The counterattck north of Lyman is a small area in the grand scheme. And if you’re looking for signficance, you shouldn’t over react to the push-pull of front lines in small sectors.
But - there is maybe a story behind the story here. Several stories.
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The closest you’re going to get to The Truth and an honest insight of Russian thinking and awareness is probably an aggregate of similarly timed and themed milblogger Telegram channel freakouts.
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There’s a brittle chauvanism to the Russian invasion mindset that doesn’t respond well to ANY step backwards. That’s a very inflexible way to fight a near-peer war of conquest. It also indicates a weakness - Ukraine doesn’t have to fully expel the Russians to 2014 or 1991 borders for Russia to consider it a defeat. They treat every retreat like an irreversible loss with shrieking hysterics, searching for scapegoats. And usually at the opeational command level, which is kind of dumb. The failure may manifest there, but the real blame is several layers higher in the chain of decision makers.
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Ukraine remains capable of coordinated manueuver warfare. This is after a period where it seemed both sides seemed to accept that mutual drone mass has made zone operations fairly moot. And maybe it is - but that lapses in that drone mass coverage create opporutnity that conventional thinking considered a thing of the past. Ukraine isn’t in a mere “hold on” phase - they are capable of offensives, and they may be growing stronger as Russia’s man-intensive horde war approach is weakening.
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Taking several steps back - the Russian anxiety reacting to a localized rollback at least implies a palpable fear of a ‘turning point’. One that is past ‘culmination’, where you stop advancing, and instead suggests you’re at a point where you start to lose significant pockets that would require limited reserve strength you might not even HAVE to try to get back. That could create a dangerous domino effect both on the physical front lines, and in the collapsing confidence of a slow-but-inevitable strategy of grinding ever forward over a presumably weaknening ukraine.
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For all the talk of a September mobilization, it hasn’t happened yet. And the first fresh conscript, whose combat effectiveness is highly debatable, wouldn’t arrive to reinforce failing fronts for several months from this sentence if mobilization were announced. Nor is there much certainty that mobilized conscripts would be any good as assault forces in the first place to underwrite Russia’s “grind forward, meat bags” strategy. How many more pocket collapses might happen before those conscripts who have less support, less equipment and poorer leadership even arrive at the front to replace the low-funcntioning grunts that are currently being blasted into canned pasta in charred piles of timber and blasted concrete right now?
In short - they are not moving forward and are starting to move backwards. Slowly, then quickly.
That all implies a collective fear among Russky milbloggers that they understand their entire position and philosophy is very fragile. There’s lots of examples in history where a small local defeat reinforces a wider fear that the entire approach to the war is pointless.
It’s very possible that a few collapsed pockets clustered together makes Russia finally accept defeat and screw off home.
The courage that the Ukrainians show every day is truly historic stuff. Slava Ukraini.
I heard fabricated intelligence reports were how this even started, so yeah, no issues at all
There’s gonna be oodles of study afterwards about why any of this happened, but I’d bet my left pinky toe that the biggest single factor is this simple: Putin was always going to do this in his lifetime. Period. This is a vanity revenge project meant to cement his legacy. It gets said often that Putin is a 4D Chess player running circles around naive Western leaders.
I don’t believe that. He’s not a chess player - he’s a poker player who always bluffs. He punches down on opponents he doesn’t think will hit back and relied on his fat chip stack to scare people. Relies on an assumption that nobody really wants to fight and that nobody else would be able to endure their reckless cruelty.
And it worked, most of the time. Georgia. Chechnya Part 2. Crimea. And no doubt, he was given delusional intelligence reports he received about what level of Ukrainian resistance he was likely to come up against in a case of invasion. That’s a consequence of living in a brittle kleptocracy - everyone tells the boss what they want to hear, so that their head doesn’t end up on a spike. Especially when life is relativley good, you just lurch along skimming your take of The Great Corruption Project that is modern russia. Who would be so stupid as to rock the boat to this wonderful mafia state we’ve created? Just lie, and steal. Who cares? Nothing is going to happen except the next mafioso over trying to take your cushy position. Keep an eye on that asshole.
Well…The Boss, who is never satisfied and wants to see certain things happen before he dies. This was supposed to be the great victory that the USSR was cheated out of by traitors and feckless weasels in the west. The final hubris of wicked fools trapped in 20th century grievances.
Putin is a cautoniary tale of investing too much power in one mortal man. Especially when that man is a vile, black hearted gangster ghoul. Russia would have been MUCH better off to use malign mischief to corrode and corrupt Ukraine instead of exposing their army as corrupt, useless butchers way less effective than even the most pessimistic pre-war observers imagined.
Yeah, you’re probably right in that and that it would have happened anyway. It’s maybe even worse than just bad intelligence (but I’m inclined to believe he would have done something stupid anyway even if he did not start this war)