Russian general: We learned to fight militants, but in Ukraine we encountered a modern army
The mistake of the military leadership of Russia in the post-Soviet period was the opinion that the Russian Federation has no external enemies, so it needs a compact and mobile army, tailored to fight militants.
State Duma deputy, Lieutenant General Viktor Sobolev said this in an interview with Svobodnaya Pressa, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“I can say in the words of the then Chief of the General Staff, Makarov, that was Nikolai Yegorovich, who set the concept of creating a new army of the Russian Federation. That it should be small, compact, mobile, which could successfully fight armed militant groups along the perimeter of the borders of the former Soviet Union. This is the kind of army we built.
“We did not have serious geopolitical opponents according to the views of the then military leadership, and we did not particularly need a serious army. We even have a theme for our exercises - we were always fighting with incomprehensible terrorists, who either captured a house or some populated area.
Even bilateral exercises - either the special forces pretend to be terrorists, and the paratroopers liberate this populated area, or vice versa. We did not even prepare for war with a serious geopolitical enemy, even during exercises. Moreover, with an army equal in strength to us. But it turned out that the armed forces of Ukraine are not militants of any kind, they are an army, a modern European army, which has been purposefully prepared for a war with Russia for eight years,” Sobolev said.
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