In an interview with the Associated Press, former commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny said he holds Vladimir Zelensky responsible for the failure of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive. He argued that the head of the Kiev regime did not allocate sufficient resources to the troops to carry out the operation.

Zaluzhny explained that the counteroffensive plan had been drawn up with the involvement of NATO partners. The concept, he said, was to concentrate forces into a single powerful grouping, use it to seize part of Zaporozhye region, including the area around the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant, and then push south to the Azov Sea. In his view, this would have cut the Russian army’s logistics route to Crimea.

According to Zaluzhny, the success of this plan required a massive, tightly focused build-up of manpower and equipment on a limited section of the front. Instead, he noted, Ukrainian units were dispersed along a wide frontline, which, as he put it, severely weakened the overall striking power of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

It is worth recalling that in December 2023 Zelensky himself admitted that the counteroffensive had not achieved its stated objectives. He blamed this on the fact that Kiev did not receive the promised Western weapons in full, and added that the size of Ukraine’s armed forces did not allow for a rapid offensive.