Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

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The Russians are leaving and sending the troops to break the Eastern front. They are not leaving because a Ukrainian push is making them intenable. Rather, it's because the Russians are invading with 3x fewer soldiers than the Ukrainians have deployed, so they need every soldier they can in the South, now that the southern cauldron has been formed and Mariupol is on the verge of being taken.

The fact that they have just recently been able to form the cauldron lends some credence to this theory. Now, the Russians will have to push the sides of the cauldron, which will necessitate a much higher amount of troops. If they succeed, the payoff is immense - the 100k+ troops of the Eastern front will have to retreat without mechanisation, making a fighting retreat impossible. The Ukrainian army will be greatly struck, and the Russians will be able to take a lot of prime terrain and perhaps try a push all the way to the Dnieper and then up, completely cutting of Kyiv from any mechanised supply line.

Some have speculated that the only reason they attacked the North is to prevent the Ukrainian army from rotating their forced to the Donbass, thus maximizing the effectiveness of their small invading force. I don't know if I buy that.

In any case, it's abundantly clear the Russians are leaving the North to send the troops in the East, and are not being pushed back.

"Some have speculated ... it is abundantly clear"

Russians left so much destroyed equipment behind them during the retreat from the North that OSINT servers have problems catalogizing it all.

Russian retreat wasn't a Suomussalmi-like rout [0], that much is abundantly clear from the fact that most of the personnel was able to get out (there are neither thousands of dead nor thousands of POWs there).

But the level of attrition they sustained was horrific and it would have gotten only worse once all the bushes and trees started to grow proper foliage (which is great for ambushers) in April and May. They simply had to retreat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Suomussalmi

You're taking two qualifiers that I assigned to different statements.

Images are not a reliable way of getting information on ambushes. There is no way to know if those losses were during ambushes or shortly after the initial advances. Moreover, a big reason the OSINT community had such an issue with cataloguing them is because it was often difficult to tell whose it was and whether it was already accounted for earlier.

They indeed sustained a high level of attrition. And yet, it was still a sustainable level of attrition. Russia is lacking soldiers that are needed to attack more than they lack equipment at this point in time.

>Russia is lacking soldiers that are needed to attack more than they lack equipment at this point in time.

I haven't seen any proof of that. There are rather reliable reports that large majority of stockpiled soviet-era weapons (tanks, BMPs...) is unusable in a short term due to large-scale corruption and lack of maintanence.

There is only evidence for the loss of 425 Russian tanks (following Oryx).

Russia has around 5000 post-soviet era T-90s.

There is no need for them to tap into their stockpile of Soviet era tanks. Even if they had to and only 10% of those stockpiles were usable short term, it would be enough to replenish their confirmed loses.

You have a very optimistic view of things. I would suggest spending less time reading RT :)

The Russia soldiers seem to be much better at executing tied up civilians than actually winning battles

You would not be able to get such a perspective from Russian media. They aren't saying that the Russians abandoned Kyiv and are repeating like a mantra that they "will achieve all objectives", whereas I just wrote that they are falling back to the Donbass.

I also don't see how it's optimistic for their side to say that they are runnning out of soldiers and have to redeploy.

I was wondering what happened to the liveua map - There was a massive Russian arm stretching to within kilometres of Kyiv that just disappeared seemingly overnight. Does this mean the war is over soon if Russia achieves their goals for Donbass? I don't remember expansion of Crimea being a part of their goals but I also don't have good memory.

Russia is indeed retreating from the Kiev front, not because of some genius strategy, but because they failed to achieve their initial goals, lost a ton of material and troops, and now they need to regroup those troops which were attacking Kyiv to reinforce the ones in the east and south to try to achieve their new more limited goals - occupying the whole Donbass and southern Ukraine.

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