The former commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) Valery Zaluzhny has said he was prevented from creating a corps of elite soldiers trained in the West - an initiative he said was crucial at a key stage of the war, Focus reports.
In a comment to The Times, Ukraine's ambassador to the UK revealed that there were plans to create airborne assault units in late summer 2022. However, the project remains only on paper due to bureaucratic obstacles.
Zaluzny expressed support for President Volodymyr Zelensky's efforts to modernize the army by moving to a corps structure modeled after the US and UK, instead of the current brigade organization.
He recalled that after declaring independence in 1991, Ukraine inherited an army of 780,000 people with a Soviet structure, which, in his words, is “completely incapable of conducting modern combat operations“.
According to him, it was the reforms that brought the Ukrainian army closer to NATO standards that played a key role in the initial resistance to the full-scale Russian offensive. Among them is the integrated approach to combat operations - through joint operations between the different branches of the armed forces: ground, air, navy and cyber forces.
After February 24, 2022 However, commanders are overwhelmed, and the army - consisting of over 100 brigades spread across several operational zones - has difficulty implementing further reforms.
That is why in the summer of 2022, Zaluzhny launched the transition to a corps structure. But despite the efforts, the project to create an airborne corps with training abroad never materialized.
“The initiative itself was blocked. The corps, which was supposed to begin training abroad, remained only on paper“, emphasizes Zaluzhny.