a matter of days,” Romanenko said.
The third big problem is delayed Western military aid. “After a six-month hiatus, the United States has finally begun to implement large aid packages, but if that had been six months ago, or even better, a year and a half ago, the situation on the front would have been completely different. And now we are focusing on stabilizing the situation to stop the advancing enemy”, the Ukrainian military said.
„Either the Russians will collect reserves and start the second stage of the offensive, as the president of Ukraine warned, or we, together with our partners, will gather all forces and means – and we will thwart these enemy plans”, notes Igor Romanenko.