TLDR, the answer to the question "is Ukraine winning"? is that Ukraine has not won, while it is farther away from Losing than Russia is, for reasons that have been revealed over the last eight months.
Like I said on April 24, “Its pretty bad when a bunch of YouTube animators understand warfare better than a real army.”
Cmments, criticisms, questions, or angry gnashing of teeth?
I’d bring it down to a street fight level.
The purpose of a kinetic fight is to
deprive your opponent of the ability to fight or
the desire to continue the fight.
Neither Russia or Ukraine are there yet.
Resource wise Russia has the advantage
over a period of time.
Pure “blood and guts desire” Ukraine has the advantage.
it is their home they are protecting.
Can you spell Holodomor? I think they can.
Russian OWNS the air space has conclusively proven Ukraine's air defense is non-existent this week. You can't win a war or take back lost territory if the other side can bomb you to kingdom come.
Donald Trump knows that and that is why he wants to spare more Ukrainian lives and keep it from losing more territory by negotiating an end to the war.
If you have a problem with Trump, lay down on the tracks so the Trump Train can run you and your fellow neocons over.
Noted Russian military expert Vladislav [“Vlad”] Shurygin to Izvestia newspaper: ‘The Russian Armed Forces have begun to conduct combat operations for real, this is how it should have been done from the very beginning.
Now we are striking at the infrastructure. First of all, targeting energy facilities, communications and railways. All these targets are vulnerable, and we have every opportunity to impact them.
Leaving the enemy without electricity, we will leave him without light and communications, as well as without properly functioning railways. This fighting must be continued. This is feared in the West, which is why they’ve raised such a cry.
Problems with electricity will disrupt entire logistics of the Ukrainian military — system for transporting personnel, military equipment, ammunition, related cargo, as well as the functioning of military and repair plants. It will become easier for our units at the front.
So far, there is shock in Ukraine, but they will be able to restore the destroyed facilities. In order to comprehensively destroy [Ukraine’s] military logistics, you need to work in this vein for a week and a half or two.’
We will see how this new strategy works under a new general. It worked for us against Serbia.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/stories/belgrade052599.htm
BELGRADE, May 24 – NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia’s power grid left millions of people without electricity or water service today, bringing the war over Kosovo more directly into the lives of civilians across the country.
Three consecutive nights of air attacks caused extensive blackouts in Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Nis, the three largest cities in Serbia, Yugoslavia’s dominant republic. In contrast with previous attacks on the power supply – in which allied warplanes triggered temporary outages by dropping carbon-fiber filaments that shorted out electrical lines – NATO forces this time struck at Serbia’s five major power-transmission stations with high-explosive munitions, causing damage that could take weeks to repair.
Officials at the Pentagon and at NATO headquarters in Belgium said allied jets deliberately attacked the power grid, aiming to shut it down more completely and for longer periods than at any time previously in the two-month-old air campaign. U.S. officials estimated the attacks had shut off power to about 80 percent of Serbia.
Allied officials said the attacks were intended to disrupt operations by the Serb-led Yugoslav military in Kosovo, the focus of the conflict, and not target civilians. But by increasing the hardship of ordinary citizens, alliance leaders also appeared to be seeking to encourage public disaffection with the government of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Here in Belgrade, where rage against NATO during the initial days of the three-month-old bombing campaign has lapsed into weariness for many residents, the prospect of sustained blackouts brought renewed anger toward the alliance. Some cited the power outages as evidence that the genuine aim of NATO is not to expel Yugoslav troops and Serbian special police units from Kosovo, but to punish civilians and wreck the country.
The attacks also slashed water reserves by damaging pumps and cutting electricity to the few pumps that were still operative. Belgrade’s water utility said that reserves of drinking water had been reduced to 8 percent, according to the Beta news agency, and that 60 percent of the city was without water service. The agency said authorities were trying to restore water to most city residents by midnight.
