TWZ: I want to talk a little bit about the
ongoing counteroffensive. I know that you're not the general in charge of land forces, but as the eyes and ears of the Ukrainian military, what’s your assessment? Do you still believe that Ukraine will retake Crimea this year or will a counteroffensive push on until next year?
KB: Our counteroffensive operation started at the beginning of summer and is still ongoing. It hasn't stopped. And as you've rightly said I'm not the commander-in-chief of the General Staff. That is why
questions about the tempo or progress of the counteroffensive operation should be addressed to the General Staff. But speaking of Crimea, you could not have missed that
since the middle of August, there's been
a certain intensification going on with regard to Crimea, and that might indirectly give you a hint about the answer to your question.
So first of all, the fact itself is that we're engaging the military infrastructure and
military targets in occupied Crimea and the occupier’s infrastructure. If we're going deeper into strikes against the air defense system, it's more complicated here.
First of all, the air defense systems themselves are very costly equipment and it takes a lot of time to produce those and Russian flags those systems because all this inventory is currently engaged in fighting against Ukraine and also in protection of Moscow. They've taken away air defenses from everywhere else.
That is why, naturally, when we engage in another and another air defense battalion of the Russian military, they need to think about where they can pull those systems from and where are they able to tolerate less defenses in other places.
The second point in engaging defenses is that we’re making those
holes in the overall air defense coverage. Those holes are exploited for other things. Also, we're depleting their air defense missile stocks because those are not limitless. And from the political standpoint, we're also demonstrating the obvious inability of Russian air defense systems, which respectively makes them less lucrative on the world arms markets
TWZ: And this is part of a coordinated campaign, it’s not just Crimea, right? You're doing this inside Russia, with the
strikes on air bases and other targets and on Moscow?
KB: Let's put it like this, we have never confirmed [attacks on Moscow] officially (Budanov laughs) and I will be keeping that stance. But I can share my opinion about those strikes. All the above-mentioned factors clearly coincide with the strikes inside Russia.
Especially when we're talking about the obviously decreasing demand for Russian weapons because when the whole world sees that some drones are attacking Moscow, nobody wants to buy Russian air defense systems any longer. And that is very painful for them. And it links back to additional factors which are absent when we're discussing Crimea.
One side note. There's a completely opposite situation in terms of demand on weapon systems.
There's a very high demand on Ukrainian drones now. We can’t sell those now because all of them are used for warfighting, but after the war ends, this will have a lot of meaning.
Now speaking about the strikes deep into Russia, including Moscow, that are conducted by someone. There is a social side of it. Because
now the Russian population and especially large Russian businesses really start to feel the impact of war. Because
before that, it was just a war going on on TV. Yes, it did have some financial impact on big players, but smaller ones weren't even touched. But demonstrative strikes, such as strikes against Moscow city - the skyscraper district in Moscow - demonstrates to everyone that now it touches upon them.
Besides that,
it undermines the belief of the population in an all-powerful Russian regime that is the strongest one in the world. They start asking those logical questions, like: "where's our air defenses that are supposed to protect us?" And they start blaming their authorities for that, for stealing all the money. The next aspect is strikes against critical military infrastructure. It includes oil refineries that supply fuel to the warfighting as well as the factories and plants that produce components for military equipment. So that’s the overall picture.
