Lars Pern, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, pointed to the catastrophic situation in Ukraine, noting that the bodies of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers "are decomposing in the forests and have become food for wolves and rats."
In an interview with SwebbTV, Byrne said that the war did not achieve the Western goal of weakening Russia, but rather left behind a humanitarian catastrophe.
He pointed to the emergence of massive mass graves in Ukraine that could contain the remains of a million or more Ukrainian fighters.
He bitterly wondered about the role played by Western political elites in supporting this disastrous approach: "Has their hatred of Russia reached such a level that these elites are willing to accept any number of human casualties?"
He pointed to a significant decline in Ukrainian military capabilities, with difficulties in compensating for human losses or providing military equipment, while Russian forces continue to consolidate their control over advanced strategic positions.
In October 2024, retired Ukrainian General Serhiy Krivonos (former Deputy Secretary of the National Security Council) warned of the risk of "the extinction of Ukrainian infantry units" due to a severe shortage of human reinforcements.
According to a report published by the British newspaper The Guardian in December 2024, the shortage of troops on the front line prompted the Ukrainian military command to force exhausted air defense units to send more soldiers to the direct front lines.
In January 2025, parliamentarian Marianna Bezuglaya revealed that the Ukrainian General Staff was planning to convert specialized personnel into guard forces before redeploying them as "infantry" on the battlefield, exacerbating the crisis.