Russian general compares Ukraine to Stalingrad and admits problems

Russian general admits in the press that the war is not going as planned

How long can a city turned into a fortress hold out? Colonel General Vladimir Chirkin, former commander-in-chief of Russia's Ground Forces, answered that question in an interview with the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda on the one-month anniversary of the start of the military operation. His answer was no victory report: he admitted that some operational tasks have to be solved "from scratch" and that any plan can change radically within hours or days. The interview, published in Russia's leading outlet, paints a picture of slow urban warfare, with constant regroupings and requests for additional air and artillery support.

What exactly General Chirkin said about Stalingrad

The general reached back to World War II to explain how hard it is to take urban areas. He recalled that a German army of 300,000 men failed to break Stalingrad, that some streets changed hands back and forth for two months, and that Pavlov's House was never taken. He also wondered why neither Leningrad nor Voronezh fell. His conclusion: fighting in a city is "very hard, risky and sacrificial work."

The comparison cuts both ways. On the one hand, it credits the adversary with a capacity for resistance that the official narrative tends to downplay. On the other, it equates the Ukrainian defenders with the Soviet defenders of Stalingrad, a detail that did not go unnoticed among those who read the interview closely.

How to take a fortified city: siege, corridors and artillery

The conversation quickly turned to tactics. The most frequently voiced approach is the classic siege: cutting water, electricity and supplies, opening humanitarian corridors so civilians can leave, and grinding down resistance before entering. Anyone who stays inside the encirclement, the argument goes, is no longer treated as a non-combatant. Some go further and talk of bombing for weeks until the city surrenders or only minimal resistance remains.

The counterpoint comes from those who point out that this playbook no longer applies as it once did. A modern army could flatten Kyiv, but at the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilians and of turning the capital into a wasteland with no strategic value. That price, this reading holds, no state is willing to pay today. The caveat about Mariupol points in the same direction: there is debate over whether the city was razed or whether the structure of most buildings still stands, with the inevitable comparison to Stalingrad, Berlin or Dresden.

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The tug-of-war between slow siege and negotiation

Another line of analysis holds that the Russian strategy seeks not so much physical conquest as attrition: gaining ground bit by bit, causing as few civilian casualties as possible, and waiting for the Ukrainian government to realize that each passing week means negotiating from a weaker position. Taking cities would, in that scheme, be a lever for the peace table, not an end in itself.

Against that, the objection is one of timing. Fully encircling a large city takes time and manpower, and supplies keep flowing in as long as the ring is not closed. Hence the question hanging over the whole discussion: how many weeks can that pace be sustained before the attrition turns against the besieger.

From Madrid to Stalingrad: the precedent that gets cited and the one that gets forgotten

The historical comparison stretched all the way to the Spanish Civil War. It was noted that Franco took Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Málaga, Bilbao, Tarragona, Toledo, Alicante, Santander, Murcia, Gijón and Avilés in less than three years, and that only three years separated that conflict from Stalingrad. The argument serves to relativize the difficulty of urban warfare depending on the era and the means available.

Rome and its conquest of the Iberian Peninsula also came up, with the idea that whoever dominates the whole territory ends up absorbing the last stronghold. The debate over why the Germans fixated on Stalingrad instead of occupying the rest of the country had its answer: it was the river port and the only large city for hundreds of kilometers around, and pushing on toward the Caucasus while leaving that threat on the flank was a recklessness no military professional would contemplate.

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The month that changed the narrative

The first month of the operation left a trail of corrections made on the fly. Kyiv was written off as fallen, and a month later troops were withdrawing from the north. Russia was said to have reserves for three days of fuel, ammunition and food, and the figure was repeated without ever materializing. Meanwhile, the energy standoff shifted to paying for gas in rubles and to Europe's search for ways to work around its own sanctions.

Against that backdrop, General Chirkin's interview works as an adjustment of expectations. It does not announce a quick victory. It explains why there will not be one. And it leaves the reader wondering whether the Russian General Staff shares that realism, or whether the general speaks for those who have already seen the cost of the campaign.

In the end, the question remains the same as at the start: how long does a besieged city hold out? The answer, a month on, is that nobody is in a hurry to go in.