Russia to Soon Deplete Offensive Capabilities: Ukraine’s National Guard Commander

Brig. Gen. Oleksandr Pivnenko, commander Ukraine’s National Guard, said Russia would be unable to sustain its multi-prong offensives in “another month and a half” and at that time, Ukraine should be ready to seize the initiative.

Speaking to Ukrinform, Pivnenko said Moscow does not have unlimited resources.

“It’s difficult. But the enemy’s offensive capabilities are not limitless, and how many losses they will suffer ... I think another month or a half – and they will not be able to conduct active assaults in many directions at once and will be on the defensive in any case. And for us this time we need to form our units, to prepare them,” said Pivnenko.

Russia’s offensive is active on multiple fronts, including the Donbas region that saw Moscow making creeping gains near Chasiv Yar and Avdiivka; on the Kherson front in the south, Ukrainian troops recently had to withdraw from the Krynky bridgehead as Russian activities persisted. However, Ukraine also has some successes in containing Russia’s renewed offensives in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions.

Pivnenko also said there have been positive developments in training expansion after he assumed the commander role in July 2023.

“Apart from the front, our main task was to increase the capacity of educational centers. We understood that the more well-trained servicemen there are, the more effective we will be on the battlefield, and the more personnel we will be able to maintain.”

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“Previously, 1,500 people could be trained at one time, now at least 5,000 can be trained at the same time, and we are increasing this number. When I arrived, there were two training centers, we created another one, plus a fourth in the process of creation,” he said.

The National Guard of Ukraine falls under the Ministry of Internal Affairs and is generally responsible for public security. However, during martial law and wartime, it is also subordinated to the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) and performs defensive duties – now also offensive.

Pivnenko has advocated for offensive brigades within the National Guard. He believed it would be much more effective for guardsmen to fight under a single cohesive body rather than being dispersed among other structures.

“It is more effective to fight in a brigade than to transfer company or battalion tactical groups here and there,” he said.

Pivnenko added that the new offensive brigades – seven of them – have demonstrated positive results in holding back Russia’s invasion.

“We are not losing positions, we are slowly taking them back, as in some areas in the east. We have created a tactical group that unites two or three brigades and can manage them. In the Armed Forces, this is not a novelty, but in the National Guard, this is the first such practice,” he added. 

The need for systemic changes

He said Ukraine should also look for the weak points of Russian positions and bypass the strong ones, though it might require systemic changes that won’t arrive overnight.

“You need to adapt, change the management model, set goals: if it doesn’t work, try asymmetrically. But you can’t radically change everything, everything takes time, especially if we talk about systemic changes,” he added.

Pivnenko’s statement on systematic changes coincided with that of Oleh Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker and military commander. In a recent interview, Sentsov told BBC Ukraine that an aging command structure persists in the AFU despite some modern developments, and that a modernized approach similar to NATO, such as objective post-operational reviews, is needed.

“The army is a very archaic, vertically built structure. It cannot be reformed from within. The army has always been more conservative than any other state institution,” said Sentsov.

“You are expected to either complete the task and then you are good, or you are not. But war cannot always have a positive result. It is necessary to understand why the result is negative.

“We had a counteroffensive in the south in the summer of 2023. Nowhere after that was there a closed discussion among the military about exactly what went wrong,” said Sentsov.