A NATO spokesman, Peter Daniel, insisted that allied warplanes were not targeting the Yugoslav water system or main power plants. Instead, he said, the attacks were aimed at “the transformers and the edges, so to speak, of the electricity-generating system.”
Still, military officials confirmed that the objective of using conventional explosives against parts of the power grid was to cause longer-lasting disruptions of electrical service. “It’s fair to say we made the decision that we’re going to attack some elements of it in a way that’s going to take it down for longer than it would have been,” said a senior officer at the Pentagon.
By focusing the attacks more on distribution lines than on main production components, the officer said, the damage should take weeks, not years to repair. He said Yugoslav authorities have access to “auxiliary power supplies for many of these facilities,” but he added that the latest attacks should prove more challenging for the Yugoslav military than the brief outages caused by the filament drops.
That weapon is a highly classified munition that throws out clusters of bomblets packed with chemically treated strands that act like lightning when they touch an electrical structure, causing widespread outages but no permanent damage.
The strikes have been limited thus far to electrical facilities in Serbia proper, the Pentagon officer said, but NATO commanders are understood to be planning to extend the attacks to Kosovo – a Serbian province from which Belgrade government forces have driven hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians in a drive to crush an independence movement there.
The total casualties for Russia seem very high. Event the author mentions casualties are hard to be sure of. I have doubts they are that high.
The author is pretty clear in the overall picture.
Ukraine has not won, but it has not lost, which is a very big thing.
On the other hand, Russia has not won, but it has not lost, either.
The issue is still undecided.
If the West continues to support Ukraine, they have the edge for the moment.
Russia today is not the Russia of the Czars or Stalin. The information control is much less certain.
Russia may be able to conquer Ukraine and take Kiev, but I think it would cripple Russia to do so for the foreseable future.
The war in Ukraine has already done much to cripple the Russian "brand".
The Democrats must have been doing some really awful stuff in Ukraine.
The Ukies are slowly grinding the Ruskies down, with much Western help. People in Russia don’t want to fight or die in Ukraine. Things will only get worse for Pootie and his army the longer he makes war on Ukraine. Belarus is transferring T-72 tanks to Russia, which only weakens Lukashenko in Belarus. Lukashenko’s regime in teetering, and when he falls so does Putin’s chief ally, and Polish and Western influence will wax in Belarus.
blah blah. I am 100% sure that idiot Zelensky will ask us for more billions. That’s his only strategy.
This is a candidate for most ignorant attempt at analysis ever posted on FR. Hohos are thrashing around like fish out of water at present, similar to the last ditch efforts Germany was making to avoid the inevitable in early 45. Even with the smo limitations that Putin placed on his military, Russians have inflicted gigantic damage on the hoho military while minimizing their own casualties and the gloves have come off as of now. Events have disabused Putin of the idea of wanting to view hohos as fellow slavic orthodox Christians rather than cannon-fodder being bossed by nazis which is what they actually are and the guy in charge (HMFIC) of the entire operation is as serious as serious gets. Hohos with their ineptitude have bled NATO and the US white so that they actually have no further ability to help hohostan with anything meaningful.
Wow. Excellent analysis. and I believe mostly correct.
bkmk
Ukraine war shows:
US controls EU
US controls UN
US controls NATO
US controls media
US wants to rule the world
It has to rule the world because without reserve currency status US Empire is bankrupt.
Russia and China say “no way”
They want a multipolar order
WW3 is guaranteed .
You can’t start a serious military analysis by not recognizing that the Kiev axis was a feint, a swindle to distract from the main effort in the Donbas.
Every serious military analyst recognizes that.
It must be going pretty well for Ukraine....Mr. Z is primping and preening again:
https://twitter.com/navyhato/status/1580834744782098432
Good read. Thanks.
Glory to Ukraine
We can scroll and we’re not “Putinists” (what a leftists type slur against those you don’t understand).
The only reason Zelenskiy is still alive is because it suits Putin as he keeps poking the Globalists in the eye. If he was serious about winning - there’s be actual thousands upon thousands of civilian causalities - which would be plastered over every page of news.