The Russian commander of the “Vostok” Battalion fighting in southern Ukraine said on Thursday that Ukraine will not be defeated and suggested that Russia freeze the war along current frontlines.
Alexander Khodakovsky made the candid concession yesterday on his Telegram channel after Russian forces, including his own troops, were devastatingly defeated by Ukrainian marines earlier this week at Urozhaine in the Zaporizhzhia-Donetsk regional border area.
“Can we bring down Ukraine militarily? Now and in the near future, no,” Khodakovsky, a former official of the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic, said yesterday.
“When I talk to myself about our destiny in this war, I mean that we will not crawl forward, like the [Ukrainians], turning everything into [destroyed] Bakhmuts in our path. And, I do not foresee the easy occupation of cities,” he said.
Then why did Russia fail to take Bakhmut, do you think?
Also thank you for the link. ISW has posted some bad content in the past and this helps to explain it, I think. I appreciate it.
Last I checked Russia took Bakhmut, and they managed to use a PMC to bleed Ukrainian army there in the process which delayed the offensive and gave Russia more time to build fortifications. Even US analysts are now admitting that they advised Ukraine against trying to hold it, and blame the losses there and the delays for the current debacle.
Yeah western intelligence didn’t want Ukraine to die on the hill of Bakhmut (figuratively), Ukrainian leadership chose it for symbolic/domestic reasons rather than strategic. They never did take the whole city though and have since fallen back a bit, with the Ukrainian counteroffensive managing to take a few blocks back. Not too much, though. Ofc Russia has had the gradual advantage in Bakhmut for most of the last year but it was a grinding, incredibly slow, incredibly damaging battle for both sides. It was perhaps unwise for the Ukrainian leadership to make that move, though.
I have no idea where you got this idea that Russia didn’t take the whole city, you can clearly see the whole city is under Russian control on the pro Ukrainian liveuamap https://liveuamap.com/
Meanwhile, the battle has been grinding for the Ukrainian military while it didn’t even engage Russian military proper on the Russian side. It was fought by a private military company. This was easily one of the biggest blunders in the war that Ukraine has made to date.
IIRC Ukraine still controlled part of the T0504 highway within the city at their worst point and since then they’ve taken back a couple of blocks.
I mean you can clearly see that the city is controlled by Russia on the map, saying that Ukraine took a couple of blocks in the suburbs is just pure cope. If anything, the fact that Ukraine is still wasting resources there months after losing the city they shouldn’t have tried to contest in the first place, further shows how dysfunctional Ukrainian strategy is.
I agree with you in terms of the dysfunction of Ukrainian political strategy surrounding Bakhmut. Politicians w/ no military planning experience intervening in what was previously a well-run campaign to achieve a symbolic victory against the advice of their own generals and even western advisors.
The west hasn’t been much better. There was an actual article in WaPo that flat out said that the west knew that Ukraine didn’t have enough equipment to do the offensive, but pushed them into it anyways because they thought their motivation and gumption would make up for it:
This is not how you fight a war.
If that’s their actual justification rather than just what they tell the media then it is flabbergastingly incompetent.
Maybe they just didn’t want to deplete their own stocks and don’t really care how the counteroffensive goes as long as they can continue selling weapons but then there are flaws in that logic, too, since it degrades the idea of invincibility and total technological superiorty that the western MIC have tried hard to portray in recent years. I don’t know, maybe there are just idiots in the top brass of the US political-military institutions but you’d think they’d be more smart than thinking “gumption” can carry the day.
Though it was a big blunder on the Ukrainian side, yes. Political leaders interfered in military strategy when they shouldn’t have done. IIRC DW reported that some senior Ukrainian military leaders wanted to make a tactical withdrawal but the government vetoed it.