Immediate supply of equipment and preparations for a new large-scale war – Taras Chmut spoke about the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Ukraine needs to start systematically working on the restoration and transformation of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for a new large-scale war.

Taras Chmut, Director of the Come Back Alive Charitable Foundation and Founder of Militarnyi, spoke about this during a briefing at the Ukraine Media Center.

It is important to remember that the war is not over, and this operational pause that is taking place now, no matter how long it is – a week, a month, or eight years, as before – will sooner or later lead to another great war. And we must constantly keep this in mind and keep preparing for it, – said Taras Chmut.

According to him, currently, the weakest point of Ukraine is air and missile defense. Despite the fact that the air defense forces survived the first attack, they are now exhausted. Chmut believes that in the future “we must transform anti-aircraft missile forces in both within the Ground Forces and the Air Force.”

“We need to solve issues of the air force and cruise missiles. In the future, it means establishing efficient scouting and strike systems to increase the effective depth of the fire damage against the enemy to at least 300 km and, later on, 500 km, and more. It would make it possible to substantially reduce losses sustained by the Armed Forces and transform the format of the war,” Chmut indicated.

Today, many new units within the Ukrainian Army have been created, and the old units have been deployed to the levels of wartime establishments. Some brigades have actually reached the division levels. The issue of arming them with equipment is acute, said the Director of “Come Back Alive”.

We have good partners in the West, especially the United States, which has a huge amount, perhaps not of the best technology, but the one that can meet our needs. If we talk about armored vehicles, it’s HMMWV and M113. Even, I would think, Abrams and more powerful systems, – shares the expert.

The founder of the Militarnyi does not rule out the supply of Western models of artillery and volley fire systems. He stressed that it is now important to get the new weapons as soon as possible to compensate for losses and form new units.

“And only then we can talk about unification, service adjustment, training, modernization, and all those processes that are normally carried out in a more or less peaceful environment,” said Chmut.