Dnarever wrote on Jun 6
th, 2023 at 10:23pm:
Quote:expert - says Ukraine is losing the war badly.
In March 2022 Russia took Much of the east of Ukraine and a corridor to Kiev as well as a lot of the North.
By Oct 2022 Ukraine had taken back the path through to Kiev and all of the north east.
March 2023 Ukraine had taken back a little more but much was locked down through winter.
do you ever think there may have been more in depth reasons for what occured in all of those circumstances
ukraine has taken back effectively nothing since kharkov and kherson, and in the latter circumstance the russians gave them back the city, you are lying
kharkov was a vacated front with a significant numerical advantage, the ukrainians were opportunistically seizing upon the fact that russia did not have enough manpower to adequately defend the entire front
manpower has been a significant constraint on operations for both sides in this conflict, in reality despite being the biggest war in europe since world war 2, it is a fairly small scale conflict in the grand scheme of things, with both sides fighting with armies that in total are smaller than most major eastern front ww2 battles
ukraine wasn't even close to kherson at the time of russia's withdrawal, all their kherson offensive yielded after months and months of flailing and sending reconaissance groups into direct artillery fire was a few podunk villages along the dneiper river
it was not remotely possible for russia to capture the kiev metropolitan region with the number of men it had around the city; at that time, the only hope of seizing an urban conglomoration of 3m with a force of about ~50,000 men was a rapid capitulation ala georgia, which was obviously the plan A the kremlins were hoping for
when it became clear that was no longer possible, those forces were withdeawn and redeployed, sensibly
you seem to believe that armies should fight stupid unwinnable battles to the death, and this is a smart way for wars to be fought
and in retrospect given what has happened with the destruction of the novaya kakhovka dam surovkin's decision to withdraw from kherson was absolutely the correct thing to do, as the destruction of the dam could have easily left all russian soldiers on the left side of the dneiper river stranded, inundated and cut off from supplies
a completely reasonable decision in hindsight
what this war has communicated to me more than anything is modern armies don't have enough infantry with fighting power to effectively conduct operations, and are overly reliant on ranged deep strike weaponry which has little capacity to take and hold positions