That collaboration with NATO has moulded a group of professional-minded officers that aspired to Western standards and helped build a decentralized, empowered, more agile way of warfare than the Russian model, which has floundered in the Ukrainian mud.
In September 2021, two months before U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration started issuing loud warnings of a Russian invasion and sharing intelligence about the troop build-up on Ukraine’s borders, Zaluzhnyy described preparing for an attack.
“I have always been talking about this since I took office — because this is a threat of full-scale aggression,” Zaluzhnyy said in an interview with Radio Svoboda at the time. “Accordingly, our task as the Armed Forces is not to wait for manna from heaven. We must prepare for this. And we do everything for this. For our part, we are conducting a set of exercises, including our Western partners, including NATO members, as well as NATO partners. We are doing everything possible to make the enemy, so to speak, less willing to implement such a scenario.”
In January, Zaluzhnyy spoke to NATO’s Military Committee, the alliance’s top body of uniformed officers, and told them Ukraine’s military was ready.
“I reminded the allies that our war has been going on since 2014, and we have been doing our job ever since,” he told the national news agency Ukrinform after the meeting. We know what happened later on the famous February 24…..
But the Russians were faced with seasoned Ukrainian troops who had been trained by the centres set up in the west of the nation by the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Poland, Lithuania and other allies of NATO. This is one of the extremely discreet facets of this fight, but the results of which are observable on the ground. Ukrainian commanders have learned a lot from Western advances in this area, notably those small mobile units with modern armament are more useful than heavily armoured units that are vulnerable to anti-tank missiles. Russia is paying dearly for its old Soviet tactics founded on centralized command, not to mention the fallen Russian generals
“The Ukrainians are able to stay nimble,” a U.S. defence official told POLITICO. Since 2014, Ukrainians “can better adapt and react with initiative in a way that it could not before,” the official said, adding that flexibility has been a game-changer so far against a Russian onslaught that has fielded “a larger, more capable force — who is all about its rigid plan.”
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