EXCLUSIVE: “Conscript More Men - or Be Doomed”

President Zelenskyy is a hero but is he really doing such a great job, asks American soldier in Ukraine

Craig Dana Jones of the International Legion

He fought Russians on the frontline in eastern Ukraine and lost his left hand and most of his left forearm in the name of freedom. Now Ukraine’s International Legion squad leader from the U.S., Craig Dana Jones, delivers a sobering assessment of what’s happening on the frontline. The good news? Little. The bad? Plenty. The verdict? Either go all in or lose.

Go after Belarus - or…

It’s a 1200-kilometer front. Though Ukraine has a million-man army, there are not enough men on the front.

If you had more men, I think you could start achieving battlefield victories. Belarus's southern border is vulnerable. If you destabilize it, what a victory it would be! Imagine if Lukashenko were deposed. Think how the Poles would feel!

That’s what war is all about. In the 18th century, George Washington had battlefield defeat after battlefield defeat. His army was shrinking. Then, the American army captured a British army of 5000 men at the Battle of Saratoga. That’s when Louis the 16th decided to go all in with the colonies.

… Transnistria

There’s the largest depot of weapons and 3000 Russians there. The Ukrainian military ought to go in, invade that area, kill, capture those 3000, and take those explosives.

It would give Ukraine a battlefield victory and clean up its problem on its western border. You could say you’re doing it in the name of Moldova.

This would show the world that the Ukrainian military is good, really good, but you can't just sit there and have this war of attrition in which you’re going to lose. In fact, it might already be lost.

I'd start there and then attack Belarus. In my opinion, the Belarus border should be in play. I think Lukashenko is not as well-placed as people think. Sure, Putin could put soldiers into Belarus, but his supply lines would start to stretch. Besides, the Belarus people are ready to be freed.

Because there are incredible fortifications on the Russian-occupied territory of Ukraine. In 2023, some stupid generals in the Pentagon probably said, “Here, take 30 tanks.” Also, the Germans gave you 30 tanks, but you had no air power at all. As a result, the Russians hadn’t been bombed to submission for weeks and weeks before that, and the Ukrainian military lost tens of thousands of soldiers, wounded and killed. That’s no victory.

That’s also one of the reasons why Kursk ultimately failed. Ukraine never had air superiority. When you're on the battlefield, and there's a MiG, it doesn't even need to fly over you. It can be 30-40 kilometers away to drop this glide bomb that you only hear in the last seconds. They weigh around 2000 pounds, and you can’t believe the impact: they obliterate and make a 9-meter deep hole.

Until you have control of the skies, you will have a big problem. You need more equipment, but above all, you need more men inside every Bradley, Abrams, or Leopard.

Is Zelenskyy naive about the world saving Ukraine?

Everybody loves Zelenskyy, but did he actually do a good job in the last three years? I'm a longtime Republican, so I hated U.S. President Joe Biden regardless of his deeds. But I still believe that the Biden administration entirely and absolutely betrayed Ukraine.

Still, it's a war. And Ukraine is not putting the whole economy on a war footing, and this was Zelenskyy’s thing when he was in the Oval Office. He seems to think that the world will come and save Ukraine. Is he naive?

Forget Trump. Any American president after the two forever wars, including in Afghanistan, is just too much. And our biggest problem right now is that we're about to have a war with China.

We will probably have to redeploy some troops out of Europe into the Indo-Pacific, as they call it, to get ready for the war with China that most experts believe is coming very quickly.

Also, if you look at history, it's really not odd that you have a war-free city like Kyiv. In the Vietnam War, you had Saigon, which, if you read about accounts from 50 years ago, was like a surreal experience because there was no war. Soldiers would be fighting one day, and then they were in Saigon the next day.

That's what Kyiv is today, despite some missiles and Shaheds flying. There's a lot of Ukrainian young men of fighting age who are Kyiv-based. They’re not part of the military at all.

