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If they can get 10 miles past Tokmak they can rain hell on the M14 highway with 155mm howitzers, cutting off most supplies reaching Melitopol and areas farther south.
Then if they dig in and hold it becomes a waiting game.
Don’t forget blowing up the train tracks leading into Tokmak! It’s not really about taking Tokmak but putting fire control on the train running through Tokmak. If Ukraine can prevent resupply via the trains then everything west of Tokmak falls practically without a shot.
I'm keeping my expectations low.
Being overly optimistic will only lead to dissapointment. It seems inevitable that this will continue to be a hard slog.
Man this is no time to be reasonable! /s
Every journalist and news editor that writes up one of these articles about X force making gains in Y region towards Z town without including at least one, if not multiple, maps showing what they're describing, needs to be brought before the Hague.
The tiny thumbnail they include doesn't even show Tokmak, let alone the events described in the article
For those who want a proper analysis, I strongly recommend the Institute for the Study of War's analysees which they update regularly.
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-24-2023
Today's summary includes 8 maps.
IRC they also have an interactive map somewhere on their site.
Ukrainian forces advanced closer to the Russian second line of defense in the Robotyne area in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 24, further widening their breach of Russian defensive lines in the area. Geolocated footage published on August 24 shows that Ukrainian forces advanced further towards the Russian defensive lines west of Verbove (18km southeast of Orikhiv) and into southern Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv).[30] Some Russian milbloggers indicated that Russian forces maintain limited if any, positions in southern Robotyne and that fighting continues east of Robotyne.[31] A prominent Russian milblogger expressed concern at the Ukrainian breach of Russian defensive lines in western Zaporizhia Oblast and stated that this is a critical moment on the battlefield.[32] The milblogger stated that Russian forces need to hold their positions for at least another month and a half to try to make gains in another area of the frontline and attempt to shift the battlefield situation in favor of Russian forces.[33] Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valeri Zaluzhnyi responded to criticisms about the Ukrainian counteroffensive by stating that it was not a counterinsurgency but the Battle of Kursk, referencing a weeks-long World War II battle that ultimately allowed the Soviet army to regain the battlefield initiative and recapture significant swaths of territory.[34]
Isw has been the best for this conflict, though they have been a bit too favorable towards ukraine at times.
Still, very good coverage.
Imagine not having the entirety of Ukraine memorized by this point
If Ukrane can pump enough energy into Tokamak, then we can start converting the Russians into deuterium. If the front gets stable enough, we might get a net output of electricity. Hopefully this happens before winter, as cold fusion is harder to do.
We’re inching closer to nuclear attacks. I don’t think Putin will allow Crimea to fall without it. Someone please tell me I’m wrong and why?
This has been a worry of mine from the moment Ukraine took back the airport and other countries began aid.
I knew this day was coming, just thought it’d be quicker.
The moment putin tries to do nuclear attack, he's dead. Zelensky said it well, that putin spent most of the invasion in some bunker, before that he had this thing with ridiculously long tables being super paranoid about covid. He's clearly not planning to die.
Also I think it helps to imagine the details. How would the nuclear attack look like? How would it prevent Crimea "falling"? What would be the breaking point? It's not like there would be some clear change from Ukraine not touching Crimea to full on liberation. Ukraine is bombing military targets in Crimea even now. They are even conducting operations on Crimean soil right now. They hit the Kerch bridge multiple times already. Why press the button after 4th or 7th bridge hit and not after first?
Also it's not like he can't sell this defeat as victory. The way things are going there's probably a lot of people in russia prepared to pretend that there was glorious victory after heroic attack towards russian border. There will be interviews in the Moscow streets with people praising the successful special military operation, because they know that if it continued few more months, there would be conscription in Moscow.
A nuclear attack would surely bring in NATO. I can't see them getting away with that without some kind of severe retaliation.
Putin can survive the loss of Crimea. And he knows that a tactical nuclear attack means he loses Crimea and NATO destroys the Black Sea Fleet. That's not preferable to simply losing Crimea.
Any further escalation means that Putin likely loses his life, too. Definitely not preferable to the other two outcomes.
While Russian doctrine does allow for smaller tactical nukes to be used with less restrictions than their full sized counterparts, the smaller nature of these nukes mean they wouldn't accomplish as much on the battlefield or even if dropped onto a city. "No using nukes" is a pretty well established hard line for most countries in the world though, and if Russia uses nuclear weapons of any sort, at best NATO will make their current aid look like a joke and at worst full scale intervention into the conflict. Russia gains little with using nuclear weapons in the current conflict while standing to lose a lot. What they've been doing instead is the best way for them to use nukes in the conflict, constantly threatening to nuke everything unless they get their way and appear insane enough to actually do it, letting them reap the benefits of nuclear extortion without actually using them
this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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