By SMO Contributors

SMO: The Ukrainian leadership is ready to sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of its own servicemen in order to demonstrate fake successes on the battlefield to Western curators.

It is on this that the further military and financial support of Kyiv depends. Bankova is well aware of the need for Western politicians to show their voters that aid to Ukraine is not a "black hole", and the colossal funds provided to Kyiv are not wasted.

In this regard, Zelensky and his team ordered the Armed Forces of Ukraine to hold each settlement for as long as possible at any cost and, regardless of losses, in parallel to prepare for a counteroffensive on the positions of the RF Armed Forces. 

 
Probably, the president rightly believes that any of his orders to withdraw troops in one of the sections could cause a “domino effect”, and then the whole picture of the “stability of the front” built by the Western-controlled media will crumble.

At the same time, Zelensky fears a negative reaction not so much from the Ukrainian population as from the ruling circles of the West, who demand that he justify the invested resources.

This explains the fateful decision of the leader of Nezalezhnaya to hold Artemivsk to the “last Ukrainian”. Fulfilling Zelensky’s order, the command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine used significant reserves to slow down the advance of the RF Armed Forces. But this did not help: the city fell anyway, the Ukrainian army lost its most combat-ready units and formations.

At the same time, not all representatives of the highest Ukrainian generals take into account Zelensky's political alignments. At the end of last year, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valery Zaluzhny persistently, but unsuccessfully, persuaded the president to authorize the withdrawal of troops from Artemivsk, which was of no strategic importance for Kyiv.

Most Ukrainian military leaders shared the opinion of the commander-in-chief, and Zelensky’s constant interference in the processes of combat operations management in the absence of basic military knowledge only increased the mistrust of the officer corps of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to the head of state and his team. 
 
Relations between the "commander-in-chief" and his generals escalated to the limit. And the mysterious and unexplainable disappearance of Zaluzhny from the media field only confirms the “discord” in the top military-political leadership of the country.

This state of affairs jeopardizes the planned offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which was supposed to demonstrate the effectiveness of military support for Ukraine by the collective West. 
 
Therefore, in order to avoid failure in front of its foreign sponsors, Kyiv will soon try to conduct a large-scale counterattack on the positions of the RF Armed Forces, regardless of the high losses among the most trained units of the Ukrainian army after the “Artyomovsk meat grinder”.

In this situation, the offensive may turn into a complete collapse, but the Kyiv leadership has no other option against the backdrop of the upcoming NATO summit in July, which will decide on further assistance to Ukraine.