President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy disagreed with the assertion of American leader Donald Trump, who explained the failure of the Russian offensive on Kyiv in 2022 by a mistake of a Russian general who allegedly sent a tank column onto a waterlogged field. According to Zelenskyy, the main reason for the failure of the Russian operation was the resistance of Ukrainians, which Moscow significantly underestimated.
The President of Ukraine said this in an interview with Steven Bartlett for The Diary of a CEO podcast, published on October 22.
During the conversation, the host showed Zelenskyy a fragment of Trump's speech, in which the US president claimed that Russian troops could have captured the Ukrainian capital in one day. In his opinion, this was prevented by the decision of one of the generals to turn off the road onto agricultural land, where the armored vehicles got stuck in the mud.
Zelenskyy denied that the fate of the battle for Kyiv was decided by a navigational error of the Russian command. He recalled that Russian troops managed to reach the outskirts of the capital, occupied part of the surrounding settlements, and tried to encircle the city.
According to the president, the Ukrainian military and local residents put up active resistance, destroying Russian armored vehicles. Some enemy vehicles even managed to break through onto the streets of Kyiv, but this did not help Russia achieve its goal.
Zelenskyy estimated that Russia would have needed about 300-400 thousand troops in this direction to capture Kyiv. He explained that the offensive army not only had to advance to the capital but also leave significant forces to control the captured cities and towns.
According to Zelenskyy, the Russian command did not take this into account. Moscow expected that the Ukrainian leadership would leave the capital and that the population would not offer large-scale resistance.
The president also compared the events of 2022 with the occupation of Crimea in 2014. According to his assessment, the relatively easy seizure of the peninsula formed in the Kremlin the false impression that a similar scenario could be repeated in Kyiv.
Earlier, "Kurs Ukrainy" reported that on October 20, Trump again repeated his version about the mistakes of the Russian command during the offensive on Kyiv. Then the US president claimed that without this, Russian troops could have quickly captured the Ukrainian capital.
Based on materials from: The Diary of a CEO
