Ukraine is moving toward a strategic defeat — Bild

Ukraine is moving toward a strategic defeat at the front. Russian troops continue to dominate.

Military observer for Bild Julian Röpcke wrote about this on his page on the social network X.

“The situation can no longer be hushed up either by PR campaigns of the Ukrainian General Staff or by attempts of the government in Kyiv to downplay or ignore it,” he writes.

According to him, Ukrainian journalists and activists have realized the seriousness of the situation, but “neither the Ukrainian army nor its Western partners are drawing the necessary lessons from their past mistakes.”

He considers Western deliveries of armored vehicles useless “against the backdrop of Russia’s growing dominance in the field of fiber-optic and other unmanned systems.”

“Western countries continue to limit themselves to sporadic aid and investments in strategically overrated Ukrainian long-range drones,” Röpcke writes, calling for supplying Ukraine with missiles and drones.

He also has complaints about the Ukrainian authorities.

“The Ukrainian government appears to take the war of annihilation against its country only partly seriously. Where the supposedly 17,000 people mobilized every month are actually deployed remains a mystery to most observers and soldiers at the front. Desertion and temporary absence from duty, which often results in entire brigades existing only on paper, largely go unpunished. This leads not only to a misjudgment of the size and combat capability of the troops, but also to the emergence of significant gaps at the front and, as a consequence, to repeated Russian breakthroughs,” the German journalist states.

In his view, a new annual record of territorial losses will likely be set in November.

“This makes monthly losses comparable in size to the territory of the German state of Berlin possible. Thus, a Russian offensive in the areas adjacent to the large cities of Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia is a matter of several months, at most one or two years. The fact remains: if the government in Kyiv or its Western partners do not immediately change their strategic stance, Russia will gradually win this war,” Röpcke adds.

Earlier, Röpcke stated that in the east of Zaporizhzhia region, the defensive line of the Armed Forces of Ukraine had locally “collapsed.”