THE recapture of the city of Lyman in eastern Ukraine has been hailed as “militarily very important” by Major General Tim Cross.
The retired Army logistics expert said: “There’s two areas really; one is the military significance and then there’s the wider political significance and the impact that it will have in a broader sense. It’s quite important.
“The danger is, every time they capture a town or a village or city, we all say, ‘oh, this is a strategically important place’ and in military operations, it’s all too easy to think that something is particularly crucial.
“I don’t think this is a game changer, from a military point of view. The city is an important place, it was a logistic hub sort of hub and spoke for the Russian military and they have been doing very badly, logistically.
“So to cut off their logistics supply chain to some great some degree or other is militarily very important. Broader than that, of course, the key issue is Russia has just declared this territory, Donetsk and the rest of the other provinces as Russian territory.”
Speaking during an interview with Stephen Dixon and Isabel Webster on GB News, Major General Cross said threats from Vladimir Putin should be taken seriously:
“From his point of view, and we really have to see all these through his eyes as much as anything else – he is now losing Russian territory,” he said. “I’m a bit concerned that we, generally speaking, in the West, our attitude seems to be that he is bluffing, there is going to be no issue here, we just keep on pressing, taking more territory and so on.
“From a military point of view, that’s perfectly understandable, but from a broader political perspective, I think we need to be a little bit cautious.”
He added: “This guy has got the capability of causing serious strategic damage, not just through nuclear weapons, and everyone has been talking about nuclear weapons, understandably.
“But he’s also got chemical weapons, and biological weapons. He’s used both of those. He’s used biological weapons against us in Salisbury.
“More importantly, in one sense, he’s used chemical weapons in places like Syria. So weapons of mass destruction are a fairly broad instrument in inverted commas, and therefore, he could use any of those.
He said: “He could certainly use tactical nuclear weapons. They are part of Russian doctrine. And certainly in defence of Russian territory, he could argue that we need to use tactical nuclear weapons.
“Now they range from about two or three kilotons to about 10 kilotons. Hiroshima was 15 kilotons, so we’re not talking about small issues here.
“Nonetheless, from a battlefield point of view, if people use them to try and stop the Ukraine advance, he could send some messages by using them against Snake Island, for example, which has been much in the press recently and uninhabited, and therefore just use it as a demonstration.
“I’m not convinced that he would do that personally. And I think the chances of using nuclear weapons is probably only around 10%, but 10% is quite a high figure in the context of what we’re talking about here.
“My inclination is he probably might well use chemical rather than tactical nuclear weapons and certainly that would be pretty, pretty dramatic as well.”
