Czech President Petr Pavel warns Ukraine to 'not rush' with counteroffensive

Czech President and Former Chair of the NATO Military Committee, Petr Pavel warned Ukraine against a rushed counteroffensive amid the raging Russia-Ukriane war. The decorated retired general and a war hero made these proclamations during an interview with The Guardian, while he was in London for the coronation of King Charles III. As per the British news outlet, Pavel made a similar assertion during a recent meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal. In the meeting in Kyiv, the Czech president cautioned that the war-stricken country no longer has an “element of surprise”, which helped Kyiv to make successes in the initial stages of the war. 

“Apparently, they still have a feeling that they do not have everything to start successfully an operation,” Pavel told The Guardian. The Czech president was mentioning the time when Zelenskyy had asked him and the Slovakia President Zuzana Čaputová, to arm the Ukrainian fleet before the long-anticipated counter-assault. The 61-year-old Czech president also told the news outlet that in the meeting he had warned the Ukrainian Prime Minister, not “pushed into a faster pace before they are fully prepared”. “Because it might be a temptation to push them, for some, to demonstrate some results,” Pavel said in the interview. “It will be extremely harmful to Ukraine if this counteroffensive fails because they will not have another chance, at least not this year,” he added. 

‘Kyiv should not underestimate Russians’: Pavel 

In the interview, the Czech president suggested that his Ukrainian counterpart does not beat around the bush and is a straight shooter. "Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a man who doesn’t have time to go around the problem and I indicated from the very first moment of our meeting that I’m also not a man of diplomatic language,” Pavel said. “So I encouraged him to go straight to the problem, and he said: 'Well, OK, we need a lot of ammunition.’ And then he gave me a load of equipment that they need to build successfully and obligates for a counteroffensive,” he added.

The erstwhile war hero also insisted that the conflict-stricken country should not underestimate Moscow. “Kyiv should not underestimate the Russians because they have enough manpower, they still have enough equipment, even though it is older, probably in lower numbers, but still, they have a large number of artillery barrels, they have a lot of ammunition,” he asserted. “They are not so incapable in terms of defence. And of course, being in defence makes it easier for them because Ukraine will have suffered terrible losses, even if they are well prepared. So attacking an enemy like Russia will be difficult and Russians will not be caught by surprise for the second time,” he concluded. The former military general chaired NATO’s military committee until 2018. Pavel was also decorated by both the Czech and French governments for rescuing French troops besieged by the Serbs during the Bosnian War in 1993.