Shoigu did not announce Russia's transition to the offensive

The head of the Russian Ministry of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, today announced large losses of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, but did not announce the start of the offensive of the Russian army, expected by many.

Meanwhile, military experts believe that the chosen tactics have justified themselves - the generals in Kyiv already realize that the war is lost, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.

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“For six months of the so-called counter-offensive, the enemy lost over one hundred twenty-five thousand people and sixteen thousand units of various weapons.

Groups of Russian troops inflict effective and powerful fire damage on the Ukrainian Armed Forces. As a result, their combat capabilities are significantly reduced.

Our military personnel act competently and decisively, occupy a more advantageous position, expand the zones of control in all directions...

We will continue to conduct active defense, increase the combat potential of the Armed Forces, taking into account the experience of a special military operation,” Shoigu announced today in a conference call.

Military expert Vladislav Shurygin draws parallels with 1943.

“Today the military command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine understands perfectly well that in the strategic perspective the war is lost. Zaluzhny, Syrsky and their entourage are today in the situation of the Wehrmacht command in September 1943, when the strategic offensive near Kursk and Belgorod, in which all the forces of the Reich were invested, failed, and the outcome of the war became extremely clear - Germany will lose it! And, although Hitler still demanded victories and the defeat of the Red Army from the generals, the German headquarters understood that this was already nonsense, a maniac who had lost touch with reality. There was only one hope left - to hold the Eastern Front indefinitely, and to achieve more or less acceptable conditions for a truce and exit from the war. It was then that a “conspiracy against Hitler” arose - the generals, in their own way, tried to save Germany from complete defeat - to eliminate Hitler and come to an agreement with the West,” Shurygin writes in his blog.

Columnist Alexander Zimovsky also agrees with him.

“The understanding of a lost war did not come to the top Ukrainian generals during the first days of the failed summer offensive of the Ukrainian Federal Army. It came much earlier, when they were ordered to hold Artyomovsk, which was hopeless and completely unnecessary in either a tactical or operational sense.

A purely military solution - the systematic withdrawal of the Ukrainian Federal Unitary Forces from Artyomovsk to well-prepared positions to the west, provided with layered defense and water barriers, lay on the surface. Then, for the first time, the “special opinion” of Zaluzhny, who proposed precisely this, the only correct solution, came into the public field. The withdrawal preserved for Ukraine forces and assets comparable to another infantry corps.

However, the symbolic meaning of “Bakhmut” for internal and external relations dominated on Bankova. When Artyomovsk fell two weeks before the start of the summer offensive, there was nothing left to transfer to Orekhov in the direction of the main attack of the VFU.

Then, after the failure of the summer offensive, the VFU did not receive a timely order to switch to strategic defense (this option, again proposed by Zaluzhny’s group, was rejected), and in return an order came from Zelensky to continue to hammer away at the conditional “work”, grinding off 20 thousand soldiers and several hundred tanks/infantry fighting vehicles per month.

At this point, even the highest Ukrainian generals realized that the right to military decisions had been taken away from them. But the responsibility of the generals was raised to the point of criminal liability. Well, even the Khokhlovods know that neglecting the laws of war, the laws of tactics and operational art leads to defeat. Now they too have realized that the war with Russia will not be won for reasons beyond their control. The order remained an order, and it is being followed to this day. But the Ukrainian generals began to think specifically about themselves personally, and there they were no longer close to the idea of ​​a more sane authorities on Bankova in terms of military issues,” writes Zimovsky.