The comment has something to smile about, in the circumstances. Last Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky likened to Nazi propaganda Russia’s announcement of the use of a new secret weapon, Peresvet, a laser allegedly capable of dazzling enemy satellites and destroying Ukrainian army drones.
During the day, the Kremlin, through the voice of the Russian Deputy Prime Minister responsible for military development, Yury Borisov, had mentioned the existence of this new generation of laser weapon, named in memory of the Orthodox warrior monk of the time. medieval, Alexander Peresvet. He said that a test carried out the day before would have allowed to burn a drone at 5 km distance in less than 5 seconds.
“The clearer it became [que les nazis] had no chance of winning the war, and the more propaganda there was about an incredible weapon so powerful that it would ensure a turning point in the war”, summed up, with a smirk, the head of the State of Ukraine in its late evening video address, referring to the wunderwaffethe “miracle weapon” that Adolf Hitler sold to his people shortly before his fall.
The Kremlin went into this invasion with a sense of superiority
“Here we see that in the third month of a full-scale war, Russia too is trying to find its wunderwaffe Mr. Zelensky added, saying that “all this clearly indicates the complete failure of his invasion”.
Approaching 90and day of the war in Ukraine, Tuesday, the acknowledgment of the failure of the lightning war launched by the Kremlin on February 24 against Ukraine is becoming more and more evident, and not only for the Ukrainian president.
“This war is a fiasco for Russia, summarizes in an interview retired former Colonel Pierre St-Cyr, who was Canadian Defense Attaché in Ukraine during the 2014 conflict in this former Soviet republic. The Kremlin went into this invasion with a sense of superiority. He thought he could wage this war quickly, but after three months he mainly demonstrated the incompetence and weaknesses of his army, which lost both its initial target and its morale. »
In recent days, the Ukrainian army has repeatedly announced that it has pushed the Russian armed forces to the east, where Moscow is now trying to reconfigure its objectives of conquest, after the failure of the capture of kyiv, the capital, last February, and its inability to bring down the government of Volodymyr Zelensky to replace it with a puppet power in the pay of the Kremlin.
The advance of Russian troops in the Luhansk region, in the heart of the Donbass coalfield, is still coming up against two important pockets of resistance formed by the twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lyssytchansk, where the Ukrainian army is still standing up to the forces of the Kremlin. A resistance which, like that of the Azovstal steelworks, in Mariupol, this strategic port on the Sea of Azov now controlled by Russian troops after more than eight weeks of intense fighting, throws a little more discredit on the military reform initiated by Moscow, in the years which preceded this war, senseless in the eyes of the West.
In recent years, however, Vladimir Putin was counting on this reform in order to fulfill his ambitions to restore Russia to its former glory and prestige. It has gone through, among other things, the objective of forming a military corps made up of one million men and the development of sophisticated weapons, proudly exhibited in recent years by Russia at international exhibitions devoted to war and to armament, but which, in the field, quickly proved ineffective.
The reality on the ground
“This reform had not been tested on the ground, other than in Syria, where Russia did not face great opposition,” said Mr. St-Cyr. It was also plagued by corruption, by the quest for objectives to be fulfilled at all costs which did not care about the quality of the soldiers or that of the weapons. And today, above all, it gives the image of a Russia that is no longer the military power that it once was. »
Last January, Colonel Evgeny Pustovoy, a former head of armored vehicle procurement, was accused of embezzlement: 13 million dollars from the falsification of supply contracts between 2018 and 2020, according to the TASS agency.
Ten days before the outbreak of war, a military court in Moscow dismissed Major General Alexander Ogloblin, who had been imprisoned for four and a half years because of chronic overbilling in expenses related to ground satellite control stations allowed to embezzle 25 million dollars, between 2013 and 2018, according to the site BFM.RU.
One of the main results of this war is likely to be “a greatly diminished, and therefore considerably less dangerous, Russia,” Andrew Latham, a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, predicted last week in the pages of the political newspaper The Hill. “Not only has the Russian army turned out to be a kind of paper tiger, but, furthermore, no matter what combat capability it possessed on the eve of the invasion, that capability has since been severely depreciated. »
Growing Opposition
The analysis also seems to be shared by the retired Russian colonel Mikhail Khodarenok, who has become a conservative columnist on the Russian public network Rossiya 1 and who, on May 16, did not hesitate to challenge the official discourse of the Kremlin by affirming on prime time that the “situation” for Russia in the war in Ukraine was “undoubtedly going to get worse”. At the same time, the Ukrainian army announced that it had pushed back the Russian troops and regained control of the border in the coveted and strategic region of Kharkiv.
And he added: “We are in total geopolitical isolation. The whole world is against us […] even if we don’t want to admit it,” he added.
This isolation was also felt the same day during the meeting at the summit and in the Kremlin of the few allies of Moscow, members of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Of the five countries present, including Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, only one, Belarus, supports Russia in its military intervention in Ukraine.
“This colonel has made himself the spokesperson for an opposition to the war which is increasingly expressed in Russia and which risks continuing to be so the longer the conflict lasts,” says Pierre St-Cyr . This colonel could disappear and be punished. But if we were to see him again, then it could suggest that Vladimir Putin is losing control. »
This is what Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to imply last week by bringing the Russian president closer to Nazi Germany before the fall of the Hitler dictatorship, and this, while making fun of the “miracle weapon of the Russians to regain the upper hand over the Ukrainian resistance. A rapprochement between the two eras whose master of the Kremlin could suffer the repercussions not only by falling, too, but also by taking his country with him.
“It is still difficult to know when and how this war will end,” said Mr. St-Cyr, “but what is becoming increasingly clear is that with the war crimes committed, the reconstruction to come and the compensations that could be imposed on Russia, this country will have in the future to climb a slope as steep as that which Germany faced after the Second World War”, he concludes.