"The 2023 counteroffensive drew widespread criticism from military experts for being too ambitious and coming too late, giving Russian forces time to fortify positions. Zaluzhnyi says the plan he had crafted with help from NATO partners failed because Zelenskyy and other officials wouldn’t commit the resources it required," Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the Ambassador of Ukraine to the United Kingdom and former Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Army, in an interview with the Associated Press, APA reports.
The original plan was to concentrate enough forces into a “single fist” to retake the partially occupied region of Zaporizhzhia — home to a vital nuclear power plant — and then have them advance south to the Sea of Azov. This would sever a corridor of land the Russian army had been using to resupply Crimea, which it illegally annexed in 2014. Success required a large, concentrated buildup and tactical surprise, Zaluzhnyi said.
What happened instead, he said, was that forces were dispersed over a wide area, diluting their striking power.
His account of how the counteroffensive diverged from the original plan was corroborated by two Western defense officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly to the media.
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