Putin’s Ukraine War Fail: The Ukrainian Military Is at the Russian Border

Or perhaps more likely just Ukrainian propaganda.

The failed bridge crossing is well explained by a few artillery strikes to destroy the bridge, followed up by some kind of close-encounter. The bulk of the losses here weren't artillery IMO (which would have scarred the landscape far more than what we saw), but some kind of direct confrontation... be it close-air-support (Su-25? Multiple TB2? Helicopter gunships Mi-17??), or maybe even a Ukrainian Tank-platoon (10 to 20 Ukrainian tanks cleaning up a set of scared / demoralized vehicles). Hell, it could have been an impressive barrage of smart weapons (though I find this unlikely, as smart-weapons are extremely expensive. Still, USA / NATO absolutely has crazy smart-weapons and even smart-cluster weapons in their inventory and maybe Ukraine got to use one here??).

It is safe to say that the bridge was destroyed by an artillery strike of some kind (if not artillery, then heavy mortar). The top-down damage and craters in the bridge prove this enough.

It doesn't seem like the Ukrainians are saying how they "cleaned up" the operation and finished the troops off. But there's "many ways to skin a cat" so to speak. The specifics don't matter at all, whatever operation the Ukrainians did to finish off the troops was brutal, accurate, and devastating. Its truly a marvel of modern warfighting that there are at least 3 or 4 different ways Ukraine could have realistically achieved the result at this river-crossing.

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Why were the Russians trying to make an opposed crossing the river? Well... to get to the other side, obviously. More seriously: Russians have lofty goals, likely goals above-and-beyond what their military is capable of.

Performing high-risk / high-reward strategies (like a river crossing) is necessary, if Russian generals hope to achieve anything in Eastern Ukraine. Alas, if these high-risk operations fail, then Russia loses a ton of troops, becomes further demoralized and have to scale back operations grossly.

River crossings are necessarily a predictable, and forced, chokepoint. Predictable because both sides have a map of the area and can wargame the limited areas where a river-crossing is possible. A chokepoint because you need to send many military units on a narrow bridge as quickly as possible, so your units naturally end up massing at a point (open to be devastated by artillery and/or cluster munitions).

The clearest example of this to me is the broad similarities between the maps that show who controls what territory that the Russians and the non-Russians are producing. They're not the same but there's more agreement there then you'd expect if it was just people making up anything and everything out of whole cloth. The real ground truth is probably that no one knows exactly who's controlling what piece of ground but the confusion behind that isn't designed.