- Igor Girkin is a former Russian military commander who led the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
- Most recently, he criticized the Kremlin’s military strategy in Ukraine.
- The soldiers are facing “the deepest crisis of strategic planning,” Girkin wrote on Telegram.
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A former Russian military commander who visited the front lines in Ukraine said Russian soldiers were confused because they were waging a war with no clear objective and poor strategic planning by the Kremlin.
Igor Girkin, a former Federal Security Service officer and military chief who led the annexation of Crimea in 2014, has been a recent critic of Russia’s military strategy in Ukraine and often voiced his views on Telegram.
In October, he announced he would be joining the Russian army to fight in Ukraine and eventually illegally joined the Donetsk People’s Republic Battalion, according to the Institute for War Studies. With the unit he was deployed to Svatove in the Luhansk Oblast region.
Girkin on Telegram on Tuesday told what he saw at the front and said that Russian troops are fighting without clear “strategic goals”.
“Put simply, the troops are fighting ‘by inertia’ and have absolutely no idea of the ultimate strategic goals of the current military campaign,” he wrote, according to an inside translation of his Telegram post.
He went on to say that the lack of a clear purpose and conditions for victory or simply ending the war creates “apathy” among soldiers.
“In most parts of the Armed Forces of the RF (Russian Federation), soldiers and officers do not understand: in the name of what, for what and with what goals are they fighting. It is a mystery to them: what is the condition for victory? or just a condition for ending the war,” Gurkin wrote. “And the authorities of the Russian Federation cannot explain this to them, since they have set a clear goal for the SMO [Special Military Operation] means ‘restricting the room for manoeuvre’ – that is, missing the opportunity to declare the SMO’s goals achieved at any time when the Kremlin leaders see it opportune.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday said the war in Ukraine could be a “long process” and quietly acknowledged that the conflict had not gone according to plan.
His remarks before the President’s Human Rights Council came shortly after Ukrainian forces sent drone strikes deep into Russian territory.
Putin said it was “pointless” to ask for more troops but warned Russia will “defend itself with any means at our disposal”.