"Meager achievements with no strategic significance". Russia’s summer offensive ended in failure – military expert Selezniov
Russia’s summer offensive, which the kremlin had prepared as a turning point in the war and accompanied with large-scale propaganda, ended without any strategic results. Military expert, former speaker of the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces Vladyslav Selezniov stated this in an interview with OstroV.
"The russians had planned by August to fully occupy the Donetsk oblast, but to this day about a third of the oblast remains under the control of the Ukrainian army. All their promises of large-scale advances and breakthroughs turned out to be nothing but a soap bubble. The only thing they really achieved was a colossal level of losses. In three months of active hostilities, their losses amounted to about one hundred thousand killed and wounded", - the expert emphasized.
According to Selezniov, the statements of the Chief of the General Staff of the russian federation Valery Gerasimov about "dozens of liberated settlements" or "the encirclement of Kupiansk" do not correspond to reality and are a fabricated picture for the russian domestic audience.
"In fact, the russian army has demonstrated that it is capable of conducting only local tactical operations. They captured a few villages and positions, but this did not affect the overall situation in any way. Over the summer, despite favorable conditions and the concentration of seven hundred thousand troops, the russians advanced only a few hundred square kilometers. These are meager achievements with no strategic significance. And for them, they paid with tens of thousands of killed and wounded", - the military expert noted.
He stressed that the outcome of the summer campaign can be summed up very clearly: minimal territorial gains at the cost of extremely high human and material losses.
"This is very telling and illustrative. The kremlin declared grand goals, promised a massive breakthrough, but in the end received only another proof of its own insolvency. And it is precisely this imbalance between costs and results that today is the main characteristic of russia’s summer offensive", - concluded Vladyslav Selezniov.