Ukraine: Batacchi (Rid), ‘with urban warfare houses are trenches, devastating for civilians’

“More than urban guerrilla warfare, I would speak of ‘war of attrition’, which is a bit different. The Russians, basically, are not entering the cities, except in Mariupol, where an urban battle is actually being fought. But not. the Russian military and the citizens of Mariupol are facing each other, but the Russian military, in particular also Chechens, and elements of a brigade of the Ukrainian army, especially the Azov regiment of the Ukrainian National Guard. It is an urban battle, something similar from what we have seen it seems to me in 2004 in Fallujah in Iraq, when the American forces fought a very hard urban battle with the Iraqi insurgents “. So to Adnkronos Pietro Batacchi, director of the Italian Defense Magazine (Rid). “The Russians, on the other hand – he explains – prefer to avoid other Ukrainian cities, they try to surround them and unfortunately they hit hard with artillery and for a few days even with air strikes, we see it in Kharkiv, in Mykolaiv, in Sumy and also in Chernihiv, where the Ukrainian forces fighting in that sector are cut off, unlike Kharkiv which is not surrounded. The Russians would like to do the same thing in Kiev, but they find it difficult. Probably the forces are not enough and in fact they are trying to mobilize their own military instrument “. As for the hypothesis that, without a ceasefire, an urban guerrilla scenario could be envisaged that goes on for months, Batacchi replies:” I believe that this war will continue for a few more weeks, at most a few months. Then, at a certain point, it will no longer be possible to move forward, also because resources on both sides are scarce, even if the Ukrainians are supplied at full capacity by NATO countries. go that if the Russians don’t get some things in a couple of weeks, at some point they will have to find a way out on a negotiating level, and we as the West will have to favor this way out, otherwise the consequences could be far worse “. An urban warfare would also be a dramatic scenario for civilians. “Unfortunately, several civilians have died in Mariupol – underlines the military analyst -, clearly we do not know the correct numbers because obviously the Ukrainians have a vested interest in oversizing the numbers, while the Russians have an interest in undersizing them. In this war, when they face each other. these aspects, it is always good not to trust either of the two contenders, but the impact on the civilian population is devastating and under the eyes of all, also because when an urban battle is fought, civilians are the first to suffer because it is fought between the homes, which are effectively transformed into trenches, shelters for snipers, command and control posts “. A scenario of urban guerrilla warfare, Batacchi observes, “on the one hand, militarily, would be an advantage for Ukraine, because it would mean buying more time, pulling them out, and the Ukrainians would benefit from it, but clearly all this translates into enormous damage to civil infrastructures, which already now, especially in the eastern and southern part, and the part of Kiev, have been heavily damaged. relatively infrequent “.