Ukraine Marches 30 Miles in 3 Days and Lays the “Attrition” Cope to Rest

More than six months after Russia launched the invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces are still struggling to capture the village of Marinka in the Donbas.

Meanwhile, in the Kharkiv region, Ukrainian army advanced more than 50 kilometers in three days. pic.twitter.com/EB6fkr9bCJ

— Никола Миковић / Nikola Mikovic (@nikola_mikovic) September 9, 2022

It wasn’t so long ago that the Approved Narrative in the pro-Russian Groupthink Brigade was that Russia was inflicting 400 to 700 KIA on the Ukrainians every single day. To hear it told this would mean that eventually the Ukrainian army would be defeated just through attrition.

‘Sure — the narrative went — Russia wasn’t making significant advances, but what you couldn’t see from the map was the fantastic attrition Russia was inflicting at practically no cost to itself.’

I said at the time there was no evidence for this, but strong evidence that it was nonsense.

Of course, the Russians were firing enormously more shells than the Ukrainians. So it would stand to reason that in what is largely an artillery war the Ukrainians were sustaining higher casualties than the Russians. (To say nothing of the cruise missiles hitting their barracks.)

But higher casualties do not magically equal 500 KIA daily for which there was no support (except the transparent and laughable lie about a “mole” in the Ukrainian high command supposedly feeding a Russian Telegram channel Ukrainian losses — an absurd and demented tale if there ever was one).

I pointed out that the kind of fantastic 1:30 casualty ratios the Group Therapists were peddling would be totally historically unprecedented.

I pointed out that despite the Russian high shell usage they had largely stopped doing combined arms (because they lacked the infantry for it) and that this made their artillery threat one-dimensional and lessened its effectiveness.

In essence, the outsized reliance on artillery alone wasn’t some magic formula they had discovered — instead, it was what their lack of mass had them reduced them to.

❗️Massive air transfer of reinforcements near Kupyansk and Izyum. "Cows" land almost at front. Several landing points have been prepared. Mi-26 helicopters deliver armored vehicles and personnel. Fighters are sent into battle to push the UA back and prevent further breakthroughs. pic.twitter.com/yQIzu0lxzv

— ДражаМ (@DrazaM33) September 9, 2022

Most importantly, I pointed out that the alleged Russian ability to take the equivalent of one Ukrainian battalion off the board each and every day did not jibe with the observed reality that Russian progress on the map was glacial or non-existent.

I pointed out that the two forces facing each other were relatively small and that intense fighting was taking place only along a small section of the front. So that if one of the sides actually could actually reliably kill 500 of the other daily in that sector, then that side would also be advancing at a steady pace and wouldn’t be half-stuck:

“However, the slow Russian progress also points to them being able to create the overmatch necessary for advances only with great difficulty. That does not at all point to them being able to kill anything like 18,000 on the other side (10%) a month.”

It’s very simple, if you can take 500 of the enemy off the board almost at will then you can blow giant holes in enemy defenses quickly, but this is not what we observed. What we observed was that the Russians were overwhelming Ukrainian defenses only with great effort and difficulty:

[The claimed] 18,000 monthly Ukrainian deaths require us to buy that Ukrainians are losing men at twice the rate of the Germans in the disastrous year of 1944 (or higher) — but without Russian territorial gains to show for it. How does that work?

With the Ukrainian Kupyansk offensive now having shifted the front 50 kilometers from Chkalovske to the Oskil river and the outskirts of Kupyansk in just 3 days we can say that I was right.

What I had been banging on since March — that Russia will run into manpower problems before Ukraine does — has come to pass.

The Russians had to fight extremely long and hard battles to take Izyum and the bridgehead to the south of it. But now the Ukrainians have taken an even bigger bite out of the Russians to the north in just 3 days. Why is that so?

It is so because the overstretched Russians had no choice but man a section of the front with little more than cops (Rosgvardia SWAT) and militias (the newly-mobilized Donbass regiments are just civilians with arms).

Rather than the Ukrainians finding themselves with an insurmountable manpower problem due to attrition, it is the Russians who can’t properly man their lines (everywhere at once), thus allowing a lightning Ukrainian advance that they themselves are no longer able to replicate.

There is now a reliable pattern where I point to some crack in the Russian conduct of war, I then receive spectacular quantities of childish hatred-rage for it, and then down the line it turns out that if anything my critique had been too tame and that the reality is worse.

Even as an alleged “pessimist”, “Strelkovite” or “doomer” I would have never have predicted that the Ukrainians could pull off such a feat right now. I flatter myself as being a realist but clearly I had still been giving the Kremlin too much benefit of doubt.

It’s very simple. Regardless of what happens now (eg even if the Russians prove able to use their greater firepower and air assets to quickly reverse the situation) the fact that Ukrainians are able to sniff out such Russian weak spots, but the inverse is not the case (there hasn’t been a swift Russian advance since May), tells a story.

This doesn’t mean that the Kupyansk offensive is a turning point or that Ukraine will now be ascendant or dominant over Russia. (Or maybe it does mean that and I’m being too much of an FSB shill once again.) But it does mean that Russia’s war within the parameters of a “Special Military Operation” that makes conscripts undeployable has exhausted itself and is entering quagmire territory.

Which does not mean that Ukraine will “win”, but in a war it is perfectly possible for everyone to lose. In fact, that is a common outcome of any long war. Ukraine does not need to “win” in order for Russia to also lose.

If sections of the front have to be guarded with weak forces then even a stable, frozen quagmire is probably too much to hope for.

Such weak points will naturally drive the Ukrainians to want to test them. And since Ukraine (unlike Russia) is conscripting it can generate the forces to do so.

And with the Russki and the Rusini locked in a fratricidal war, possibly forever, who benefits?

Until 1900 or so the rural folk in Ukraine would refer to themselves as “Rusyn”, or “Rusyni” for the plural — pronounced as “Rusin” or “Rusini”. This is a word that includes the root Rus and the suffix -in which creates a noun.

Ethnic Russians meanwhile refer to themselves as Russkiy — pronounced Russki — which combines the root Rus with the suffix -ski which creates an adjective.

So it’s the very same meaning, the difference is merely that one is a noun and the other an adjective, same as the difference between Briton and British.

It’s literally a slaughter between Briton (Rus-in) and British (Rus-ski)…

This is the current progress of the offensive. The area in red stripes is completely Unconsolidated and is mostly spear head units. For reference there is still fighting going on within or very near balakleya. pic.twitter.com/UNk7YozyGp

— ayden (@squatsons) September 9, 2022

Footage from Russian Defense Ministry of reinforcements allegedly arriving to Kharkiv Oblast. pic.twitter.com/UNQDT383JX

— Aldin 🇧🇦 (@tinso_ww) September 9, 2022

Very chaotic conversation, but we could hear some interesting things. "LNR" soldiers are not satisfied that:
– they fight for 7 months without rotation;
– officership loot everything. pic.twitter.com/AVBCnGTY4X

— Volodymyr Tretyak 🇺🇦 (@VolodyaTretyak) September 8, 2022