Stuff Digital Edition

‘We’ll fight with bare hands’

THE general is ready for a war he knows he may not win.

Absent of allies and with few foreign friends, short of modern weaponry, and outmatched on land, sea and air, fury may be his best defence.

‘‘We have about half a million people who went through a war in this country in which they have either lost someone or something. Half a million who have lost the blood of a relative, lost their homes or lost their friends, and they are ready to tear apart Russians with their bare hands,’’ Ukrainian Lieutenant-General Oleksandr Pavliuk stated coldly.

He is determined to ravage any Russian force unwise enough to invade his homeland.

‘‘If our intelligence manages to predict the direction of the main Russian hit, after the first big losses they won’t go further,’’ he said.

Pavliuk, 52, who commands a combined arms group of 52,000 personnel on the front line in eastern Ukraine where the Russian hammer is expected to fall, knows his enemy well.

He joined the Soviet armed forces in 1987, and trained as a tank commander. In later years, he fought against his erstwhile comrades, and talks with pride of leading a brigade of Ukrainian soldiers against Russian airborne troops in the battle for Luhansk airport in 2014.

Yet he is sanguine when discussing the expanded war he now faces, with the United States predicting that the 100,000 Russian troops massed around Ukraine may soon attack.

Speaking at a military base in Popasna, near the front line,

Pavliuk said Russia’s deployment amounted to 54 battlefield tactical groups, including 36 Iskander mediumrange ballistic missile systems, some of which were in range of the capital, Kyiv.

Among various scenarios, February 20 is noted as a potential start date for the invasion.

This is when the Winter Olympics will end in Beijing, and Russian President President Putin, eager to woo China, may not wish to tarnish the event. It will also mark the end of a joint

Russian-Belarus military exercise on Ukraine’s border.

Western intelligence agencies expect that any invasion will begin with Russia moving its forces into eastern Ukraine in stages, with thousands of soldiers arriving by rail to reinforce units already in the area.

Ukrainian commanders have begun distributing weapons in anticipation of a protracted campaign in areas where the regular army may be overwhelmed. ‘‘We have created territorial defence units, which

means there will be more than 100,000 volunteers who are ready to take up arms.’’

Pavliuk said victory for Ukraine would be a war in which his forces reclaimed all their territory, even the ground lost eight years ago to pro-Russian separatists in the east, ‘‘until the Ukrainian flag is hanging all along the border with Russia’’.

He also described a scenario outlined by Ukrainian military intelligence: Russia could attack from several directions and capture eight key regions in the east of the country, including the cities of Dnipro, Odessa and Kharkov, so that Ukraine lost its main military and industrial capabilities as well as its access to the Black Sea.

Pavliuk noted the divisions among Nato members in response to the crisis, which has left Ukraine swaddled by wellwishing statements but undefended by the military alliance. He singled out Germany, which has refused to supply Ukraine with weapons through the Nato Support and Procurement Agency, while continuing to send ambivalent signals over whether it will turn off the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline running from Russia to Germany in the event of an invasion.

Asked how European countries would respond to a Russian attack, Pavliuk said in weary jest: ‘‘They will be ‘concerned’ – perhaps ‘very concerned’. Europe is in its own comfort zone and does not want to act, just like in 1939.

‘‘Nobody really understands that invasion would be the end of the values and of the way the European Union exists. It would be an end to the European project. If Russia gets a country with the potential of Ukraine, then it will not stop. It’ll be the Baltic countries next.’’

He reflected for a moment on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, under which Ukraine relinquished its nuclear weapons in return for territorial protection. Then he pulled on his flak jacket and moved off into the snowy wastes with a cortege of soldiers.

‘‘It was a huge mistake for Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons,’’ he said. ‘‘It is a mistake we are still paying for.’’

WORLD

en-nz

2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-01-23T08:00:00.0000000Z

https://stuff.pressreader.com/article/281771337569364

Stuff Limited