Thread by @bazaarofwar

It's a hard point to understand from just looking at a map, it's worth going into what an encirclement entails....

Here's the picture, for reference:

https://twitter.com/SeznegMT/status/1498867010331103237

For comparison's sake, here's what the road system in that area looks like. At the operational level, any modern army is going to be entirely road-bound—especially in muddy conditions like we're seeing.

This really limits the extent of an army's dispositions in the first place. It also means that "encircling" them requires occupying a relatively limited number of areas in force, with patrols in between.

The real value of encirclement is that the forces within are cut off: no resupply of fuel, ammo, or food. This lets the attacking force follow up with a series of attacks and smaller encirclements while enjoying complete overmatch.

Here are the dispositions from two years ago (this has no doubt changed a lot but is useful for illustration).

The first targets of Russian air and long-range fires will be the HQs and comms. We should start seeing a lot more jamming too, after which....

...individual positions will be surrounded and overwhelmed. This is a slow, firepower-intensive process that is similar to a siege in many ways. Far more soldiers are likely to surrender than be killed in combat.

Assuming roughly half of the Russians' 200k are in the south and that there are still ~45k Ukrainians in the Donbas (many have very likely been withdrawn), this will be a lengthy but feasible process for the Russians.

BUT—and this is important—they haven't been encircled yet.