https://uk.news.yahoo.com/war-russia...053755023.html
General Zaluzhny said the introduction of modern sensors had made it virtually impossible for his or his enemy’s forces to advance without being detected.
This was best demonstrated when the general visited the front line in Avdiivka, in the east, where Russia recently advanced hundreds of metres by plunging two new armies into the battle there.
“On our monitor screens when I was there we saw 140 Russian machines ablaze – destroyed within four hours of coming within firing range of our artillery,” he said.
Russian forces lucky enough to escape the artillery barrage were hunted down by first-person-view drones as they fled.
Ukrainian forces suffered similar results on attempted advances, General Zaluzhny added.
General Zaluzhny said time had expired on the possibility of F-16 fighter jets, which Kyiv has been repeatedly calling for, becoming a game-changing weapon for his forces.
The American-made jets are expected to arrive in Ukraine next year, with some of the country’s pilots training on them in Romania.
The general said Russian air defences had improved, making the aircrafts less effective.
An experimental version of Russia’s S-400 surface-to-air missile system that can reach the skies beyond the city of Dnipro, some 60 miles from the front line, he warned.
Ukraine’s army should have been able to push back at a pace of 18 miles a day as it breached Russian defensive lines, the general said.
“If you look at Nato’s text books and at the maths which we did [in planning the counter-offensive], four months should have been enough time for us to have reached Crimea, to have fought in Crimea, to return from Crimea and to have gone back in and out again,” Gen Zaluzhny told the magazine.
When his troops got nowhere, he wondered if it was his commanders, so he changed them. They still had no luck.
He said he only got an insight when he reread a book published in 1941 by a Soviet major-general, who analysed the battles of the First World War. It was called “Breaching Fortified Defence Lines”.
He said: “And before I got even halfway through it, I realised that is exactly where we are because just like then, the level of our technological development today has put both us and our enemies in a stupor.”
It is estimated that while up to 70,000 Ukrainians have been killed and 100-120,000 injured, Russia’s casualties stand at an estimated 120,000 deaths.