General David Petraeus told CNN he believes Ukrainian troops will be able to push back Russian forces further this summer, depending on weapons supplies and strategy.
It will take successful combined arms warfare — a complementary approach where multiple types of combat units support each other — to succeed, Petraeus told CNN’s Nic Robertson at the Munich Security Conference in Germany.
“You can bring the enemy to collapse and ideally collapse – and it’s possible this summer, at least locally – and hopefully enough to sever this land bridge that Russia has established that allows them to connect to Crimea along Ukraine’s southeast coast,” said Petraeus, who was the US and coalition commander of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and later CIA director. .
“If you cut that, you can start the isolation of Crimea, you can reduce it as a logistics support center, then you can divide the Russian forces. And then, if you can take down the Kerch Strait bridge, you really isolated them,” he added.
Petraeus said if this scenario plays out, combined with long-range weapons for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), there would be “very different dynamics” in the conflict.
If Russian casualties continue to mount, “at some point the Kremlin must recognize that this war is unsustainable on the battlefield. And if you continue to tighten economic, financial and export controls, you will make unsustainable (on) the home front like well,” he said.
He also said Ukrainians trained in Western weapons seem to be doing this with remarkable speed.
“Reports (from Western colleagues) indicate that the Ukrainians are blowing all the way through their training. They finished the first day at noon, and you are on the second day, and they have to speed up the training very meaningful. And even when they go back to the barracks after a very long day of training, they read the manuals. They want to get back to fighting, to get back to protecting their families,” he said.
Ukrainian troops receive training on Leopard 2 tanks in Poland, the British government announced earlier this month that it would start training Ukrainian pilots on NATO-standard fighter jets, and the first group of Ukrainians completed training at an American base in Germany on Friday.
“I think they’ll be able to get the kind of combined arms effects that the Russians haven’t gotten,” Petraeus reiterated.
CNN’s Cristiana Moisescu contributed to this report.
cnn
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