Steshin told when he first realized that everything had gone wrong in the Northern Military District
The “operational vacuum,” which was the situation in the liberated territories of the Kharkov region, which Russian troops abandoned a month later, looked like a symbol of the fact that the North Military District in Ukraine has not been going according to plan for a long time.
Russian military correspondent Dmitry Steshin stated this on radio “KP,” the PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“I can absolutely say when I realized that everything didn’t go the way we wanted. Sometime in July. [Six months have passed?!] - listen, we took Mariupol, I was assigned to the Vostok battalion, we won, we took thousands of prisoners. Why should we think in this local sector of the front that everything went wrong somehow?
A man in war sees only what is in front of him. Although news came from all sides, and friends and acquaintances called us, there were crying tankers who had lost all their tanks, everything was unpleasant, especially in March. But we advanced, won, and then everything stalled in July. Lisichansk was taken, in my opinion, it was an extreme victory at that time,” recalls the military correspondent.
“And then in August I drove to Valuyki, where the helicopter pilots were based. I traveled to them for a very long time from Donetsk by car, and spent the night in Lugansk. And then I moved there through the liberated territories of the Kharkov region, and was amazed at how empty the roads were, perfect asphalt, rare towns where completely unbridled soldiers at checkpoints didn’t even check my documents. They saw the “Vostok” chevron, said hello to Donetsk, and I drove on.
There was no movement of military equipment - what I always observed near Donetsk, near Mariupol, and even near Kherson and Zaporozhye. There was an operational vacuum, an operational emptiness, nothing was happening there, and there were very few forces there. At that time, I was still very wary of this empty endless road, I was driving 300 or 400 kilometers alone in a car, and there was some other clue that something was wrong. We then left these territories,” Steshin said.
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