Zaluzhnyi was fired for a reason

Remember Valerii Zaluzhnyi’s article for the Economist in which he said that the Ukrainian military needed to raise 500,000 new soldiers? Well, the only way to do so is to lower the conscription age. It was still 27 then, but he said it had to be lowered to 18.

Zaluzhnyi was right: You need these 500,000 new men. Right after that article, — and it's an “amazing coincidence,” — he was fired and made ambassador to the UK.

You talk to people, and they say, well, now you're dooming our 18 to 25 year olds, but not all of them need to go to the zero line and will die. That's not the way it works. About 1 soldier in every 4 actually fights on the front line. But you need to have those men mobilized.

If the Rada would drop the conscription age, raise 500,000 new soldiers, and say, "We can't just give these guys broomsticks; we need weapons for them,” it’s a totally different story.

The U.S is literally sitting on a swath of weapons in the deserts of California, Nevada, and Arizona. It has hundreds and hundreds of warplanes: A-10s, F-16s, F-15s, that they could be selling or giving to Ukraine.

France and Britain are broke

The Donald Trump administration wants the war to stop because we have to get ready for this coming war with China; it makes a lot of sense.

During the first administration, Trump was telling Europeans that the U.S. has global commitments and that they need to step up. Nothing has changed since then.

The British are broke. They have a 70,000-person army, and their debt to GDP is nearly 100%. Half of their defense budget is to keep these few 100 nuclear weapons they have, which they don't need because the United States has thousands. They only keep them out of ego. The truth is that they could get rid of their nuclear weapons, save a ton of money, and grow their conventional forces dramatically.

The French also have a 110% debt to GDP: they're even more broke than the British. And their, their army is just a little bit larger. Overall their capabilities militarily are pretty limited.

There's no chance the Germans will send soldiers to Ukraine. Nor will the Poles, as they only have an army of about 120,000 men.

There’s also a lot of European hypocrisy. I think they look at Zelenskyy, and they lie and cheat. Then, they look at the press, they pontificate, but in truth, they don't do, and why don't they do this?

They obviously don't want Putin to lose or the regime to change. They're so afraid. Jake Sullivan (former National Security Advisor) and Anthony Blinken (former Secretary of State) were completely terrified of a regime change in the Kremlin. But how do you end this war? You have to have regime change in the Kremlin at a minimum. You might get somebody worse, but unless you get rid of Putin, you're never going to have security. In Ukraine, never.

Ukrainians and Europeans must fight total war

Overall, peace is improbable. You might get a ceasefire, but how long would that ceasefire last? Besides, a sovereign nation is not sovereign if it gives up its ability to have a military. So when Putin says we want the Ukrainian military not to be more than 100,000, they obviously Ukraine can't agree to that. That would be like giving up its sovereignty.

But think of it: if you got rid of Putin and aggressive Russia, is there any other military threat for Europe? No, so, what you have to do is you have to fight the threat.

Europeans talk about spending money over 10 years as everybody is afraid of nuclear war, and that if Putin got too weak, he’d try to save his own skin.

The Ukrainians haven't fought this war as aggressively as they could. Therefore, they can't look at the Europeans, and the Americans, and ask the same. But if they did, they’d say “we need $20 billion a month for the next 24 months to get 1000 tanks, not just 20-30 tanks.”

The Germans could give the money to Ukrainians, or the Germans could go and buy those tanks and give them to the Ukrainians by the thousands, not by the tens.

If Ukraine and Europe get ready to fight this war in a total way for victory, then I think that would bring the US into the fold. You will never get the Trump administration to go all in when Europe is spending all this money with Putin on oil. They give Putin more money for oil than they do to Ukrainian military assistance or total assistance.

C’mon, Europe, you need to cut off how many Russian businessmen are flying around Europe and doing business and tourists, too. They need to completely and absolutely shut Russia off, make the Russian people suffer, and they need to fight this war to win.

And you need to raise those 500 thousand soldiers together with the EU, giving 15-20 billion euros a month.