According the PBS Frontline report, the Russians are dying like flies and losing equipment at a stupendous rate, yet strangely, they have a lot more volunteers and a lot more equipment than they did a year ago, while the Ukrainian army is shrinking dramatically. Odd that.
The Pokrovsk agglomeration (Pokrovsk, Rodynske and Myrnohrad) is a city bigger than Bakhmut — remember how long and terrible the battle for Bakhmut was.
But on August the fifth the Pokrovsk agglomeration had been trapped in a cauldron for a while and seemed to be collapsing quite rapidly, looked like it was going to fall in a few days. The Ukrainian battle lines were so thin that Russians could infiltrate through the front line to take out drone operators and artillery inside Pokrovsk, indicating that the Ukrainian front line in Pokrovsk was far more thinly manned than their front line in Bakhmut had been. And then the Ukraine rounded up its elite forces, the politicals, the Nazis, Azov, who have better pay, better equipment, and vastly better and longer training that the busified cannon fodder. These people have, until recently not really had to fight Russians. Their main job has been blocking the retreat of the busified cannon fodder. Now they got hurled into Pokrovsk.
Suddenly the Russians found themselves fighting far more enemy troops, far more dedicated enemy troops, far better trained enemy troops, and far better equipped enemy troops.
This stabilised the situation, but did not push the Russian troops back. Ukrainian attempts to relieve the cauldron and push the Russian troops back had a terrible cost for the Ukrainians.
How terrible?
Well now seems like the Ukrainians are back to where they were five weeks ago. From which I conclude that most of those elite troops hurled at Pokrovsk are now dead or maimed. The layer of busified cannon fodder separating the Nazis from the Russians has for some time been getting thinner and thinner. Poles, Germans, and Moldovans were supposed to show up to protect the Nazis. They failed to do so. At Pokrovsk the layer disappeared.
Does this mean the war will end shortly with the Maidan government in Kiev dying in a fire? Probably not. There may not be enough Nazis to defend it, but neither are there enough conscripts to attack it. The logic of war is that Ukrainian army just quietly evaporates, and the Russian army then does what it pleases. Because the decision to expend the Ukrainians was not made in the Ukraine, it is impossible for the Ukraine to agree to peace. The Russians will just have to kill every remaining male. They are most of the way there, but there is still some way to go.
This is just horrifically ghastly.
It deserves a closer and sober look, how the interent, Starlink, etc, have made this horrible state of affairs possible. It reminds me of how President Johnson and the Pentagon were accused of micro-managing every minute detail of the Vietnam campaign, but at least they were roughly American. This is much worse, and portends an even more ghastly separation of power and consequences for next time.
Or rather, perhaps I’m seeing it exactly wrong. If those Ukrainian cannon fodder unfortunates only had some kind of unfiltred social media capability themselves, maybe this could have done very differently.
Also:
What a sentence.