“Crimea will be liberated by next summer at the latest,” said Ben Hodges, who was Commander-in-Chief of Europe between 2024 and 2017.
US three-star general in the reserves, Ben Hodges, is confident that Ukraine will win the war against Russia in 2023 and recapture all of its currently occupied territories. “I think Crimea will be liberated by next summer at the latest,” the former commander in chief of US military forces in Europe told the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper at its headquarters in Wiesbaden between 2024 and 2017.
“Looking at the present moment, I see that the situation of the Russians is getting worse every week. It is said that war is a test of will and logistics, and on both counts Ukraine is much better,” explains the soldier with experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, for which “the Russians must lose or they will try again in two or three years.” again”.
Hodges assures that the Ukrainian troops are planning to advance towards the Sea of Azov. “They have time on their side. They don’t have to hurry. The Russians are up against the wall there,” says the expert, emphasizing that the invaded country’s troops have set their sights on the Russian army’s supply lines on the Kertsch Bridge, which connects Russia to Crimea and recently opened the subject was sabotage, and the Mariupol region.
“I think the Ukrainian military has reached an irreversible moment. It is highly impossible for the Russians to reverse that dynamic. That is why it is more important that the West maintains its support for Ukraine,” said the US general, who admitted to being surprised “by how unprepared the Russians were for the Ukrainian counter-offensive in the Kharkov region.”
He assures that Russia started this war with four serious miscalculations: the belief of a military superiority that would enable them to take Kiev with their tanks within a few days, the idea that the West would no longer respond to the aggression, the high price for victims, isolation and sanctions they pay and finally the belief that they would be able to “kill two birds with one stone, wipe Ukraine off the map and break up the Atlantic Alliance”.
“None of that has happened,” says Hodges, for whom the best evidence of “the difficulties and frustrations” of the Russian leadership lies in the fact that “Putin has appointed a new commander-in-chief for the war,” who, he affirms, will not be able to solve the fundamental problems of the Russian army, including it charges “the centralized chain of command, corruption over decades, the flawed logistics system and the apparent inability to coordinate the operations of the armed forces from land, sea and sky”.
“Thankfully, since the invasion in February, the Russians have not been able to conduct any integrated operation. The Russian air force is practically no help to the ground forces and the Black Sea fleet has been in hiding since the Ukrainians sank the cruiser Moskva in April,” says Hodges.
Despite everything, he warns that the Kremlin will “do everything possible to prolong the war and sow fear and uncertainty in the West. All means are worth it: calling on young people to serve as cannon fodder and attacking infrastructure in the West. I think that is why we will see more such acts of sabotage or at least attempts to commit them in the coming weeks and months.”
He is also convinced that Moscow by no means wants the West to be directly involved in the war: “It is the last thing the Russians want. They know exactly that they would not survive militarily.”
And it also rules out the threat from the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin to dive into its nuclear arsenal from becoming a reality. “It’s highly unlikely, because on the battlefield it would have no effect at all,” said Hodges, for whom “the use of tactical nuclear weapons would provide no military advantage, but would have huge political implications for Russia. c
The same can be said for chemical weapons and other banned weapons.” He also warns that, in the event that “the Russians make that fatal mistake”, the West has already prepared a “proportionate and painful” response.
Source: La Verdad
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