It is quite clear that the people that post these things online have an agenda of making Ukrainians sound like absolute geniuses and Russians sound like complete morons. The fact that everyone on twitter have jumped onto the success of this Kharkiv offensive and just completely ignored all the losses at Kherson show you the reliability of this crowd.
This is a military forum, not twitter or reddit. Yes, we are biased toward China here and probably against Western military here, but let's try to be intellectually honest here and not resort to all these bad takes and hyperventilation.
if we only look at Russian incompetence and have complete media blackout over Ukrainian losses (outside of that one WAPO article), how can we accurately assess what's going on?
What seems to have happened is that:
1) Ukraine launched an enormous offensive at Kherson and the Russians were ready for it. Ukrainians really suffered
2) Ukraine then turned around and attacked Kharkiv, the Russians were not ready for it. They didn't want to lose combat strength, so they retreated to a place.
3) It didn't sound like there were any major Russian forces that were captured, because they were fleeing so quickly.
4) It is also quite obvious that the online twitter crowd has often overstated the number of Russian casualty and equipment losses. They are in capable of being partial and just analyze things from military point of view.
5) It's not clear to me how much casualties Russians can actually suffer from fleeing quickly and abandoning their equipments.
So, since this is a military forum, can we please just get past the hyperventilation and the over the top reactions and just look at what we can know?
- what has Russians actually lost in terms of combat strength?
- even if they lost 100 trucks, how hard is that to regain?
- are there any natural defensive value to the positions that Russia just lost? Keep in mind that Mariupol was a big deal because Ukrainians had fortified the area for years. Are there any such structure along Kharkiv that Russia lost?
- What is the capability of Russia to back up its forces and re-engage?
- What is the ability of Ukrainians to continue offensive? How much Ukrainian forces are available.
