The Western allies were overly cautious in supplying Ukraine with the latest technologies and more powerful weapons, but by holding back the supply of long-range missile systems and tanks, they allowed the Russian Federation to regroup and strengthen its defenses after the Ukrainian breakthrough in Kharkiv region in the north and in Kherson region in the south in at the end of 2022, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valeriy Zaluzhny said.

"These systems were most relevant to us last year, but they only arrived this year," Zaluzhny said in an interview for The Economist. Similarly, f-16 jets, due next year, are now less helpful, suggests the general, in part because Russia has improved its air defences.

Yet the delay in arms deliveries, though frustrating, is not the main cause of Ukraine's predicament, according to General Zaluzhny. "It is important to understand that this war cannot be won with the weapons of the past generation and outdated methods," he noted, pointing out that technology would be critical.

At the same time, according to Zaluzhny, there are no signs that a revolutionary technological breakthrough, for example, in the field of drones or electronic warfare, is just around the corner. However, he insists that Ukraine has no choice but to maintain the initiative by continuing the offensive, even if it only moves a few meters a day.

"Just like in the first world war we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate," Zaluzhny said, emphasizing that breaking the stalemate would require a huge technological leap.

He called it a mistake to assume that he could stop the Russian Federation by bleeding its troops. "That was my mistake. Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war," Zaluzhny said.

"Let's be honest, it's a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life. And for us…the most expensive thing we have is our people," he says.

In this regard, Zaluzhny is trying to prevent the war from moving into the trenches, since a long war is beneficial to the Russian Federation, a country with a population three times larger and an economy ten times larger than Ukraine. "The biggest risk of an attritional trench war is that it can drag on for years and wear down the Ukrainian state," the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said.

According to him, there are now enough military personnel in Ukraine, but the longer the war continues, the more difficult it will be to maintain it. "We need to look for this solution, we need to find this gunpowder, quickly master it and use it for a speedy victory. Because sooner or later we are going to find that we simply don't have enough people to fight," Zaluzhny said.