Infantry retreats
The infantry is retreating. 3,280 metres from the first position in Zalizne to the final position in Toretsk in 232 days. My company. 14 metres per day, less than a step per hour.
But we did our job well. In 1,000 days, the enemy occupied less than 1% of Ukraine's territory. This became one of the cards in the negotiations with Trump.
I'm not a military expert, I didn't graduate from any academies. But I was physically on many of these metres. I was directly involved and managed the battle. I was in front of Toretsk, Pokrovsk, Lyman, Kupiansk, and Bakhmut directions. I have two opinions on this matter.
We should not measure the success of the war in square kilometres. The first goal of military efforts is the destruction of the enemy army, and only then the capture of the enemy's territory, which he can use to replenish his army. I didn't invent this - it was Clausewitz, a classic of military art. That is, capturing sparsely populated areas or destroyed cities from which the population has been evacuated does not give the enemy a significant advantage in the war.
Holding positions at all costs leads to even greater losses of territory. By defending unfavourable lines "to the last", we simply do not have the people to stand on favourable ones. And we have not saved people and lost positions... (I cannot give specific examples in the public domain, but they exist).
The principle of "no step back" defence, i.e. holding positions at all costs and placing infantry in a killzone to mark the territories we control, leads to dubious consequences and heavy losses in the frontline units, particularly in the infantry.
Our losses are small in relation to the country's mobilisation potential, but devastating in relation to trained and experienced infantrymen at the level of squad leader and below. The combat capability of the Ukrainian infantry is maintained only by the fact that we manage to retain combat officers and NCOs above the level of squad leader. But the degradation of the infantry is increasing. This leads to increased casualties and reduced combat capability.
When a general asked me what I needed most, I said: "Don't change my soldiers for 200 metres of forest".
We are successful in deterring the enemy not because "no step back" works. It's because we have sacrificed the best infantry in the world to do so. I won't be able to gather fighters like those in my platoon in March 2023 in an entire company.
If we save the army, we will save Ukraine. We will change or we will die.
Serhii Churikov, 100th separate mechanised brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine
