There were 1500 mines on Chonhar, and to fight back, there should have been 200,000 mines - Naiev
According to the former commander of the Joint Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Lieutenant General Serhii Naiev, in order to prevent the enemy from breaking out of the temporarily occupied Crimea in 2022, it was necessary to adopt legislative decisions on the use of the Armed Forces and introduce a legal regime of martial law.
This was stated by the former commander of the Joint Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Lieutenant General Serhiy Nayev, in an interview with Ukrainska Pravda, Censor.NET reports.
"In 2014, when the temporary occupation of Crimea took place, troops were sent to different areas - Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv regions, including the Crimean direction - so the Ukrainian army took measures to repel the aggression.
In the Crimean direction, our military dug some trenches, there were several brigades there, then they mined five bridges on the isthmuses: two on the Arabat Spit, which were detonated by a surface charge. Directly on Chonhar, there were three bridges - two road and one railway. Explosives were planted there, a little over 1,500 mines. In order to be ready for repulse, there had to be about 200,000 mines there," Naiev said.
The general stressed that he was talking about 2014. Subsequently, these brigades moved from the Crimean direction to the territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, while small units remained in the south. According to Naiev, the leadership of the Armed Forces requested that at least an anti-terrorist operation regime be introduced in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions so that troops could be deployed within the legal framework.
"Imagine a military commander comes to the owner of a property complex and says: "Can I place an artillery battery on your property complex?". And the owner of the property complex says: "On what grounds?". There were no such decisions, at least to deploy these forces. They refused, saying that there would be no such legal regimes in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions," explains Naiev.
Regarding the most resonant question in society - "who cleared Chonhar?", the general said the following:
"This question makes no sense. This direction was subordinated to the 'South' group of troops, and there was a separate battalion on this isthmus. And in this battalion there are soldiers who blow up these bridges. Accordingly, on the night before the attack, when I was telling the commanders that an attack was possible tomorrow, I also told the commander of the group in this area to get these bridges ready to blow up. And when the attack took place, those soldiers had to blow up the bridges. But we have to imagine that the bridges were not blown up by robots, but by ordinary people like you, like me. And they had to do it when bombs and rockets were flying."
Regarding what could have been done differently in the south, Naiev said that, in his opinion, it was necessary to make a decision to use the armed forces and introduce martial law. This is about the preparations in those previous years.
According to the general, in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, it was necessary to make the same decision as in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Then the military command would have been digging trenches and laying mines - not 1,500, but hundreds of thousands.
Before the war itself, it would have been necessary to increase the number of troops through mobilisation. Then there would have been two additional territorial defence brigades in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions, brigades from the reserve corps, mechanised tank brigades, which would have been transferred by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Naiev added.
