Setbacks For Russia
By Yesterday Rob wrote a piece that I agree with. We’ve both been cautious about the news coming out of Ukraine because it was hard to verify, but the Ukrainian offensive seemed to be going well and picking up speed. This morning the Ukrainians have retaken the railroad centers of Izyum and Kupiansk, which Russians had been using for resupply. It is beginning to look like a rout in the Kharkiv region.
A big question continues to be the absence of the Russian Air Force.
Lawrence Freedman is always worth reading.
Speculation is getting pretty wild on Twitter, and I advise large grains of salt. From Freedman:
Russia is losing but it has not yet lost. It still occupies a large chunk of Ukrainian territory and still has substantial military assets in the country. As I have argued regularly in these posts wars can take unexpected turns, as we have just seen. Calamitous miscalculations as well as audacious manoeuvres can transform the character of a conflict. There is always a risk of analyses getting too far ahead, jumping from the current state of affairs to the next and beyond and then asking what happens in purely hypothetical situations. Earlier in the summer there was a tendency to assume that the coming months would be dominated either by more gruelling Russian offensives as in the Donbas or perhaps a stalemate, so that the war could last months or even years. This stalemate philosophy still persists, not least because it is hard to even contemplate such a great military power being humbled.
This is happening so quickly that there aren’t even a lot of tweets to choose from. I’ll update the post with good ones as they appear.
Guys, guys! We’ve got this.