well it’s finally happening dot gif. ukraine dared ru to defend Kherson, and they built the garrison upto 25k, while the command posts are moved out of it. now the supply road is cut and the whole force is essentially trapped. allegedly it’s as tenuous as germans at stalingrad. their resupplies had to be airdropped. so it’s on. speculatively zaluzhnyj is going to wait for ru to use up the food and ammo, and then it’s a chance to recapture in some way.
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Did the pontoon bridges get taken out?
it’s very low throughput and very vulnerable. a himars can take it out at will
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The investigation had blown the lid on a glaring hole in the GRU’s tradecraft: for nearly a decade, Russia’s military intelligence agency had furnished their spies with consecutively numbered passports, allowing investigative journalists who had acquired data commonly leaked onto Russia’s black market to uncover other spies by simply tracing such batches of numbers.
LMAO
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so far not a ton of data from the kherson counteroffensive. telegrams claimed that a couple villages may have been liberated, and that some russian forces tried to flee over the antonovsky bridge, which ukraine promptly hit, and may have taken out a barge next to the bridge that was used as a ferry.
The destruction of Ukrainian replicas may partially account for Russia’s unusually boastful battle damage assessments on Western artillery, particularly the U.S.-made High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS.
“They’ve claimed to have hit more HIMARS than we have even sent,” one U.S. diplomat observed.
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Sources say they also set up a fake tollbooth outside of Kherson, greatly delaying the Russian Army when they had to go back for a shitload of dimes.
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Wut? Your second sentence is not so much wrong as incoherent.
Russia just sidelined their defense minister, have taken 80k casualties they can’t replace, sanctions are biting, winter is coming.
If the Kherson counteroffensive has a good result, it will not be looking good for Russia. They may keep fighting but I wouldn’t underwrite a life insurance policy for Putin.
russians are tired of it, even those who support the war. although i suppose they are also tired of bad news from the war.
so the propaganda adjusted to no longer even give day to day operations updates from the front. it’s wall to wall nato/eu/russophobia/sanctions coverage now. tv lost like 30% of viewership since february. that’s a baseline number, not since peak of war coverage, although to be fair most entertainment programming has simply been taken away. meanwhile news consumption via telegram is now equaling tv audience. that’s pretty huge, although it includes those who follow pro-war/putin channels.
but there still is a gap in coverage, pro-war channels jump from one small success to another, skipping or denying big developments, going back to the idea that bucha was staged, and mixing in shots at zelensky and western leaders. last week they were reposting a poetic performance that explained zelensky’s hatred toward ukraine (!) with his dissatisfaction over penis size. i wish i was joking.
there’s no bottom. it’s a very trmpy culture right now
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I think the only route to a quick resolution here is via total victory for one side or the other, whether that’s conquest of Ukraine or complete ouster of Russia from Ukraine. Neither of those scenarios seems all that likely at this point, but those are about the only conditions for a quick resolution. Ukraine’s not going to cede territory lightly, and Russia isn’t just going to go home.
What seems reasonably probable at this point is that the Russian invasion has peaked, and the Ukrainian counterattack will reclaim some but probably not all lost territory. How much, and what territories they prioritize are both open questions. Can they retake Crimea? Do they do so at the expense of Luhansk and Donetsk? Maybe they can’t get much past Kherson to the south but can retake much of the Donbas? I’m not sure, but it seems pretty likely that the Russians pull back to a degree that they can hold some conquered territory, and the smaller Ukrainian force just isn’t big enough to vanquish it. Then we have a protracted stalemate spanning months or perhaps even years with little movement, and then there are peace talks.
Things that could throw a monkey wrench in the works would be Russia going full mobilization, Putin dying, and the US cutting off all military aid due to Republicans taking power.
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