While the Russians strip units out of the East to reinforce the South …
The Ukrainians start to take chunks out of the Izyum frontline (in the East).
Really what this is is interior vs exterior lines.
Get ready for a map…
The Ukrainians, who have the momentum now, are going to shift pressure from south to east and backwards and forwards.
And the Russians have to move their forces through a much larger arc than the Ukrainians do, and so the Ukrainians can make the Russians dance to their tune.
Nicely done.
To those who are popping up saying that the Kherson thing was a feint so that they can take back the east, I don’t think so.
The South is still the main effort but by making mischief in the East the Ukrainians are making the Russians keep some forces there.
Thus making the South easier to take.
The Ukrainians are a lot better at this than the Russians.
My prediction of eventual Russian defeat still stands.
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A couple of weeks ago (or so) the Russians announced an ‘operational pause’ in the Donbas.
Op pauses are pretty normal in this type of high intensity warfare, because of the vast supplies required and damages inflicted.
Armies sometime just have to take ‘time outs’ to regroup and build up their supplies again.
Although normally you don’t broadcast to everyone that you’re doing it. That’s a big weird an makes it seem like there must be another reason that Russian military activity has decreased.
Zelensky to G7: “We want to finish this war by Christmas”
Let’s just unpack that a little.
A thread.
This thread is gonna zoom out quite a lot from the battlefield; frankly because not much has happened since I threaded last week: the Ukrainians have left Severodonestsk, and they are still making progress towards Kherson. See here for the thread:
By the way, the way the media has handled the battle in Donbas has been shocking. A few outlets who shall remain nameless have been painting leaving Severodonestsk as a strategic defeat for Ukraine—whereas it is quite the opposite. The Ukrainians used it to bleed the Ru AF …
Time for a little round up of the Ukraine situation.
A thread (with some poorly drawn maps).
I also wanna briefly comment on the level of Russian twitter bot activity (attacks on my website etc.) It’s been off the scale over the last week or so—they really have been getting excited about this little offensive that the Russians have been getting up to in Luhansk.
As ever, the difficulty in analysing war is extracting the strategic meaning out of a confused tactical picture.
For leaders the challenge is know when to act, based on very limited information.
We’re reaching a bit of a tipping point in the Ukraine War.
A thread.
Over the last week or so, we have seen Russian forces begin to culminate in the east and the south of Ukraine.
That is: they’ve moved from the offensive to the defensive (conversely, the Ukrainians have moved from the defensive to the offensive).
Two areas where this is very obvious: Kherson and Kharkiv.
Kherson - where the Ukrainians have pushed the Russians back towards the city which, if it continues, will make the Ru planned annexation a bit difficult.