The news from the battle front in Ukraine is indeed desperate, but the actual news is that yesterday’s Washington Post (WaPo) reported it. And, further, a Ukrainian battalion commander put himself on the line, going public with the sorry state of affairs.
A battalion commander of Ukraine’s 46th Air Assault Brigade, a lieutenant colonel, “consented to having his photograph taken and said he understood he could face personal blowback for giving a frank assessment….” (His photograph, along with his call name, “Kupol,” make him unmistakable to those he criticized in Kiev.) In Kupol’s one year of command of about 500 soldiers, he reports, according to the WaPo, that “roughly 100 were killed in action and another 400 wounded, leading to complete turnover. Kupol said he was the sole military professional in the battalion….”
The WaPo then quotes him: “I get 100 new soldiers. They don’t give me any time to prepare them. They say, ‘Take them into the battle.’ They just drop everything and run. That’s it.” Their training is completely inadequate, so “our instructors need to be sent over there into the trenches. Because they failed in their task.” Further, Kiev needs to do less public relations and more systematic training: “It’s like all we do is give interviews and tell people that we’ve already won, just a little bit further away, two weeks, and we’ll win.”
