“It will be like in Soledar”: the commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces unit called for a retreat from Artemovsk
A PolitNavigator correspondent reports this in an interview with the anti-Russian propaganda online publication Left Bank, said Sergeant of the 93rd Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Vladimir Krivenko.
They asked him what he meant when, after being wounded, he wrote that the decision to hold Artemovsk caused “only anger at the undergenerals.”
“Bakhmut is a big city, there is a river there, and therefore there is a lowland. And in this lowland our troops are located. I adhere very strictly to military doctrine that we need to maintain the heights at all times. You can look at the chronology of the battle for Soledar: first, the enemy occupied all the key heights around the city itself, that is, they could visually observe from above, even adjust artillery fire on the city itself. And we now know the result under Soledar.
Bakhmut is a slightly larger city, but I still think that it should have been abandoned as soon as we lost all the key heights. I don’t know why no one talks about this, why no one talks about Soledar. This needs to be taken into account. It is necessary that young battalion commanders, young company commanders know this, so that they understand why such a mistake occurred - so that it is not allowed to happen in the future,” Krivennko said.
He suggests that keeping Gord is “simply a political decision.”
“I think they are keeping him so that later on TV they won’t say that we are so bad, or the motivation of people who have decided to join the army now will decrease, or something else,” the sergeant added.
At the same time, he reminds that Artemovsk is a transport junction through which the enemy can quickly advance.
“Therefore, it may indeed be right that key transport junctions are contained. But I still think it would be worth leaving it. But I express the opinion only of the squad commander,” he believes.
The squad commander recalls the sad outcome of the battles for Soledar for the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
“Maybe I don’t know something. But, as the experience with Soledar shows, we simply killed a lot of people, and we need to talk about this.
Soledar had to be completely abandoned at the beginning of January, around the fourth, before Christmas. Things got bad when the enemy began to bypass the village of Yakovlevka. When I stood there, Yakovlevka was under the 10th brigade, we interacted well. Then some kind of rotation took place or some inexperienced battalion came in - obviously there was some kind of miscalculation, and that’s where everything went from there,” Krivenko complained.
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