Zelenskyy and officials allocated insufficient resources for 2023 counteroffensive plan – former Ukrainian military chief Zaluzhnyi

Valerii Zaluzhnyi, Ukraine's Ambassador to the United Kingdom and former commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, has said the 2023 counteroffensive plan was not properly implemented because President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other officials would not commit the resources it required.

Source: Zaluzhnyi in an interview with the Associated Press

Details: Zaluzhnyi said the counteroffensive plan he had prepared with the participation of Kyiv's NATO partners had failed because Zelenskyy and other officials had not provided the required resources.

He noted that the initial plan had envisaged concentrating forces into a "single fist" in order to liberate part of Zaporizhzhia Oblast, where the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is located, and then advancing south towards the Sea of Azov.

This, he said, would have cut the land corridor used by Russian forces to supply temporarily occupied Crimea.

Zaluzhnyi stressed that success required a significant concentration of forces and tactical surprise.

Instead, he said, troops were dispersed across a broad section of the front, weakening the striking capability.

The AP reports that two Western defence officials, speaking anonymously because they were not authorised to talk to the media, corroborated his account of how the counteroffensive departed from the original plan.

Background:

• In September 2025, in an article for Ukrainian online newspaper Dzerkalo Tyzhnia (Mirror of the Week), Zaluzhnyi wrote that the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive, which he led, stalled due to an "insufficiency of assets and personnel" needed to achieve decisive superiority at the breakthrough sector and to maintain mobile reserves. He added that since autumn 2022, the fighting had become positional, with both sides effectively locked in a "positional stalemate". As an example of a failed surprise operation, he cited the strike in Russia's Kursk Oblast, which, in his assessment, did not achieve operational success for the Ukrainian military.
• In 2024, Zelenskyy said the plans for Ukraine's counteroffensive in autumn 2023 "were on the Kremlin's table before the counteroffensive had even started".

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