Apparently they withdrew from Izyum behind the Oskol river during the night. Unconfirmed reports are UAF crosses the Siversky Donets river largerly uncontested and are either fighting in or have already pushed the Russians out of Lyman.
All of this in the span of a few days without much resistance in crucial areas that took the allies months to take. No idea what to even say to this tbh.
It is a PR victory too, yes. But that’s mostly because the military victory here was so quick, so easy and so massive that it naturally makes for good PR. Winning all of Kharkov region in 3 days isn’t merely a PR stunt, but it sure as hell is good PR.
Also how are they supposed to be cut off? Russians retreated from the region almost entirely. They didn’t have the resources to mount a defence of territory they invested months to take, how are they supposed to retake it or cut Ukraine off from Kharkov region?
The “victory” was easy because Russia let them “win”. Russia has said from the beginning this is not about territorial conquest. Russia doesn’t cling to every inch of land like Ukraine at the cost of its soliders’ lives. The fact that it was so easy should clue you in that there is more going on than what it appears. For months Ukraine is unable to stop the Russians and now suddenly you think that they have magically become the best army in the world that rolled over the Russians in three days? Russia barely had any troops in this area at all, it was a token tripwire force. If you want to see what it looks like when Russia decides to actually defend territory look at what happened in Kherson. But in both cases it preserved its forces and lured Ukraine out of cities and fortified positions. You keep assuming that success in this war is measured by territorial conquest because that is what the western media tells you, but when has Russia ever said it is interested in territory? The point is the destruction of the Ukrainian army. Demilitarization. This will just speed that up.
Who has lost more troops and equipment in this whole operation? What did this really change in terms of the balance of forces? So some lines on a map moved, so what? I don’t get how you people can suddenly go into all out panic at the slightest whiff of Ukrainian “success”. Did Russia lose thousands of men and large numbers of irreplaceable equipment like the Ukrainians did? No. Has the West suddenly developed an industrial base back overnight that it can afford to have Ukraine take these sorts of losses in equipment that it took in Kherson and is taking in Kharkov now that Russia just stepped out of the way and allowed them to overextend and expose themselves? No.
And sure there are downsides to this as there are to any strategy. You can call it cynical and callous toward the people living there, and that would be true. A lot of people are going to have to flee so Ukraine doesn’t exact reprisals on them. That is harsh but it is the reality of war. Russia is playing a bigger game than just Ukraine, it has broader geopolitical goals that it is following. The Ukraine conflict is a means to an end, Russia could decide to pull back to the Feb 24 lines and it still would be winning on the economic and geopolitical level because the West is now killing its own economy with these sanctions.
I think a lot of “pro-Russian” people need to take a step back and chill. You need to stop obsessing over the minutiae of every movement back and forth of the front line, every captured village or town. Go back to the fundamentals. What is the distribution of forces, who is losing irreplaceable trained men and material, who has the productive capabilities to keep churning out missiles and munitions, whose economy is thriving and whose is imploding?
And what is it that we as communists should really care about? Russia winning territory? No. That is of no concern to us. The west’s global hegemony crumbling before our eyes is what matters! More and more countries are siding with Russia and China precisely because these two do NOT behave like the US does. They have come around even on the Ukraine conflict to Russia’s side because Russia DID NOT and will not go to all out war and carpet bomb everything like the US would.
The measured and “by the book” way that Russia is waging this military operation is more important for the bigger geopolitical picture than the appearance of “success” as defined by Ukronazi and western propagandists.
Because we’re too used to seeing something looking good suddenly collapse into the pit of USA domination. Antiimperialism need serious and spectacular victories to break the endless doomerism.
Revolution much like war is a marathon not a sprint. We will be seeing things plenty spectacular enough come winter happening economically in Europe…
We will see.
The point here is precisely not about Russia losing territory, the concern is about Russia’s inability and/or unwillingness to mount even a token defence of critical areas they invested months to capture and defend the people it’s claiming to liberate there. The worrying thing here isn’t lines on a map and if that’s your takeaway of most people’s criticism I think you missed their point.
I don’t see how this makes it any better, in fact this is precisely why people are so furious. Why is there only a token tripwire force there? Why are this tripwire force, the reserves and prepared defences so utterly insufficient they have to pack up and flee, leaving behind men, civilians and equipment despite the massive defenders advantage that’s been demonstrated over and over in this war? Because it can’t and/or isn’t willing to.
If that is the case however, it also can’t or doesn’t want to muster the forces necessary to ever recapture this territory, let alone destroy the entire Ukrainian army. They didn’t have enough men to secure this area over months, but they somehow have the manpower to recapture and then somehow hold it again even though that takes much more effort than holding it in the first place? Where is that force coming from?
