According to the Ukrainian military intelligence service, almost two months after the start of the Ukraine war, nothing has changed in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans. “The goal of the military aggression has remained the same: This is an operation to destroy the statehood of Ukraine,” intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov told Der Spiegel, according to an advance report on Sunday.
According to Russia, Ukraine should “cease to exist as a state,” said Budanov. When asked why Russia decided to withdraw its troops from the region around the capital Kyiv, Budanov said: “They didn’t just retreat like that – we drove them out of the Kyiv region. It started when we took the city of Irpin This threatened to cut their forces in two in the Kiev region.”
Budanov said he was not surprised that the Russian plan to conquer Kyiv failed. But he is surprised about something else: “How incompetent and negligent the Russian commanders approached the implementation of such a large operation. If they really believed that they would be done with it in three days – and according to our findings they were absolutely convinced of it – then the Russian leadership must ask themselves how competent their generals are.”
Budanov also repeated the Ukrainian government’s demand for weapons from Germany: “We need artillery systems – the German army is particularly strong in them,” said the major general. “And unfortunately we need tanks, because we had very large losses of armored vehicles.”
The Ukrainian army wants to use the weapons to liberate the occupied territories, said Budanov. This includes the Crimean Peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014. Budanov doesn’t see a problem with training Ukrainian soldiers on the Leopard battle tank, for example: “We’ll learn that quickly. With all due respect, that’s not advanced mathematics.”