UzuMaki NaRuto
Alexander Mercouris
comments
Comments by "UzuMaki NaRuto" (@UzumakiNaruto_) on "Russia Reportedly Withdraws From Izyum, Deploys Troops to Ukraine in Response to Kharkov Offensive" video.
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@subtle0savage
Regarding this current engagement, Ukraine has launched a series of major attacks with no discernable goal in mind (of military consequence). If they had succeeded, or nearly succeeded, in capturing/controlling an objective (as in Germanys advance in to the Ardennes during the 'Battle of the Bulge' to cut Allied ground forces in two and control the port of Antwerp), then this current assault could be labelled as a 'Penetration of the center'. Ukraine's goal seems primarily to gain significant stretches of land held by a weak enemy to boost moral, which has negligible strategic value and in point of fact demonstrates they are weak
The overall Ukrainian goal is of course to take back all or as much land that they've lost in this war. The thing is I believe that they're flexible in going about doing that.
This is just my own speculation, but I think when they announced the offensive on Kherson 1-2 months ago they wanted to see what the Russian reaction would be. The Ukrainians know that the Russians can't be strong everywhere along the front and so perhaps they were looking to see what the Russians would do.
When the Russians saw that the Ukrainians were actually gathering to attack in the Kherson area they moved in reinforcements to help with repelling the attack. The thing is this became a pick your poison situation for the Russians. If they move troops to Kherson to reinforce that area, then those reserves won't be available for other parts of the front. If they don't move troops to Kherson then it will be an easier attack when the UA forces go on the offensive.
The Russians chose to reinforce Kherson, the Ukrainians saw the opportunity to attack in the Kharkiv area when they saw that it wasn't heavily defended. So between good planning and good intelligence supplied by the west, they were able to take advantage of an opportunity that became available and because there were few reserves available, the breakthrough became much larger than if the Russians had any reserves to stop the offensive from moving so deep so fast.
So while this successful attack and retaking of large areas of land is certainly a good morale booster, it also shows that the Ukrainians are capable of outsmarting the Russians as well as being capable of launching larger offensives and exploiting opportunities when they emerge.
You'll ignore the some 80,000 Ukraine casualties to date. You'll look the other way when Russia demonstrates it can strike anywhere, anytime, clear across Ukraine, whenever it chooses.
Can you provide a legitimate source that shows that the UA forces have taken 80,000 casualties? Also ever since the Kiev retreat, the Russians have barely attacked anywhere but the Donbas region because that was all they were capable of. Imagine starting off the war attacking on 3 fronts with armored forces rolling into Ukraine and then after being forced to retreat from Kiev, they lost so much armor that they no longer had the ability to launch any further large scale mobile operations since and its why they were reduced to fighting WWI style and moving forward in a slow crawl in their Donbas offensive.
What took the Russians several months to gain they gave it back in a matter of days. And here's my prediction. The Russians aren't going to be launching any kind of major counterattack anytime soon and if they do eventually go back to the offensive its going to be another slow hard slog forward unless they throw much more men and equipment into the fight.
PS: I give Alexander credit for being such a good spin artist that he could make such a bad situation sound like a minor setback. Putin should definitely give this man a big fat bonus check for defending every Russian mistake so hard and always trying to turn it into a positive.
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@subtle0savage
Frankly my estimate of 80,000 was erring on the side of conservative caution. The number of casualties, given the amount of devastation observed of military formations, anecdotal comments by captured Ukrainian soldiers, the lethality of Russian weapons, is likely in the 120-150,000 range.
I don't doubt that the Ukrainians have taken significant casualties during this war so far, but I doubt the 80,000 number let alone higher until you or anyone else can provide an official legitimate source that can prove this to be true.
On the otherside I don't necessarily trust the super high Russian casualty estimates that have been put out there by some, but I don't doubt that they've definitely taken more casualties than the Ukrainians have.
What we know for certain is that 40,000 soldiers would never, by any military around the world, be construed as enough to seize and hold a well-defended city the size of Kiev. Personally I think Russia was primarily attempting a bluff, a gamble that if it was pulled off, would save an enormous amount of deaths and cost.
When will people give up this excuse and accept that Russia's attack towards Kiev was a failed assault and they paid for it dearly? Look at every single coup/overthrow attempt of a government and tell me when have you EVER needed to conquer the entire city and its population to successfully get rid of a government or leader and take control of the city and gain power?
Look at one of the more recent coups in Myanmar in 2021 where the military there simply arrested all the politicians who were in charge at the time and then installed their own government in its place. Did the military need to send tens of thousands of soldiers out in the city to keep the capital's 900,000+ population under control? Not really and that same military government is still in charge today.
So I don't get this insistence that you need tens of thousands of troops to take over a capital when all you really need to do is capture, kill or make the existing government flee and then take over important government and news media buildings and perhaps some military installations and that's about it.
Personally I think Russia was primarily attempting a bluff, a gamble that if it was pulled off, would save an enormous amount of deaths and cost.
Completely unnecessary. You could've just put those same 40k soldiers at the Belarus border and sat them there the whole time and accomplished the same objective of forcing the Ukrainians to put tens of thousands of troops to face you without losing a single soldier or tank. If the Russians did that, they would now have a large fresh armored reserve to work with instead of a badly beaten and depleted one that needed to be refitted.
Regarding the goal of Ukraine being to take back all of the land it's lost... that is a pipe dream. It has been losing ground consistently since the beginning of the war--and that when it was strongest.
Disagree. While the Ukrainians have lost some good units during the war, they're also gaining new ones who have now had combat experience and are getting better by the day. Also ever increasing amounts of UA soldiers are being trained by NATO advisors which means they'll come out being good troops unlike the untrained, substandard soldiers that Russia are increasingly turning to.
And we didn't even talk about the Ukrainians getting massive equipment upgrades from western countries that they didn't have at the beginning of the invasion. Just the addition of HIMARS/MLRS systems have made a HUGE difference to the war with their ability to hit vital targets far behind Russian lines. If only they had them at the beginning of the war, things would be vastly different by now especially with that 40km column that HIMARS would've turned to dust.
As an addendum, Russia has barely used its actual forces in Ukraine. Most of the fighting has been done by the Wagner group, the Donbass militias and the Chechens under Kadyrov.
That's what Alexander told you and if you want to believe it that's up to you. He just doesn't want this debacle and embarrassment of a performance to be put on the Russian army so just blame it on the militia. If you can show me other sources that prove that Russian troops haven't been doing as much fighting as we know they are, then please post it here. Otherwise its just another 'fact' that Alexander has pulled out of his ass to try and explain away the losses and defeats as not being Russian army losses and defeats.
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