Everything is a new development to Putin Fanbois. They don't want their tenents corrupted by facts.
But here are a few (NSFW) links to Redditt Combat Footage threads about this battle. The Russian Army at Avdeyevka is using its traditional tactic of drowning its opponent in Russian blood, or rather its modern tactic of smothering its opponent in a deep layer of burning Russian tanks, AFVs and APCs.
Short clip showing the scale of Russian armored attack on Avdiivka on Oct 10th, 2023.(25 days ago)
Russian attack near Avdiivka suffers massive losses.(16 days ago)
Destruction of russian armored vehicle with troops by Ukrainian Army near Avdiivka. (10 days ago)
Heavy fighting rages near Avdiivka, russians are continuing their attacks.(6 days ago)
OP cited The NY Times as the source but the real source is a blog called Financial-World.org. It is not from The NY Times.
One of those links talk about the Russians sending 3 brigades towards Avdeyevka, only to limp away with barely a little more than a battalion?
I don’t think I know what any of that means. I certainly don’t know what footage of unidentified activity means.
I do know something of precision guided munitions. The CEP on all the artillery black dots in the footage suggests pretty good artillery bombardment. No way to know from whom. The sheer quantity of it suggests Russian, given western reports of how much ammo they have compared to Ukraine.
There is entirely too much focus on drones. They are not very important. The critical information comes from orbit. Drones have too many vulnerabilities in recon because jamming can be bidirectional, both for flight commands and for transmitted imagery. They are cheap and you can procure a lot of them, but the reason you do should be understood. It’s because they have such little use. You have to swarm 100s to get information through from maybe 1, and then you have to persuade yourself that 1 was accurate and valuable.
Satellite imagery, multispectral, and signal receipt is 1000s of times more valuable.
The public has seized on drones as important because they can understand them more than they can understand fourier transforms, which they cannot understand at all. And, of course, there is that delicate reality that military grade orbital recon imagery is not going to appear on Reddit.
War has changed. Satellites have changed it. People may want to measure things by old standards, but it does not matter what people want war to be. Satellites are deciding that. Not people.