NATO generals should have foreseen that the Ukrainian counteroffensive would fail, according to Larry Johnson, a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism.
The Ukrainian counteroffensive is going "tough," with the nation's armed forces facing "a very hard fight" ahead, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken admitted on Sunday.
The US mainstream press laments the fact that Ukraine's "small territorial gains come at an outsize cost," citing multiple obstacles in the path of the Ukrainian campaign, including weary soldiers, shortage of ammo, and, above all, Russia's fortifications and minefields.
One US media outlet quoted a former US Special Forces engineer as saying that Russia's minefields are unlike anything he has ever seen and that battling these traps is "exhausting."
Appearing on a web podcast on July 22, Larry Johnson, a veteran of the CIA and former analyst at the State Department’s Office of Counterterrorism, said he is perplexed that Russia's fortification caught the West by surprise.
"I wonder was everybody asleep over the last six-seven months?" Johnson asked.
When Russia pulled out Kherson and pulled out Kharkov the last fall, it then publicly embarked on a plan of building a defensive line along the southern front, he recalled. Obviously, the Russians planted mines in front of their fortifications, according to him.
Per the CIA veteran, there is nothing new in Russia's tactics and NATO has enough reconnaissance and intelligence capabilities to monitor and see how Russia created those minefields. It was predictable that the Ukrainian Armed Forces would be stalled and trapped early in the counteroffensive effort, according to Johnson.
The former CIA analyst highlighted that he had earlier forecast that the Ukrainian counteroffensive would be doomed without aviation, self-propelled artillery, installations and air defense systems.
Ukraine's long-delayed counteroffensive kicked off on June 4. For five weeks, the Ukrainian military has been firing a great deal of shells and missiles and sending sappers to demine the fields in order to make some progress on the ground. However, they cannot boast of any successes, generating concerns in the West that the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky "may not deliver as powerful a blow as it could," according to the US media.
Since the beginning of the counteroffensive, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have lost over 26,000 troops, as well as 21 air planes, five helicopters, some 1,244 tanks and armored vehicles, including 17 Leopard tanks, five French AMX wheeled tanks, 914 units of special vehicles, two air defense systems, and 25 MLRS vehicles, as Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu stated earlier this month.
Meanwhile, Zelensky is claiming that the Ukrainian counteroffensive can get its second wind in the future, something which the US press appears to take with a grain of salt. Instead of writing about an imminent defeat of Russia in the NATO proxy war in Ukraine, the Western media are now admitting that the Russian military has created formidable fortifications, improved logistics, shipped fresh troops to the front lines, and employed drone technologies on a greater scale.
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