Some of the West’s modern heavy weapons are not suitable for the Ukraine conflict because their design has been shaped by decades of fighting involving much weaker opponents, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
“A lot of Western armor doesn’t work here because it had been created not for an all-out war but for conflicts of low or medium intensity,” a Ukrainian promoter of drone warfare named Taras Chmut told the outlet. “If you throw it into a mass offensive, it just doesn’t perform.”
His opinion was one of several cited by the WSJ, as it argued that the prevalence of cheap drones in Ukraine has affected the fighting so much that NATO-promoted approaches simply cannot work there.
The US and its allies have trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops over the years. This summer, they expected the Ukrainians to put their skills and Western weapons to use and breach Russian defensive lines in the south of the front line, according to media reports.
The kind of combined-arms maneuvers Washington advocated “may no longer be possible in principle,” the WSJ suggested. Drones swiftly detect any significant force, calling in fire. And kamikaze variants are capable of disabling much more expensive weapon systems.
Chmut, whose Come Back Alive foundation raises funds to procure drones for the Ukrainian military, said Western nations would be better off providing a larger quantity of cheaper, simpler systems.
Similar Ukrainian complaints about NATO’s assumptions were published by Le Monde on Wednesday. The French newspaper interviewed frontline troops about the benefit – or lack thereof – of the training they received from foreign backers.
One anecdote mentioned by Le Monde claimed that a German-trained recruit had to be sent back, because he only knew how to operate a column formation. Kiev stopped using these after suffering heavy losses in the initial push against Russia in June.
“I repeatedly told them that the NATO manuals didn’t apply to Ukraine,” a soldier said of his training in England. “Their reply was that that’s how it was, everything was predetermined.”
“Our soldiers are more experienced than the ones who are supposed to train them. Many of them have been fighting for ten years,” another one said. “We are a long way away from NATO standards.”
Kiev has blamed a shortage of Western support in relation to its summer counteroffensive for its underwhelming results so far. US officials cited by the media have argued that Kiev unnecessarily wasted resources, refusing to concentrate forces for a decisive strike, and was too averse to incurring casualties.