What we hopefully can all agree with is that what happens to both soldiers and civilians in this war is just horrible and this is true for both sides, Russians and Ukraianians. This war should have never started and end as soon as posssible on the negotiations table. Ukraine just needs to give up officially on areas it didn't control since about 2014. The Ukrainian regime is just playing on time by slowing things down by transforming every major city into an urban battlefield, by sacrificing its cities, infrastructure and civilian casualties for gaining time. We have to ask for what do they need that time, and the answer is: They just want to provoke an incident which might bring NATO into this war and start World War III, because militarily, they can't win.
Some here said that the Russian military looks incompetent and shows bad morale. Sure, they are not perfect, but they have here a war and task which is much bigger than anything e.g. the US army had to do in the last decades. And whenever the US army was in similar scenario, despite its superiour numbers and means, they had losses and caused civlian collateral damage. Its not even possible to prevent that, because urban siege warfare will inevitably cause civilian casualties and the Ukrainian regime don't just knows that, but calculates with it, to provoke a Western intervention.
From a purely military standpoint, the Ukrainian army is still standing because of two plugs:
- The urban siege warfare in major Eastern cities, which binds large portions of the Russian elite units, especially Mariupol and Kharkiv
- The main Ukrainian battle groups barely holding off the Don republics and Russian forces at the Donbas front
That's why the Russians hit the Eastern cities in the siege so hard, they don't have time, they don't want to give the Ukrainians the time. As soon as especially Mariupol being conquered, even if just largely, and the main units of this siege being freed and the threat in the back eliminated, we will see this massive pincer movement in the East, which will cut off the main Ukrainian forces. Then the main Ukrainian battlegroups, including elite units and nationalist battalions will route and they can't flee from the combined force of the quickly advancing Russian tank groups, the airforce in the sky and the Donbas elite units in their back. They will be completely annihilated in the process.
The Ukrainian government therefore just uses up its time and people, for what?
Either 3rd World War or a soon coming complete Ukrainian defeat. The Russians don't need to change anything, they just need to keep up the morale they have now and what I see is a slow but methodically acting steamroller, the classic Russian strategy - they did the same in all wars since World War I.
What this also means is that the Ukrainian Selenski regime has about 1-3 weeks before this pincer movement closes, at best, because the first spearheads already securing the Dnieper river, despite all those huge elite forces being still bound to the sieges of Mariupol and Kharkiv etc. Mariupol and Kharkiv are the last straws the Ukrainians are holding and the Russians need to use their whole arsenal to eliminate that threat for their big advance.
I heard the Ukrainians take negotiations more seriously now, I just hope that's true, they just should have taken peace and diplomacy more serious before, then this war would have never happened. Nobody wanted that war. Putin was just willing to start it under the given circumstances, because he had absolutely no political and peaceful option left, to safe his most basic interests in Ukraine. The sanctions would have lasted, and Ukraine planned to attack Donbas, while joining NATO and becoming weaponised. People can say Ukraine had the right to do so, from a strictly juridical standpoint, which always favours US interests, because its their system, maybe, but what does it help? Are these pro-Russian territories worth this war, or even a 3rd World War? Is that anti-Russian weaponising of the Ukraine worth it? Don't think so.
They just need to sit down and end this mess as soon as possible on the negotiations table, before it spirals out of control or even if not, before hundreds of thousands more die and Ukraine being reduced to rubble.