That is the point though, Ukraine neither overextended nor exposed itself in Kharkiv. Russia was exposed and overextended and Ukraine capitalized on that. Russia also isn’t attriting this force by basically packing up and leaving without much of a fight at all. And why would they be able to destroy them better now, sitting behind less prepared lines behind the Oskol river, than they were behind the Siversky Donets? As you said, the situation hasn’t changed fundamentally. They weren’t able to grind down the Ukrainians sufficiently with the old frontline - otherwise this offensive wouldn’t have happened - why should they be able to do that with the new frontline? How would they be able to free Donbass and beat the Ukrainian military at all if even that chunk of Kharkiv was too much for them to hold onto?
Sure, that’s Ukraine. That doesn’t really matter though if they are willing and capable of sacrificing these kind of numbers of men in particular and if Russia is incapable of capitalizing on these numbers. Their losses accomplished what they needed to accomplish - they brought Russia’s ragtag militia-volunteer-pmc expedition force to the limits of its capabilities and are now managing to exploit these limits. Despite 6 months of this supposedly crippling attrition. They obviously do not care about losing a couple thousand men for victories like this.
Like come on, we don’t need to be doomers and proclaim that everything’s lost here, but especially as Marxists we also musn’t delude ourselves to the now incredibly obvious faults and shortcomings of this whole operation if we are to asses things correctly going forward.
And fact of the matter is that this operation, while accomplishing incredible things for its size, is terribly inadquate for the task at hand. We saw this in March; we saw it when DPR fighters left Mariupol for Donetsk, dragging the fighting out for much longer than it needed to; we saw it when allies were unable to fully close the cauldron around Severodonetsk; we’ve seen it in the failure to stop daily shelling of Donetsk even after 6 months and we’re seeing it more obvious than ever today. They are fighting a ‘special operation’ with a patchwork volunteer army against a NATO supplied fanatical enemy outnumbering them 4 to 1.
If they can’t commit the resources needed via mobilization and can’t destroy the targets they need to to disrupt the Ukrainian military (infrastructure, etc) due to larger PR struggles, but that leads them to blunders like this and massive PR blows like Bucha and the loss of goodwill among their own population and the Russians in Ukraine - it just can’t finish what it started.
And we also have to confront the seeming lack of a coherent overarching strategy or goal for this whole thing that is reflected in the Kiev retreat, the Kharkiv retreat, the inadequate force committed, the gloves-on approach, the absolute non-reactions to redlines like repeated Belgorod and Crimea attacks and the abandonment of their supposed compatriots (again).
In short they need to get their shit together, because right now the contradicitions within Russia and their leadership are creating the conditions for much worse than the loss of some part of Kharkov.
Look i am not a military professional and i don’t know if you are. But i am pretty sure that neither of us is working with anything close to complete information here. We don’t know where and how many units there are, we don’t know what the losses on either side have been so far, we don’t know the short term operational plan for this area was, and we don’t know what Russia’s long term plan for the whole of the Ukraine conflict is.
We need to bear in mind that Russia may not have the goals that we assume they do. For instance Russia has never said anything about sticking around in Kharkov region. They may not have the intention to liberate all of Russian speaking Ukraine at all. And as for the timeline, it seems to me that Russia wants to drag this out.
It would make sense that they want to largely be in a holding pattern until a month or two into winter, or maybe even longer, so that the full impact of the economic blowback of the sanctions fully devastates Europe and renders it unable to keep supporting Ukraine. And think about how long the Syria operation lasted.
I know we have short attention spans and we would like to see a quick end to this but that may not be what the Kremlin wants. Whether or not they fucked up, or whether they have the wrong strategy it’s too early to say, ultimately we will just have to wait and see, and most importantly stop being so emotionally invested in every little daily or weekly development in this conflict, there are more productive things we can do as communists.
And as communists we should especially not be surprised anyway that Russia does not act how we would like them to act, it is after all a bourgeois government with bourgeois priorities. Our critical support for them is only justified insofar as they contribute to the weakening of western imperialism and to the emergence of a multipolar world.
Watch my new post. The video explains everything in better detail than I could.
I know the channel and the video, I generally think his reports are pretty damn good, but I simply disagree in this case and reckon it’s mostly cope.
Well, I disagree with you. I still don’t think this will accomplish much. I still remember the great empty victories of Kharkov 1.0, Snake Island and other laughable useless achievements by Kiev, I’ll remain skeptic. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.