Letter to Online Defense: "Putin in Ukraine like Mussolini against Greece"

26/04/22

The Russian attack on Ukraine is very reminiscent of the Italian aggression on Greece in October 1940. Putin, underestimating the Ukrainian forces, which were easily beaten in the Donbass fighting in 2014 and which did not oppose the loss of Crimea , launched his own offensive believing that a show of force would be enough to bring down the government in Kiev. Hence the use of forces numerically much lower than the pre-established objectives, the dispersion of the attack front on an excessive number of invasion lines, the scarce logistic and artillery support assigned to the maneuvering forces.

The Russians did not expect a real war, but believed that a massive deployment of armored forces and some aerial bombardment and the launch of a few ground-to-ground missiles would be enough to impress the Ukrainians and induce them to surrender.

The decisive reaction of the Kiev forces was clearly unexpected and put the Russian army in crisis, whose apparatus was not prepared to face a high-intensity conventional war. Hence the crisis of even essential supplies, such as food, clothing and ammunition, due to the failure to mobilize logistic units commensurate with the fighting forces, to be fed in a war of unexpected duration and intensity.

Putin first of all paid him errors of their information bodies who could not foresee the Ukrainian bite and the defensive capabilities of the enemy army.

The parallelism of the Russian action of February 2022 with the Italian attack on Greece in the Second World War is quite evident. Mussolini trusted his foreign minister, whose information organs had guaranteed that the Greeks would not resist an Italian invasion, due to the paucity of their army and the political affinity of the government to the fascist regime.

The gen. Visconti Prasca, protege of Minister Ciano, without listening to the Military Information Service which had advanced many doubts about the alleged unwillingness to fight of the Hellenes and their military unpreparedness, planned the attack towards Epirus, with numerically scarce forces, limited to 4 binary divisions, lacking important logistical bases in Albania and appreciable air support and artillery fire. Such imprudence and carelessness, combined with poor information knowledge, were paid dearly and from the early days the Italian advance was easily curbed by the Greeks, also thanks to bad weather and poor road conditions, which soon went to counterattack, rejecting the invaders well into Albania.

Just as Putin immediately punished the heads of the intelligence service and is rearticulating his own device by strengthening the forces in the field, Mussolini too soon expelled Visconti Prasca and the chief of staff general Badoglio and was forced to bring in various corps from Italy. .

As Mussolini became convinced that the Greeks would soon surrender in the face of the threat of an army superior in number and armaments like the Italian one, without fully evaluating the military aid and the push for resistance that came to the Greek government from the United Kingdom, so Putin he underestimated the Ukrainians, not properly considering the support that would come to them from NATO.

FC