12:58
Has Opsec settled over the northern offensive, or have we entered a (expected) pause in fighting?
Rob Lee below has his take on the advance; apparently, Zelensky was the driving force behind this, he must have binge-read The Art of War and concluded that offense is the best defense, but wow, what a payoff they got from this strategy.
https://twitter.com/RALee85/status/1569640660021694465?s=20&t=Qb98sq59MsMq8LwS8LtJug
12:59
Was supposed to be standalone but fits perfectly under XSI33 post.
13:18
Yes exactly, they don’t have enough and now must choose what to defend, and Ukraine, which has critical mass on its side, can push everywhere (almost).
At the top of my risk list is that Ukraine loses momentum here; they have just taken an area as large as the remaining area north of Luhansk.
It seems the Russians have retreated AT LEAST to the NS line Troitske-Svatove-Kreminna, and now Kreminna is falling because they were overflown directly. What we are waiting for now is the front in Svatove in the picture; then we know the area is abandoned because east of Svatove there is nothing to defend over a huge stretch, and if they try a hedgehog defense at Starobilsk, it will just be encircled.
One can guess they are heading east, but a picture is proof.
14:55
Then we have black on white that the Germans were/are the friend who betrays, one must be able to say?
https://twitter.com/DmytroKuleba/status/1569637880204775426?s=20&t=Qb98sq59MsMq8LwS8LtJug
16:55
I’m bouncing like a pinball right now, they apparently continued straight east after crossing the Oskil river and are soon in Svatove. Now it’s Gregg, but he name-drops a place almost at Svatove 🙂
It just has to be that the unit maps are behind and one is fooled into thinking there was a pause in fighting; there is no logic in not pushing after that fleeing beggar camp we have been talking about for three days when the unit maps have paused.
Then he has confirmed the next thesis we’ve had, that Territorial and NG would handle border security to the north with some maneuver battalion behind covering an area so maneuver brigades can swing down toward Luhansk and Donetsk, +20 maneuver brigades just around Izyum that can now do other fun things.
“Home guard battalions have been called in to defend the borders together with border guard battalions. This is to free up the actual combat troops to regroup and continue the liberation of the northeastern parts.”
This was Gregg’s toughest update in a long time; Ukraine is doing absolutely everything right here all the time, they are completely unstoppable 🙂
10:15
I’m quite sure that at Izyum, Ukraine’s losses were small.
At Kherson, they have taken higher losses.
But none of that can be compared to when it was worst on the eastern front and Russian artillery was at the peak of its short career.
For the Russians, if not the opposite, losses have now increased sharply, and then we have large numbers of prisoners of war at Izyum and soon in Kherson, which is written off.
12:42
In the past week, there have been dozens of videos of Russian prisoners of war, and they are all battered and demoralized far beyond what two days of offensive would cause. This is in the middle of summer (well, almost…) and they are in bad shape, dirty, torn clothes, unshaven, worn out, and mentally broken. Ukraine has hardly launched any offensives anywhere; it has been Russian attacks – the only conclusion can be that they treat their soldiers extremely badly?
The other thing is how the Russian barracks and trenches look; sure, some mess is caused by the retreat, but they all live like the worst mentally ill hoarders, without exception.
Then the equipment, when Ukraine films a captured vehicle that still works, all the interior is always broken or missing, and the maintenance is extremely neglected, it’s a miracle they run when maintenance is exactly zero.
The imperialist Russian army is almost like a wandering beggar camp of homeless and mentally ill people here.
Add to that all the abuses the blogger writes about that are now being uncovered. At the start of the war, we learned about the five-year-old child who was raped, tortured, and finally murdered in front of his mother, who was then released and presumably took her own life.
There are thousands of stories just as cruel (castration, crushed knees, murder, murder, murder), and for me, it is an incomprehensible sadistic violence ending in murder that a normal person could not carry out. I guess most Ukrainian soldiers who have been in combat and taken lives would not be able to witness such an abuse as described above being carried out, let alone perform it themselves. Since it is not an exception, there is obviously some kind of sexual sadistic culture/undertone in the Russian army and a “no limits” atmosphere encouraged where people dare to act out in this way; it is an enormously high threshold that is crossed when torturing and murdering children.
Everything seems to be carried out in groups with officers silent or actively consenting.
The only reasonable conclusion here should be to isolate Russia behind a NATO wall and have a stranglehold with sanctions for the next 100 years since they have run exactly this race since the 1700s every time they get the chance. If they are allowed to retreat and lick their wounds, it will be a repeat in some country after 15 years.