But is that true though? Is most of the Ukrainian army actually around Kiev? You could be right, I'm just not sure. I read that most of it was still on the eastern front, about 70,000 in and around the Donbas. This huge concentration of troops is the biggest reason why the Russians are having a hard time breaking through the Severodonetsk-Rubizhne-Lysyschank urban agglomeration in Luhansk. And also why the Ukrainians are giving them a tough fight for Izium.
The reason the Russians are not making a big push on Kyiv is because they are learning their lessons from Mariupol.
The Ukrainians are far more fanatical and ruthless than the Russians initially expected, and are wilfully throwing their own civilians in the way of incoming Russian ordinance as human shields and media props.
Russia is having to reduce that city to rubble Grozny style now that they are too deeply committed to change course. And that is proving costly and damaging both militarily and in terms of PR.
So rather than repeat the same mistake only on a much larger scale with Kyiv and Kharkiv etc, what the Russians are doing is instead drawing the Ukrainian defenders out to the defensive lines on the outskirts and surrounding towns and villages around Kyiv, where they can engage in a much cleaner fight and where Russian firepower dominance is far far more telling and effective.
That’s the main reason the Russians have made zero attempts take out Zelensky. Because his idiotic leadership is one of Russia’s biggest assets right now since the comedian is so obsessed with the media war he cannot see how he is loosing the actual long term fighting chance of the Ukrainians to achieve more Reddit karma and Twitter likes.
The west will fight Putin to the last Ukrainian, and Zelensky is proving to be the kind of mindless puppet who would gladly do it for them, and in the worst Hollywood-fictional-heartless-Soviet-leader style, with his Molotov Grandma and pick-up-what-you-need-from-the-battlefield-dead ‘strategies’.
So Putin is using that to his advantage and creating a massive meat grinder outside Kyiv for Zelensky to blithely throw all his manpower into so the Russians can move into Kyiv later on to a depleted defence and take the city with far fewer losses and in a much more intact way than they could possibly hope with a Leningrad re-enactment as a fully assault right now would be.
