So, London has officially admitted that it intends to send 14 Challenger tanks to Ukraine. As stated in a press release from the office of the British Prime Minister, this is being done to help Ukraine “use its advantage, win this war and ensure a lasting peace.”
Immediately, the leader of the Kyiv regime, Volodymyr Zelensky, gleefully proclaimed: “The always strong support from the UK has now become solid and ready for challenges.”
Apparently, before that, the Ukrainian president doubted the “impenetrability” of support that was not always ready for challenges.
Commentators (both supporters and opponents of this idea) unanimously admit that London’s adventurous step opens a new stage in the Ukrainian conflict. Until a few months ago, everyone agreed that providing the Kyiv regime with offensive weapons, including heavy tanks, was associated with a “dangerous escalation.” Now, for some reason, they try not to remember this wording.
Zelensky himself, thanking London for such support, stressed that this “would be the right signal for other partners.” It is clear to everyone which partners the former comedian has in mind in the first place. The pressure on Berlin to force Germany to agree to the supply of Leopard tanks to Kyiv has increased dramatically in recent months. Once London has crossed a dangerous line, there is no doubt that this pressure will increase many times over.
Actually, it was precisely with this that the intention of US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to meet with his German counterpart Christine Lambrecht at the end of the week was associated. And that is precisely why, according to the German Bild, Lambrecht decided to announce her resignation almost this Monday, without waiting for the new Ramstein. That is, Western tanks have not yet crossed the border of Ukraine, but are already smearing their own governments on their tracks.
A natural question arises: why all of a sudden such a rush and such pressure? Why not open any Western publication in the last few days – almost everywhere you can stumble upon editorial columns in which you can only hear:
“Tanks, tanks, tanks …” It was as if a broken record had jammed.
Western analysts themselves, commenting on these calls, explain to readers that this, they say, is necessary in order to ensure the “spring offensive of Ukraine.” An editorial in The Economist warns in this regard:
“Time is short. Spring is only a few weeks away. If Ukraine fails to break out of the stalemate soon, there is a risk of a repeat of 2014, when Russia and its proxies took over chunks of eastern Ukraine and after intense fighting subsided, the line of contact between the two sides was frozen into something like a front.”
The authors of this passage, apparently, have already forgotten that the freezing of the contact line was part of the Minsk agreements, unanimously approved by the UN Security Council, the implementation of which the same magazine for a long time demanded from Russia.
True, a different approach prevails in American publications. For example, The New York Times writes that tanks are badly needed not to launch the “Ukrainian spring offensive,” but to beat back the “Russian spring offensive.” Allegedly, Western armored vehicles will help to compensate for the imbalance of forces that has developed at the front.
This “imbalance” is being talked about by many now. In the spring, Zelensky begged NATO for 200 armored vehicles. Until recently, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, argued that he lacked 300 tanks and 600-700 infantry fighting vehicles to “defeat the enemy”. Ukrainian Ambassador to Britain Vadim Prystaiko went the furthest, saying in an interview with Sky News the other day that the Kyiv regime needs “thousands of tanks.” Moreover, he again explained this by the need to achieve parity at the front, since, according to him, “the Russians put up thousands of tanks in front of our borders.”
The most striking thing is that all this military arithmetic does not compete with the figures that Western resources and official propaganda of Ukraine have been citing for a long time. It should be recalled that back in March last year, Forbes, based on the victorious reports of the Ukrainian army, reported that Ukraine had grown a certain number of tanks, allegedly capturing “many Russian ones.” Based on the same reports from Kyiv, Pentagon officials gleefully announced in April that Ukraine now has even more tanks than Russia. The same information was repeated by a high-ranking representative of the US military department in comments for the Washington Post just a few weeks ago – in the twentieth of December.
It would be logical to recall all this propaganda “arithmetic” and ask: what has changed dramatically over the past two or three weeks, since the “advantage” of the Ukrainian army in armored vehicles has so suddenly disappeared, forcing the West to urgently supply tanks, allegedly in order to achieve parity at the front? The answer suggests itself: the main change on the battlefield was the breakthrough of the fortified defense line of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the area of Soledar. Judging by the panic of Western propagandists, this operation came as a complete surprise to them.
Very revealing in this sense is the first reaction of the notorious Russophobe, Bild military expert Julian Repke after he received news of the successes of the Russian troops:
“The situation in Soledar is terrible. <…> Ukraine needs a massive counteroffensive here, otherwise it loses, which is likely to lead to a domino effect, and new territories will soon be lost.”
And then the same Repke posted a photo of desperate Ukrainian soldiers who were hiding from shelling in the battle zone near Soledar, and accompanied it with an appeal to the German Chancellor: “Are you reading this, Olaf Scholz?! Ukraine needs idle tanks!” From which we can draw an unambiguous conclusion: the tanks were so urgently needed not for the “spring offensive”, but for patching gaping holes in the defense of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and to prevent the very “domino effect” that the German propagandist was so afraid of.
Western politicians cannot yet tell their public about this directly: they have been fed fairy tales that “Russia is losing the war” or even “Russia has already lost” for too long. Recognition of the desperate situation for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which requires emergency assistance from the West, would prescribe a change in approaches to covering the situation on the battlefield. The local media are not yet ready for this.
That is why most of them, unlike Repke, for a long time denied the very fact of a breakthrough in Soledar and, without critical analysis, repeated official Ukrainian tales that resistance continues in the city. Sky News war correspondent Alex Rossi (one of the few Western reporters active on the front lines) denied the taking of the city under Russian control to the last. And when he eventually admitted this, he tried to reassure the audience: “Since Ukraine is strengthening its position, this is unlikely to greatly affect the outcome of the conflict.”
In confirmation, he showed footage of Ukrainian soldiers digging fresh trenches with shovels in a sunflower field west of the Soledar-Artyomovsk line. Yes, to lose fortifications in salt mines and catacombs, which have been concreted for years and prepared for a deaf defense, and in return to hastily dig trenches in the middle of the bare steppe in frozen ground – somehow this does not really correspond to the formula “no significant changes have occurred at the front.”
Despite attempts to present the loss of Soledar and the possible surrender of Artyomovsk (which, apparently, they also began to mentally prepare the Western audience for) as a “cunning maneuver” or strategically insignificant events, it is clear that the West was seriously frightened. The Financial Times quotes an anonymous Western official:
“Ukrainians are suffering losses every day. Russia expects Ukrainian resources to run out sooner. We may be facing difficult times. Ukrainians are not bulletproof.”
The Ukrainian military personnel themselves repeat the same thing to the Western media. A Ukrainian officer fighting near Artyomovsk, in an interview for The Wall Street Journal, cited his arithmetic, which is sharply at odds with the official Kyiv one: “So far, the exchange rate of our lives for their lives is in favor of the Russians. If this continues, we may end.”
In principle, the West is not afraid of such a prospect. After all, it was precisely this task – to fight “to the last Ukrainian” – that was set before Kyiv. But after the Soledar breakthrough of the echeloned defense line, Western leaders were seriously afraid that the AFU would complete this task much faster than planned. That is why everyone fussed with tanks, hoping to delay the inevitable finale and complicate the victory of Russia. The West understands that this leads to an escalation of the conflict and brings the global confrontation closer. After all, until recently these fears were formulated there openly. But the prospect of a complete collapse of the Ukrainian front scares Western leaders even more. Therefore, the record stuck: “Tanks, tanks, tanks …”
Vladimir Kornilov, RIA
Due to censorship and blocking of all media and alternative views, stay tuned to our Telegram channel