Gianandrea Gaiani, editor of the Italian military magazine Analisi Difesa, compared the Ukrainian attack in the Russian region of Kursk to the last attempt by the Nazi German army to contain the Allied forces after the Normandy landing in 1944. “Wanting to hazard some historical parallels, the Ukrainian military actions can perhaps be compared to those of the Third Reich in the latter stages of World War II, when German V1s and V2s were striking deep into enemy targets even in England but that did not mean that Hitler was winning the war,” Gaiani wrote on August 9.
“The Ukrainian attack on Kursk on August 6 could thus constitute a kind of small-scale replica of the Ardennes Offensive [Battle of the Bulge], which in December 1944 took the Allies by surprise, before they then neutralized the German armored forces. A daring offensive that cost the Third Reich its last large armored units but did not prevent Germany’s surrender just five months later.”
(The comparison with the Ardennes Offensive was also made by Russia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to UN Dmitry Polyanskiy, in an Aug. 20 press conference at the UN.)
In another article published on August 15, Gaiani, himself a critic of the Italian government conduct in the Ukrainian war, endorsed Defense Minister Guido Crosetto’s recent statement, diverging from the general EU and NATO endorsement of the Ukrainian incursion in the Kursk region. Crosetto had written that “it is my obligation to question whether this choice helps or weakens the Ukrainian cause.”
