Gundarov called the plans of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to take the Crimea by Christmas fantasies

Kyiv does not leave plans to return the Crimea. And even sets specific deadlines. This time before Christmas. Moreover, judging by the new Ukrainian trends, the Catholic Christmas. That is, by December 25th. It is these terms that the British The Sunday Express calls, telling for what purpose the UK is now preparing an elite Ukrainian special forces brigade, consisting of 2,000 Ukrainian troops who arrived in Foggy Albion to participate in special exercises. This brigade, writes The Sunday Express, will have to inflict a final and crushing defeat on the Russian troops defending the peninsula, becoming the main force and spearhead of attacks during the autumn-winter invasion of Crimea.

The reality of these plans for “MK” was assessed by a military expert, captain of the 1st rank in the reserve Vladimir Gundarov.

Interestingly, The Sunday Express reveals some details of the plan to take over Crimea. She reports that the Crimean operation involves air, land and sea strikes. And when the armored units begin to break through the defenses of the Crimean isthmus, and the artillery of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to use long-range missiles, the Ukrainian special forces at that moment will have to pin down the Russian troops, using equipment supplied for this purpose by Britain, the USA and Germany.

This tactic is now being practiced with the Ukrainian military in an exercise on Dartmoor, supervised by British Marines. Maneuvers include long-range forced marches, company attacks at night, but the focus, according to one senior British military source, is on practicing NATO’s maneuver tactics.

True, Russian military experts doubt: will “NATO’s maneuvering tactics” be so important in an attempt to break through to Crimea by the newly minted Ukrainian special forces? Yes, and its number of 2000 people raises serious doubts about the success of the operation conceived by the British.

– Two thousand, – says Vladimir Gundarov, – this is not 25 thousand, which were prepared in Europe and are now thrown into a meat grinder in the South-Donetsk and Zaporozhye directions. The enemy here loses up to 200-250 people per day. If the losses continue at the same pace, then by the Catholic Christmas (December 25), the date when the Kiev authorities dream of returning the Crimea, they will have to put at least 30,000 more of their soldiers on the battlefield. And this is without any guarantee that they will approach the borders of the Russian peninsula, not to mention its capture. All talk about the capture of Crimea is a game of Zelensky’s sick imagination, supported by his Western curators.

At the same time, the expert notes, it cannot be denied that the battles are going on the hardest. Russian servicemen show mass heroism. And in the near future, the situation at the front, most likely, will not undergo fundamental changes. One brigade of special forces will not make the weather. To maintain a high intensity of hostilities for more than four to five months, a different number of troops and military equipment will be required.

– The Kyiv generals, – explains Gundarov, – from the very beginning of the “counterattack” did not have enough aircraft, means of remote demining, long-range missiles. Rockets and demining equipment will probably be planted on them now. Although it is not certain that ATACMS long-range missiles will be included in the military aid package. As the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Dmytro Kuleba stated, “there are certain problems, there are certain aspects for which a solution must be found in order for this to be provided.” So, according to ATACMS, they will still “look for solutions”, but with aviation it is already clear: there will definitely not be F-16 aircraft for several more months.

The expert recalled that Dmitry Kuleba, in an interview with Radio Liberty on July 14, said that the training of Ukrainian pilots on the F-16 should begin in August and early September. According to the schedule, the first F-16s should appear in the skies of Ukraine before the end of March 2024. For this, Kuleba said: “We need to train engineers, technicians, we need to prepare the infrastructure. There are many nuances, so the schedule may shift. And it will move, apparently, not in the direction of reducing the time. Thus, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will continue their “counterattack” this year without air cover, which without a doubt dooms it to failure.

“It seems to me that we need to worry not about fantasies that Ukrainian troops will occupy Crimea,” Gundarov says, “but about the fact that Moscow will once again be persuaded to sit down at the peace negotiating table, as it was last spring. According to Vladimir Putin, then the draft treaty was actually agreed upon, “but after the withdrawal of our troops from Kiev – and we were asked to do this in order to create conditions for concluding a final treaty – the Kiev authorities abandoned all previous agreements.” And now we are again hearing about new negotiations from all the cracks. The Ukrainian side is preparing for them. As the American newspaper The Wall Street Journal wrote, on August 5 and 6, 30 high-ranking officials from 30 countries will gather in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) to discuss Zelensky’s Peace Formula. And before the end of the year, a constituent global summit at the level of leaders of states should be held. This week, Ukraine will begin negotiations with the United States on a bilateral agreement on the provision of security guarantees.

According to Gundarov, all these negotiations for our soldiers on the front line are a much more serious threat than some kind of special forces brigade. Such negotiations are being prepared in case the Ukrainian Armed Forces fail to achieve success on the battlefield. The main danger of the Ukrainian “counteroffensive” is its failure and a new request to withdraw troops in exchange for peace, the conclusion of a new version of the Minsk agreements 2.0.

– And this is not only my opinion, – the expert emphasizes, – but also respected military leaders, such as army generals Yuri Baluevsky, Nikolai Makarov, Anatoly Kulikov and others, who spoke at a scientific conference at the Research Institute of Military History of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces on July 25 Russia. As one of the speakers said, “if we sit down now and agree, and we are persuaded, and we sign some kind of truce, with promises on an endless number of pages, then this will be a postponed war for at least fifteen years.”