The pro-Ukraine sources are getting excited and not because of the southern offensive.
These are the types of breakouts that you keep paratroopers and other quick reaction forces on hand so that they can buy you time. I guess now we will find out how many of them the Russians have left after using them to man the line down south……
This one might be pure propaganda but it gives you a taste of what is out there..
This is the pro-Russian view. You can tell they are worried when they start explaining that they are really fighting NATO and not Ukrainians…..
This is a Ukraine view in counter to the above……
All that said, there is always a real risk of overextensions on these kinds of things. This is a true test of the mobility of the Russian arms. If they have reserves of any significance left, they should be able to pincer this attack and it might even help them now that the Ukrainians are out of the trench. But if they tied up their best troops holding the line then this will be textbook example of why your elite forces are supposed to be in reserve (where Napoleon famously kept his Old Guard for example).
It is make or break time for Ukraine. Peter Zeihan has a good overview of what the stakes are.
The one thing that Peter does not go into is the consequences of failure for Ukraine. They really don’t have time on their hands. Western populations forced their leaders to adopt harder line on Russia then they really intended to (so much so that US treasury had to ask companies to not “over enforce” sanction regulations and EU ports were turning away legal Russian cargos because the longshore unions were refusing to unload). But the EU populations are starting to learn what the consequences are for their actions and Ukraine is going to start facing a falling off of support if for no other reason that all easy gifts (small arms, old stocks of soviet weapons in eastern European weapon stocks) have all been given. So the question of the hour is does Ukraine have a chance of achieving its goals in southern Ukraine?
In a chartable mood, I can sympathize with not trusting America’s intelligence agencies and thinking that Putin was not crazy enough to do what he has done. Maybe I would have been in the same camp if it had not been for some people smarter than me walking me through the available open source information and what it meant from a military perspective. And how many people in Ukraine have the time and inclination to collect the sources of information that I read?
Regardless of whether you are charitable or not, the fact remains that a lot of Ukrainians completely failed to see this coming.
If disaster strikes your country, are you going to be one of those people in a panic trying to buy food in a rapidly emptying grocery store? Or do you think you are smarter then all those Ukrainians who totally failed to see this coming and you will be smart enough to stock up before the general panic sets in?
“water purification kits, medical equipment as well as drugs, tents, blankets, sleeping bags and additional equipment for civilians who are not in their homes in the cold winter weather”
It sounds very similar to the equipment list I laid out as part of my Yuppie FEMA plan. If you had the all the gear as laid out in that plan, you would be pretty well set up to throw it all in the car and flee. If I felt compelled to do that, the main additional things I would wish I had were a tent, a few full gas cans to extend the range of my vehicle, and a way to charge my cell phones without running my vehicle.
Hopefully, we will never experience a crisis on the scale of what Ukraine is going through now. But you should always remember all the people in Ukraine who held on to that hope without doing anything all the way up to the point when it became a certainty. Maybe that memory will keep you from being just like them.
