Zaluzhnyi praises Iran and rebukes US in new article about war

Ukrainian Ambassador to the UK and former Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valerii Zaluzhnyi said that modern warfare is being changed by the rapid development of technology, in particular cheap drones. He criticized the US approach to warfare in the Middle East and noted the effectiveness of Iran's combined attacks.

He said this in a speech at King's College London on March 25, Apostrophe quoted him as saying.

Zaluzhnyi emphasized that the nature of international security is affected by the rapid development of technology. According to him, hostilities in the Middle East have confirmed that in a war of attrition, relatively cheap, affordable and, if desired, scalable drone systems can cause very large losses to the economy, especially through strikes on energy infrastructure.

The ambassador also noted that there is no defense against such systems, just like on the battlefield, today. However, if it exists, he added, it leads to the conclusion that it is the most affordable tool to make the economics of war extremely expensive and impossible to continue such actions.

"Finally, today's air defense is not able to guarantee protection, for example, against combined attacks. The same experience of the Middle East shows that while the United States, following an outdated doctrine, strikes at military facilities with expensive precision weapons, Iran skillfully uses combined attacks on infrastructure. It is this infrastructure that is absolutely impossible to protect today," he said.

Zaluzhnyi says that in order to control the flow of energy resources, today it is no longer necessary to have Krupp plants (German heavy industry company Friedrich Krupp AG) and super-expensive air and missile forces, a large fleet.

"Don't you think that very soon there will be not only states, but also, for example, international terrorists who will want to take advantage of these opportunities. The time of global change and the failure of the former major actors to understand this is the most favorable for this," he said.

We would like to remind you that The Washington Post, citing sources, reported that the Pentagon is considering redirecting weapons, destined for Ukraine to the Middle East, as the war in Iran is depleting some of the US military's most important munitions, including air defense.

As the Ukrainian News agency earlier reported, Zaluzhnyi recently published a resonant article on his blog, in which he analyzed the relationship between the war in Ukraine and the escalation in the Middle East. The general emphasized that the lack of resolve of world leaders and their inability to stop russia's aggression in time are destroying the global order and could lead to a large-scale confrontation. The article, and especially its headline "Only the dead will see the end of the war," sparked a lively discussion on Facebook.

Zaluzhnyi earlier said that the failure of the Ukrainian Defense Forces' counteroffensive operation in the Zaporizhzhia Region in 2023 was due to the dispersion of Ukrainian forces on a wide front.

The Ukrainian ambassador to the UK also said that in September 2022, he faced an SSU raid at his temporary headquarters in Kyiv, which he perceived as a threat.