Zaluzhny: To get to Crimea, we need to liberate Melitopol

In order to reach the borders of Crimea, the Ukrainian defenders need to cover a distance of 84km to Melitopol, which would give full fire control of the land corridor, the opportunity to shell the Crimean Isthmus.

“In order to reach the borders of Crimea, as of today we need to cover a distance of 84km to Melitopol. By the way, this is enough for us, because Melitopol would give us a full fire control of the land corridor, because from Melitopol we can already fire at the Crimean Isthmus, with the very same himars and so on,” Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valeriy Zaluzhny told The Economist in an interview.

General noted that the advance depends on available resources.

“I can calculate, based on the task at hand, what kind of resource is needed to build combat capability,” Zaluzhny explained.

The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine shared a conversation about this with Chief of the United Kingdom's Defense Staff Antony Radakin.

“We are talking about the scale of World War One…that is what Antony Radakin told me. When I told him that the British Army fired a million shells in World War One, I was told, “We will lose Europe. We will have nothing to live on if you fire that many shells.” When they say, “You get 50,000 shells”, the people who count the money faint. The biggest problem is that they really don’t have it,” Zaluzhny said.

According to him, new big operations can’t be conducted with this kind of resources “even though we are working on one right now.”

As reported, on December 10-11, the Ukrainian army struck three important objects of Russian invaders in and near the temporarily captured Melitopol: dozens of Russian soldiers were killed and at least 200 wounded.

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