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.
This isn’t the first Ukrainian offensive. They’ve mounted several offensives that ended in total disaster. Just before this one, they launched an offensive in Kherson and failed miserably. The Russians are retreating since they never really held much territory in the north. They didn’t even take Kharkov.
This offensive is mostly a propaganda campaign to secure more western funding. It’s just the initial push, once it’s over the Russians will regroup and retake their positions. Ukraine can’t sustain this for long.
Ukraine has attempted attacks before, yes. Relatively small scale actions on the tactical level. Those weren’t offensives. Kherson and Kharkov now are offensives - maneuvers on a very large scale on the strategical level. And this is the first they’ve put together since this war started and no matter the losses in Kherson, they still managed to collapse the Kharkov area because of it.
This is a massive win for them on the strategical level, not a simple PR win. No other way to frame it. There’s absolutely no indication that Russia can or will make the big moves and sacrifices to return these places, despite the massive effort over months to take them in the first place. Izyum was one of the primary objectives and wins in the first phase. It was lost in 2-3 days. I also don’t see any reason why the Ukrainians should be unable to sustain. They managed to sustain in these places initially much longer than the Russians now did. They’re sustaining all along the front and they’ve even gained offensive capabilities.
Well it is a PR stunt regardless of its success. Since it coincides with a new multi billion dollar aid package for Ukraine. It can be argued that without such an offensive, it would be hard to justify more aid, since up until now Ukraine has been systematically losing.
I still wouldn’t call it a massive success, because Kharkov was the area with least Russian presence. I’m not military expert, but I’ve been following “The New Atlas” as my source of information for this war. He still claims that this isn’t as big of a deal as the Western media is portraying. From what I know this was just a continuous big push into Russian territory. These troops will eventually be cut off from logistics and grinded down by the Russians.
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.