Thread by @ThreshedThought

There’s been a few developments in Ukraine over the run up to Xmas.

Three things to watch, I’d say.

As a recap, a couple of weeks ago, I suggested that there were broadly three fronts: Bakhmut, Zaporizhizhia and Svatove-Kremina. See here:

https://twitter.com/threshedthought/status/1602614881320148992

I suggested that if the three, Zaporizhizhia was the most likely axis of Ukrainian advance

Advancing here gives the greatest strategic prize of cutting the Russian dispositions in Ukraine in two.

And so the Russians have been reinforcing like crazy down there.

- improving the defences of Tokmak, an major railway junction

- reinforcing Melitopol with troops from across the south

- generally digging defences and reinforcing settlements

As ever - the Russians run up against their two standard problems when they try and do stuff like this.

1/ Not enough troops

2/ Troops are poorly trained and factionalised into eg military, Wagner PMC, Chechens, (loyal to Russian) Donbas militias, etc.

Most of these groups don’t like to play together and don’t like redeploying to other operational areas.

Which means that it is the Russian military that gets shunted around.

But there aren’t enough troops….

So when they heavily reinforce Zaporizhizhia sector in the south, somewhere else is losing out

So now we come back to the other two sectors: Bakhmut and Svatove-Kreminna.

A quick reminder: why are these important?

Bahkmut is where the Russians have been trying to punch through the Ukrainian lines for months with infantry wave tactics reminiscent of world war 1

They’ve made incredibly slow progress at unbelievable cost in men.

It’s important to the Russians because it fits with their narrative of ‘liberating’ the Donbas.

The Svatove-Kreminna front is important to the Ukrainians.

If they can punch through, then they have a chance of severing some of the Russian logistics (running N-S) into the Donbas.

And so what are we seeing in these two fronts?

Bahkmut seems to be slowly culminating for the Russians.

They are running out of men and materiel to be able to continue the fight there

They might be able to bring up more people and stuff but for now it seems to have paused.

And in Kreminna - there are early reports that after a couple of months the Ukrainians may have got to the outskirts of the town.

There are reports of Russians in the town starting to loot stuff and leave

(We’ve seen this behaviour before, usually just before a collapse).

Over the next week or so I would be keeping an eye on Bahkmut and Kreminna.

Especially Kreminna.

Update: the Russians have moved their HQ from Kreminna