Meatgrinder 2.0: Valery Zaluzhny wants Ukraine to become the West’s weapons lab

Kiev’s former commander-in-chief, now ambassador to the UK, has given a speech that was half crowd-pleasing, half terrifying

Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief, has given his first public speech in his new role as his country’s ambassador to Britain. The occasion – surely carefully chosen – was the annual Land Warfare Conference at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the UK’s oldest and still premier military and geopolitical think tank.

It was a high-level setting; other speakers included General Roland Walker, Chief of Britain’s General Staff and Admiral Tony Radakin, Chief of the Defence Staff. Zaluzhny of course, was a high-level guest too: De facto exiled to Britain after losing a power struggle against Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, rumors about a future return to Ukraine and a powerful position there have never died down.

According to a Telegraph correspondent who was in the audience, Zaluzhny’s address was mostly delivered in Ukrainian, as the ambassador’s English is, to put it bluntly, unusually weak for a diplomat, especially one sent to London. But Zaluzhny published the speech on his Telegram channel under the somewhat awkward title: “The Russian-Ukrainian War as a War of Transitional period. New patterns of the war.” This version’s also less than perfect English does make you wonder about the staff resources at the Ukrainian embassy (not a single person capable of some basic editing?), but Zaluzhny’s meaning comes through loud and clear.  

Zaluzhny started on a note of corny philosophizing and gauche confusion: After being treated to the hackneyed phrase “Si vis pacem, para bellum” (If you want peace, prepare for war), his listeners must have been intrigued to hear Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief equate killing in war with murder. Usually, that is a position associated with radical pacifism. Some may have been surprised to hear that the total number of casualties of World War I and II taken together was 60 million. Unfortunately, it was significantly higher. (Also “Carl,” not “Karl,” von Clausewitz; if you want to boast using authors you clearly have not read, at least check the spelling.) 

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But World War III was Zaluzhny’s real theme at RUSI, in two respects. Ostensibly, the ambassador who used to be a general was talking about how to avoid it, but in reality the general inside the ambassador was really giving advice on how to wage it. In Zaluzhny’s defense, his idea of preserving the peace is so crude that the two aims easily converge. In his single-track mind, the only key to peace is deterrence by military power. But this total neglect of any role for diplomacy and compromise is, of course, what his Western audiences like to hear because it flatters them by mirroring their own tunnel vision.

Casting himself in what is by now a timeworn role for Ukrainian representatives in the West, Zaluzhny spoke as a sage and warner delivering a wake-up call to – why be modest? – all of humanity and in particular, “free and democratic nations.” In this context, Ukraine, for its former commander-in-chief, is a resource of a very peculiar kind. It is Ukraine’s experience in the war with Russia – or at least his interpretation of that experience – that Zaluzhny uses to claim special authority when speaking to his Western listeners and coming to conclusions that he must know are certain to be welcome.

Thus, generously offering “to share all our knowledge, experience and thoughts,” his first lesson is that “society must agree to temporarily give up a range of freedoms for the sake of survival,” because, the former general argues, modern wars are “total,” requiring “the efforts not only of the army, but also of society as a whole.” “Politicians,” Zaluzhny elaborated, “can and should mobilize society." 

This idea – often called the “whole-of-society approach” to security and defense – has, of course, been one of the main strands of NATO and EU propaganda for several years already. NATO, for instance, adopted a resolution on it in 2021; in the same year the EU’s Directorate-General for External Policies produced a policy paper on “Best Practices in the Whole-of-Society Approach in Countering Hybrid Threats.” In January 2024, the then UK Chief of the General Staff, General Patrick Sanders made the same point: a future war with Russia would require comprehensive mobilization of the whole nation. The head of NATO’s Military Committee, Dutch Admiral Rob Bauer, has long preached the same mantra, occasionally mixed with pure scaremongering about how to prep best (have a flashlight, radio, and batteries ready…) for the day the big bad Russians come. 

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All of the above is part of NATO’s escalating effort to make and keep itself important and very well financed. Having helped create – by its reckless expansion – the war that is now devastating Ukraine, NATO elites would not let a good crisis go to waste. There also is something slightly comical about the crude, 1950s-style manipulation of the Western public, and something sadly comical about how a former Ukrainian commander-in-chief serves to play back Western talking points, repackaged as Ukrainian experience, to Western audiences to receive their blessing.

