Original subtitles

Iron General Zaluznyi gave his first video interview since the full-scale invasion.

It's really a lot of material, highlighted the key points for you.

- Russia's strategic goal is to destroy Ukrainian statehood as such. The Russians

are deliberately going from Russia to Ukraine to absolutely deliberately destroy Ukrainians.

- The essence of this war is that if the enemy is not destroyed now, Ukraine will be destroyed.

- These 9 years of war hardened the Ukrainians and taught them to fight.

The Russians did not expect this.

- All possible options have been analyzed, how to act when you have a superior enemy against you.

And when the offensive will be simultaneously

from almost all directions, and it will be quite powerful and rapid.

- There is no need to be superficial about the activities of the enemy armed forces. After all,

they have done significant damage and continue to do so, and Ukrainians are dying every day.

- There was the only viable option that could work in this situation - to inflict

maximum losses on the enemy in the shortest possible time, to bleed the enemy so that he

would refuse to continue his actions on the larger territory of Ukraine. And it worked.

- We were forced, even at the expense of leaving part of the territory,

to "draw out" the enemy, pull back his rear, his reserves,

and simply burn him in those towns where the equipment had stopped to wait for refueling.

- The kind of casualties that Russia suffers on the battlefield would stop any country from

going any further. Fifteen thousand casualties in Afghanistan effectively brought the Soviet

Union to its knees. Now the Russian losses are much, much higher - and that doesn't stop them.

- The fact that we are still holding on is a credit to the Ukrainian people,

Ukrainian soldiers, sergeants, officers, who are dying and being maimed every day,

but they hold their fighting positions. And today they are making this victory.

And this is the only phenomenon that allows us to fight so far - it is the Ukrainian people.

- The sinking of the cruiser "Moscow" is of course of strategic importance to us.

But we will definitely get to the other ships as well.

- These massive columns that were moving towards the Kyiv region - they had no fear of resistance,

they could not even imagine that the "second world army" could be defeated.

- We will, without a doubt, take back Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

We know what it takes to do this, and we are doing it.

- What Russia is doing in Ukraine is genocide. I could not imagine that

the Russians would turn our cities into a stone desert. Yes, I saw what was happening in Syria,

I saw what happened to Chechnya, but I could not imagine that this would happen in Ukraine.

- I tried to do the main thing - I tried to change the culture in the ranks of the AFU:

for each commander to listen to his subordinate, to treat his subordinate as a human being,

to build normal relationships between people in the AFU.

- My family has hardly seen me since 2014.

- There is one warlord in Russia whom I read all the time.

Now he does not publish anything fresh, but I am interested in his opinion as a military man.

This is General Gerasimov. He is cunning and unpredictable.

- The scale of this war is quite comparable to World War I and World War II. The front line

for the AFU is 3,800 km and that is a lot. The amount of ammunition used by us and the enemy

corresponds to those wars. I was sure that a war on such a scale is impossible in the 21st century.

And our Western colleagues did not believe such a thing was possible.

- Our victory is certainly the liberation of the entire occupied territory of Ukraine.

And also - powerful, ultramodern, and perhaps huge, combat-ready Armed Forces

that will not allow Russia to repeat what is happening now.