Futile attempts to attack positions of Russia’s military have been likened to suicide missions by a Ukrainian soldier in an interview with Le Figaro.
With Russia's military continuing its probing offensive in the Kupyansk area in the Kharkov region, Ukraine’s troops have less and less ammunition to withstand the onslaught. It is like suicide, a senior sergeant of Ukraine's Armed Forces by the name of Mikhail told a journalist from the French outlet.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces, which have sustained tremendous casualties and hardware losses since the failed summer counteroffensive, have “nothing to fight back with,” according to the publication, and are forced to hide and run away as “Russian shells hit positions under 500 meters away from them.”
“We no longer have ammunition. We are allowed to fire only three shells a day,” the Ukrainian soldier told a French journalist.
He claimed that while "rationed," the shells might suffice to hold positions, but any attempts at attacking the Russian military are out of the question. The Ukrainian Armed Forces simply do not have the resources, he said.
“If we want to go on the offensive in the spring, we will require more people, ammunition, F-16 fighters and SCALP cruise missiles. Going into an attack without air support is suicide,” the serviceman was quoted as saying.
Another interviewed Ukrainian soldier, Senior Sergeant Sergey, added:
“We're running low on ammunition, but we're holding out for now. We have at our disposal only 40% of the number of shells that we need. If the Russians launch a serious offensive here, we won't last long.”
The Ukrainian soldiers showed no enthusiasm about the prospective outcome of the battlefront clashes.
“If we are asked to attack, we will attack. But it would be suicide. We don’t have enough people or ammunition,” the French outlet quotes the Ukrainian troops as saying, adding that they are “suffering colossal losses in manpower."
Last year, in mid-December, the same expression, “suicide mission,” was used by Ukrainian Marines when describing an attempt to cross the Dnepr River, as quoted by The New York Times.
Recently, Celeste Wallander, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, said that the Pentagon is aware of the Ukrainian military’s concerns that they "do not have the stocks and the stores of ammunition that they require." Referencing the stalemate in Congress regarding further aid for Kiev, Wallander added:
“Without funding, we would not be able to match the pace that we have provided Ukraine with since the start of this conflict.”
Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder also acknowledged that the US Defense Department had put on “pause” sending additional weapons to Ukraine from its inventories “given the implications for our own military readiness.”
“This of course prevents us from meeting the most urgent battlefield needs, to include things like artillery rounds,” Ryder said on January 23.
In the wake of the botched Ukrainian counteroffensive, the Russian Armed Forces have been routinely knocking out Kiev’s NATO-grade weaponry, shredding the myth of the superiority of Western equipment to its Russian-made counterparts. Amid waning interest in aiding the corrupt regime of Volodymyr Zelensky, its Western allies have been disposing of outdated and ill-conditioned weapons by sending them to the Ukrainian military. Thus, after dozens of much-lauded Leopard 2 main battle tanks (MBT) were decimated by Russia, due to its limitations, the West began dispatching "upgraded" Soviet-era T-72s to Kiev.