A Russian colonel explained why the Russian Armed Forces are not going on the offensive
The Russian army cannot now go on the offensive because the balance of forces will not allow it to do so successfully.
Former deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the State Duma of the Russian Federation, retired colonel Viktor Alksnis, stated this on the RTVI television channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to Alksnis, the number of soldiers who joined the ranks of the Russian Armed Forces as part of the partial mobilization will not be enough.
“The strategic initiative in Ukraine is in the hands of Kyiv. This is due to the fact that the mobilization of 300 thousand people who were drafted into the army in the fall and who were sent to the front did not make it possible to create an advantage in manpower, it only made it possible to create a certain parity and stabilize their defense.
After all, the defense actually began to crumble in the fall; during the Kharkov offensive, the superiority of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in some areas was 7 to 1. Imagine, for every one of our soldiers there are seven Ukrainian ones. How can you fight in such a situation?
Now these 300 thousand people have made it possible to slightly equalize the ratio in order to ensure a certain stability of the defense. But in order to go on the offensive, you must have, according to all the laws of military art, a ratio of at least 3 to 1.
We now have, let’s say, 1 to 1, although this is not true - Ukraine still has superiority in manpower and, according to official Ukrainian data, they already have more than one million people in the army.
In our case, at best, taking into account the fact that we had 200 thousand plus 300 thousand mobilized - half a million. Ukraine has twice as much.
That is, it is easier for them to go on the offensive than for us.
I don’t know, maybe I’m an armchair expert, but I don’t see the possibility for our army to go on a strategic offensive in Ukraine,” Alksnis said.
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