And that they failed to retreat with any North Korean POWs
This is what the Russian Defense Ministry claims as Uke losses.
Kiev’s report I havent seen.
Posted on 03/15/2025 9:14:36 AM PDT by mac_truck
Terrible though it is, Ukraine’s forced withdrawal from Kursk makes peace negotiations with Russia more likely. Indeed had Putin not been able to drive the Ukrainian army out, he is unlikely to have even contemplated peace talks. He would have demanded that Kyiv pull out of his territory first. That would have been a huge political challenge for Zelensky, on top of all the others he faces: the idea of voluntarily withdrawing from conquered Russian land while at the same time ceding large areas of his own country to the enemy.
Putin has the whip hand, and one of the strategic objectives of the Kursk offensive – gaining a bargaining chip for future peace negotiations – could never realistically have paid off. General Oleksandr Syrsky, Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian army, now knows that, which is why in recent days he has been talking about preserving as many of his soldiers’ lives as possible rather than fighting to hold his ground.
Kyiv had also hoped that driving its troops into Russian territory would force Putin to deploy substantial forces to recover it, thus easing pressure on the front lines in Donbas. It didn’t work out that way either. Instead Russia contained and assaulted the Kursk salient with limited forces and called up North Korean troops to make up the numbers. Meanwhile, of course, Ukraine had to find the forces to attack into Kursk and, with overall manpower shortages, they had to come from the battlefront. We can’t calculate the net military effect of that. Since the initial offensive in Kursk began last August Russia has continued to advance in the Donbas, albeit slowly, but it is possible that Ukraine might have lost even more of its territory there if it weren’t for Kursk.
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.news.yahoo.com ...
Are all these stories coming from the Left to try to blame Trump ?
Invading Kursk was stupid. There were three, better strategies to follow.
If the war ends in a ceasefire and and an eventual peace Treaty, then the Kursk invasion was a strategic success even though it was a tactical failure.
We'll see. Time will tell.
The Ukraine’s most costly mistake was listening to Victoria Nuland. It destroyed their country.
Putin will get his eastern slice of Ukraine at the cost of hundreds of thousands of troops. Ukraine will be left with cities and towns in ruins and hundreds of thousands of troops and civilians killed.
This could have been settled back in 2022 but there were few adults in charge. They laughed the 99-year-old Kissinger out of the room when he outlined a possible solution.
It was a gamble. Russia was supposed to freak out and commit massive forces there which the Ukes hoped to reduce the pressure they were getting elsewhere.
The Russians just absorbed it and did not fall for the distraction.
This is something the Russians did several times with the original Nazis in the 40s.
Trade a small bit of land and then close a kessel.
The Ukes were trained in this and should have known better. But they listened to the DC/London axis.
Z wasted his best troops for a useless media splash in Kursk. Now they are decimated, and many pieces of equipment destroyed. If he had concentrated on his line of defense he would have done much better.
And that they failed to retreat with any North Korean POWs
This is what the Russian Defense Ministry claims as Uke losses.
Kiev’s report I havent seen.
Seems like it's working. After the Russians captured Avdiivka and Bakhmut, it's basically trench warfare at this point but with drones.
>>>>Invading Kursk was stupid. There were three, better strategies to follow.<<<<
Rolling in there driving German tanks pissed off the Russians even more.
Kursk was a complete failure, Z put his best troops in an area with no value and no cover and got them slaughtered. His idea was to win more military support from NATO, and he now has less. Ukraine has no path to any victory, what is has is less troops and less equipment to cover the same 600 mile front.
Bkmk
“ Kyiv had also hoped that driving its troops into Russian territory would force Putin to deploy substantial forces to recover it, thus easing pressure on the front lines in Donbas. It didn’t work out that way either. Instead Russia contained and assaulted the Kursk salient with limited forces and called up North Korean troops to make up the numbers.”
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It also gave Russia opportunity to give a number of Russian conscripts actual combat experience. As I understand it Russian law prevents deploying conscripts outside of Russia during a “special military operation” unlike in a declared war where they could be so deployed.
Since Kursk is in Russia proper that deployment restriction wasn’t a factor.
Good point about the use of conscripts, many of whom are from Eastern Russia and have Asian features.
“Invading Kursk was stupid. There were three, better strategies to follow.”
On the contrary, it almost worked - they had to get to the nuke plant but I suspect the union-made Western weapons started blowing head gaskets, so they only made it 2/3’s of the way.
But once stopped, the Ukrainians should have turned around and returned home...but the Neocons who pull their puppet-strings would not permit it.
The first seems to have been an attempt to capture Russia's nuclear power plant and possibly a stockpile of nuclear weapons near Kursk. That failed.
The next goal was to divert Russian troops out of Ukraine and into Kursk to take pressure off the troops in Ukraine. The Russians did not take that bait. They flipped the script on Zelensky and the reverse happened to the Ukrainians. Some of their best trained and equipped troops became tied down in Kursk and could not help out in Ukraine.
Another goal was win a propaganda war to reassure the Ukraine's US and EU backers that the Ukrainian army was still effective and capable of executing offensive military operations.
The final goals was to manufacture artificial leverage so the Ukraine could use the military occupation of the Kursk region in Russia and withdrawal as a bargaining chip in ceasefire negotiations.
All of these objectives failed and backfired on the Ukraine and has allowed Russia to flip the script on the invasion of the Kursk. The Zelensky is obstinately forcing Ukrainian troops to fight and die in a futile Götterdämmerung in order to avoid a huge propaganda defeat that could damage his support from his foreign supporters despite the fact that it is destroying all negotiating leverage
Perhaps he hopes to create such a huge humanitarian disaster in Kursk to support his talking point that Russia is the evil empire by forcing them to do horrible things to the troops in Kursk that it will sway world public opinion for prolonging the war.
It was a good strategy to try, but after it was clear the distraction wasn’t working, they should have made a strategic retreat out of Kursk. Shouldn’t ever have been a thought they could hold it.
“Invading Kursk was stupid. There were three, better strategies to follow.”
Putin was weakened and humiliated. He is angry.
He promised the country a swift victory and after years of fighting managed to lose part of his country.
“Shouldn’t ever have been a thought they could hold it.”
They new they couldn’t hold it. It was a push to prevent an invasion.
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