Comment by The_Colonel
2 years ago
Nice cherrypicking and building strawmen. How about the Russia's obvious failures? Was Kyiv offensive a "feint" according to you?
Avdiivka is a village of 1000 inhabitants, and it's the biggest Russian assault since Russia took the town of Bakhmut about a year ago. With this pace, Russia is going to take Kyiv in the year 3000.
No, the Kyiv offensive was obviously a poorly executed failure. And it happened right at the start of this war, which is exactly what I am saying. "That" Russian military lost to a relatively improvised small scale counter-offensive, while the "new" Russian military beat back a massive Ukrainian counter-attack directly backed (and probably directed) by NATO. These are practically two different forces. We're not weakening Russia, we're hardening it.
As for Avdiivka, read the Wiki on it for more info. It's an industrial city, one of the most heavily fortified locations in Ukraine, and of significant strategic value. Every inch in that place comes at a high price, and both sides desperately want to control it. So it's a pretty reasonable bellwether to keep your eyes on.
You don't have to worry about my knowledge of Avdiivka. It's a village which has a value only for Russia, because it's very close to Donetsk city and is a major thorn in the Russian propaganda - can you explain to me how is Russia so strong and at the same time after 2 years of war still can't push Ukrainians more than 10 kilometers from the downtown of Donetsk city, the capital of DPR?
For Ukraine, the only value Avdiivka represents is that it allows them to bleed Russians for it, because it just matters so much for them. Otherwise, Avdiivka is even less important than Bakhmut (that one was at least a logistics node) and the loss of it did not lead to any frontline collapse - on the opposite, Ukrainians were able to recover Bakhmut flanks since then.
> We're not weakening Russia, we're hardening it.
What military analysts are you following? Because from what I hear from my sources (e.g. Kofman, Massicot) Russia's forces are very much degraded with many of the best units lost.
> * it allows them to bleed Russians for it,*
The scale of it is astounding. In the past few weeks, it has been a wave every hour or two, sometimes faster, with 5 to 20 vehicles a wave; minesweepers and a 2:1 bmp to tank ratio. Lots of troops and they barely get anywhere. It is horrid. The only real breakthrough that the Russians have made was through a long waste pipe into town. They rushed a ~150 people through after smaller groups, but those mostly ended up cut off from any resupply with the AFU having retaken their 3rd, main line of defense in that area. Destroyed a massive Russian column in that too.
I find analysis for this war quite inane to consume. The reality of war is that very often even the participants themselves are not entirely sure what's going on, let alone what will happen. See, for the most obvious example, the Ukrainian counter attack. So I simply prefer to look at what little data we can get that both sides agree upon and use that to get an indication of the broad "direction" of the war.
So for instance the average Ukrainian soldier is now up to 43 years old [1], more than a decade older than when the war began. And Ukraine has been turning to increasingly aggressive conscription efforts, with the military demanding even more. There's now also major friction between the head of the Ukrainian military and Zelensky, with Zelensky looking to replace him. [2] These sort of little nuggets, which are not disputed by either side at this point, give you an indication of the "direction" of the war.
It's the same reason I find Avdeevka relevant. Avdeevka does have strategic value, but what really matters is that it's a hill both sides have decided to die on. It's similar to something like Verdun. Verdun is a completely irrelevant town in France, far smaller than Avdeevka and with much less strategic value, yet hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives fighting over it. The reason the result mattered is not because this side or that now controlled Verdun, but because it was a major bellwether for the "direction" of the war.
[1] - https://time.com/6329188/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-intervie...
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/30/world/europe/ukraine-zele...