Yet ultimately the issue is deadly serious for two reasons. Obviously in the worst case, the current attempts to get everyone psyched up not just for war but for World War III may feature in future history books, in chapters on a prewar period. Second, there is a peacetime agenda as well. The drive toward “societal resilience” serves to justify, at a minimum, the streamlining of public discourse, the narrowing of policy debates, and the demonization of those arguing for diplomacy instead of – or at least in addition to – military solutions.

In this respect, Zelensky’s Ukraine, as represented by his former rival and current ambassador Zaluzhny, is the wet dream of the West’s mobilizers: a personalistic, at best semi-authoritarian regime, with no free media or opposition. And the fact that they have no shame in calling that sort of state a “democracy,” complete with the usual “vibrant” civil society, proves that they would not hesitate to do the same at home.   

If Zaluzhny’s ideas about what should be done to society are stunningly imitative, his take on the military meaning of the Ukraine War seems at least more original, if a little bombastic. He believes that the “changes which were invented on the battlefields of the Russian-Ukrainian war” are very likely to “determine the outlines of wars and the art of war in the 21st century” and to “become the foundation of the entire global security system of the future.”

Zaluzhny is probably wrong on the facts there. As I have long argued, the genocidal slaughter committed by Israel in Gaza is more likely to leave a deeper imprint on the future of “warfare” (for want of a better term). We are already seeing attempts to derive “lessons” (all the wrong ones, rest assured) from it by Western think tanks such as the RAND Corporation and, indeed, the very same RUSI where Zaluzhny gave his speech. 

But let’s set that aside and focus on what the former commander-in-chief believes to be the main military lesson of the Ukraine War. Driven by the need to survive on the battlefield, Zaluzhny argues, Ukrainian forces have invented and applied new technologies while adapting their structure and tactics to them. For him, this war therefore marks a transition, starting and foreshadowing decisive future developments. In particular – and this is a key phrase in his sales pitch – these technologies are supposed to offer a way to “fight and win against stronger armies in the 21st century.” (By “stronger,” the general here clearly must mean “larger,” because if he literally meant “stronger” – as in also technologically stronger – his statement would be self-contradictory and absurd.)

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Now compare this with what the new chief of the UK General Staff, General Ronald Walker had to say at the same RUSI Land Warfare Conference. Walker also delivered a stern warning about a dangerous world out there, i.e. Russia and China, and promised to triple the effectiveness (“lethality”) of British forces within a few years, without asking for more men. His miracle fix to do so: new technology that, Walker says, will enable his army to defeat much larger forces. See a difference compared to Zaluzhny’s promises? No? Exactly. Once again, the obliging Ukrainian delivered exactly what his Western listeners wanted to hear. By now, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has publicly agreed with Walker. Congrats, General Zaluzhny: bullseye in crowd-pleasing.  

Yet, once again, there is a less farcical side to Zaluzhny’s somewhat crude opportunism. In essence, he called on his audience to see Ukraine as a laboratory where the West can develop its future military technology. Ukraine, he admitted, cannot “scale up” its inventions and innovations made in the midst of battle. Yet its Western “partners” – “users” would be a better, more honest term – have the resources needed for such upscaling, “but there is no applied and practical field to test them.”

In other words, Ukrainians can keep dying, while the West can field-test new military technologies. And make no mistake: Zaluzhny does not believe that fewer Ukrainians will be needed because the new technologies will replace them. The whole meaning of his labelling the current war merely “transitional” and not yet one of “the future” is to strand Ukraine in the worst of both worlds where, as he admits, “the only way out may be to increase the number of human resources involved in hostilities.”

And there you have it. Ukraine’s real future, according to Zaluzhny, is one where more Ukrainians will be fed into the meatgrinder of a losing war, but on the upside, the meatgrinder will be constantly modernized and updated with the newest ways of killing and dying, compliments of the West. It is one thing that this fantasy of a forever war as a forever laboratory will not come to pass. It is another that it is the real message – if you pay attention – of Ukraine’s former commander-in-chief and current ambassador in London, and future who-knows-what, when speaking to an elite Western audience. One of Ukraine’s tragedies is being abused by the West; the other being betrayed by its own leaders.