Russia pushes on key Ukraine city while Kyiv's Kursk incursion slows

BBC News ^ | September 1, 2024 | Tom Bennett

[Trump20162020]

Russia has made sweeping advances in recent days that threaten to outweigh the gains made by Ukraine in its cross-border attack into the Kursk region.

Russian forces are just a few kilometres from the Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, a crucial logistics hub used by the Ukrainian military.

Home to a key railway station and major roads, Pokrovsk is an essential supply and reinforcement point for Ukraine’s troops on the eastern front line.

Critics in Kyiv fear that the country's military has made a serious miscalculation.

[Trump20162020]

Ukraine's frontlines are collapsing. If only there were some soldiers somewhere that could've been there helping instead of standing around in Russia.

[mikey_hates_everything]

“Incursion”? Sure. So is what Russia has done.

“Well, if Russia hadn’t invaded Ukraine..” is the answer we keep seeing to questions about ending the war. Now that Ukraine has invaded Russia, sort of takes the air out of that balloon. Both sides are definitely dirty now. Can the war end now or should everyone just let Russia keep going and destroying and killing with no talks? Because that’s what they are going to do as well as get their territory back.

[srmanuel]

At this point, Russia won’t stop until Zelinsky is gone, either that mean Russia consumes all of Ukraine or Zelinsky takes his millions he’s stolen and moves to another country.

They also very likely won’t stop until there is some type of formal declaration that Ukraine will never be part of NATO.

Formal declarations mean nothing but at least both sides have acknowledged that it should happen.

[Does so]

“If only there were some soldiers somewhere that could’ve been there helping”.
.

The Baltics should be sending their promised troops shortly.

[rdcbn1]

The offensive in Kursk may end up being a real disaster for Ukraine.

They had already squandered all negotiating leverage for a peace agreement by wasting their military assets on ill conceived offensives so they desperately tried to regain some leverage by capturing a nuclear power plant in Russia to use as a bargaining chip and possibly sucking NATO into joing the war with direct military intervention

They have totally failed to achieve this objective and the Ukrainian troops are probably going to get cut off and either be isolated and out of the fight or destroyed in detail.

The assets they allocated to their Kursk offensive has drained their ability to effectively resist on other fronts and the their reckless and losing gamble in Kursk has backfired. Their failure has shut down support and cut off supply from Germany and Poland, the Ukraine's two biggest EU backers, instead of sucking NATO deeper into the conflict.

The Ukrainian military is getting closer to the breaking point - maybe even to the point of total collapse.

It will be interesting to see how hard the Russians want to press their advantage and exploit the situation.

The post proxy war Ukraine is going to be an economic and humanitarian disaster. the Ukraine's NATO backers who have riven the proxy war are now cutting and running to shut down assistance to abandon the Ukraine.

Jerking the rug out from under the Ukraine both economically and militarily at a time when the Ukraine has become totally dependent upon foreign welfare payments has the potential to give rise economic collapse that may possibly be as bad or worse than the situation after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[BroJoeK]

Trump20162020: "Ukraine's frontlines are collapsing.
If only there were some soldiers somewhere that could've been there helping instead of standing around in Russia."

"Collapsing" is not the right word.

1. On February 7, 2024, Russian forces took Avdiivka.

2. The distance from Avdiivka to Pokrovsk is 30 miles.

3. Since February 7, Russian forces advanced 24 miles in 196 days, or an average of roughly 200 yards per day -- a little over one tenth of a mile per day.

4. Today Russian forces are 6 miles east of Pokrovsk and the city has been largely evacuated.

5. Russian casualties since February 7 have averaged over 1,000 per day, according to Ukrainian and independent estimates, so, over 200,000 Russian casualties to advance 24 miles in 6-1/2 months.

Compare: since August 6, Ukrainian forces in Kursk control roughly 700 square miles, including the region south of the Seym River.

Pre-war, Pokrovsk was a small city of around 60,000.
If or when Russian forces have destroyed Pokrovsk enough to take, it will be the largest Ukrainian former city to fall into Russian hands since Mariupol in May 2022.

The potential fall of Pokrovsk would be significant, though hardly a sudden "collapse" of Ukraine's front.

[BroJoeK]

mikey_hates_everything: "Both sides are definitely dirty now."

Naw... that's like saying the Western Allies D-Day landings at Normandy made the Allies just as "dirty" as Nazis!!
It's insane, and you really need to stop making ridiculous moral equivalences.

mikey_hates_everything: "Can the war end now or should everyone just let Russia keep going and destroying and killing with no talks?
Because that’s what they are going to do as well as get their territory back."

"Russkiy Mir" and "Putin's Brain", Alexander Dugin:

Since the fall of the Old Soviet Union in 1991, Russians are increasingly enthralled by expansionist ideology of "Russkiy Mir" and "Pax Russica" -- as replacement for Communist revolutionary expansionism.

In 2007, Vladimir Putin enshrined "Russkiy Mir" as official government policy and its ideas are behind every Russian military aggression since (if not before), including notably:

1. Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008
2. Russia's invasion of Crimea and the Donbas in 2014
3. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

If Russia is victorious in Ukraine, it will validate "Russkiy Mir" and encourage future wars of Russian aggression.

It will also encourage other "Axis of Evil Dictators" to live out their own irredentist fantasies in acts of brutal revanchism.