Can someone please fill me in with the latest update on the Ukraine Russia situation?

[Anonymous]

All I've been seeing on news sites are repetitive articles about the will smith/ chris rock situation.

Can someone provide details on the real news please?

[Soteris]

Specifically, right now not much is actually happening on the map so to speak. Ukraine does not have the room or organization to properly launch their own offensive and Russia is reorganizing its forces that retreated from north of the capital. It might be a whole month before those units are fully operational again but they are probably not going to be held back for that long and instead perhaps divided up and used to reinforce other forces in their own assaults. Either way, they are being transported and licking their wounds.

The war has changed from Russia trying to capture the whole of Ukraine by taking the capital and putting in a puppet government to Russia trying to take over the territory claimed by the two Ukrainian separatist "nations" in the east. There has been talk about Russia trying to start a third separatist nation around Kherson in the south but so far nothing much too concrete has come from it.

Realistically Russia is currently trying to capture and force Ukraine to give up the Donbas region as well as a land bridge to Crimea, sort of the area they have currently occupied. So far this does not appear to be working that well.

As for the current military targets of Russia they are actively trying to encircle a major part of the Ukrainian military who is holding a pocket in the Donbas region. To do this they are trying to cut down from the town of Izium and up from around Donetsk. This attack has appeared to have stalled early on and they are currently digging in.

Since pretty much every front has run out of steam and will require a very long time to lick their wounds and prepare for new offensives there are mostly just things surrounding the conflict that is happening.

For example, Russia is calling in some of their reservists which will take somewhere like 5 months for them to be combat ready. Meanwhile USA has basically committed to funneling arms to Ukraine through an unanimous vote. Russia put in a new general to oversee the war and there has been talk to train Ukrainian troops to use western weapons so they dont need to send them crappy old soviet stuff.

As for an overview of the conflict. Russia has failed to get any major wins and is running out of time until it politically and economically collapses. The reinforcements they are providing is barely enough to keep up with the casualties and all the experts I have listened to agree that they no longer can win a military victory.

Ukraine on the other hand is suffering but holding on better than expected. They are however mostly limited to defending as that requires a lot less resources and experience than attacking. However Ukraine has undergone mobilization which means that unlike Russia who pretends this is a limited military operation they instead regard it as a war and is training as many soldiers as they can. As such their forces are growing rapidly the longer this goes on.

Russia can't win. At most they can just occupy the land and enter a situation close to what USA experienced in Iraq until they are forced to leave because they keep losing too many troops. The longer it goes on the more it appears that Russia will not even get this far. Ukraine now has a pretty good chance to actually win this conflict as opposed to avoid losing. This would pretty much destroy Russia as a major power.

Future developments to look out for? Depending on where the Russian or Ukrainian forces that used to fight around the capitol goes we could see a small scale attack. A fair amount of Russian troops is also stuck trying to capture Mariupol which if they finally manages to capture it they are freed up to start a new offensive. That said they probably need to be reinforced as they lost much in trying to take the city.

[Asker]

Thanks, that was real helpful.

[Soteris]

No problem. God knows its good to get something useful out of the hours I have tracked down this information.

[BCA6010]

The "real news" is tricky because basically everything coming out of both sides is suspect at best. The main story right now is the claim that Russia may have used chemical weapons in Mariupol, but the counterargument is that the weather conditions at the time make it highly unlikely, and the symptoms described by the victims don't necessarily implicate chemical weapons. Also when I was in Syria, the number of victims from chemical attacks was much higher than what has been claimed in Ukraine, which makes me personally doubt the story, but it's likely that people there have been exposed to only God knows what toxins. The use of chemical weapons has for a while been a "red line" in the words of what passes for leadership in the United States, so there's plenty of reason for people either sympathetic to Ukraine or eager to profiteer off of a war escalation to lie about it too. The latter sounds far fetched, but the diplomats involved in peace talks from both sides have been targeted at least once from outside threats, and the only country that really benefits in any meaningful way to a prolonged war is China since sanctions against Russia are forcing them into debt with China, and allowing the latter to buy up Russian assets.

What's definitely happening is Russia is pulling back from many of its fronts to regroup in it's more secure positions in the Donbas region, and the commander of the whole operation has been replaced. There are a lot of reasons this could be happening, potentially good or bad news for the Ukrainian resistance effort, ranging from getting ready to accept a cease-fire to preparing for a WMD campaign, and dozens of other possibilities in-between. It could also just be part of a different, more determined and less hasty strategy. There aren't really any "good" explanations for why Russia has failed miserably to subdue a country that is at least on paper significantly weaker than they are- it's basically Russia shooting itself in the foot repeatedly and paying for major shortcomings in training and readiness doctrine for an invasion of such scale that they haven't undertaken since World War 2.

[SilverRain92]

US benefits from this war much more than China. Washington created a mousetrap for Putin and caught him

[SilverRain92]

Russia is trying to encircle around 60-90 thousands Ukrainian soldiers in Donbass region in order to make them stop shelling Donetsk which Ukrainians have been doing since 2014.
This is a hard task to do because this area has been consistently fortified by Ukrainians for recent 8 years.
However if Russian army succeeds to do it, Ukraine would lose its best troops which would lead to loosing the war. Ukrainian troops can't leave this area so they will fight till the end.
Russia doesn't advance fast because it doesn't want to lose soldiers and wants to avoid casualties among civilians as much as possible. That's why it heavily bombs Ukrainian troops and sends infantry only after making sure that fortifications and Ukrainian artillery are destroyed.
Mariupol has already been captured. Azov batallion shot everyone who tried to leave Mariupol and turned people's apartments into firing points so civilians had to live in basements. Fortunately now civilians can come back to their apartments and get humanitarian help.
The only place controlled by Ukrainian troops and batallion Azov is the territory of Azovstal metallurgical plant. But it's encircled and surrendering of Ukrainian troops there is only a matter of time. There are rumours that Canadian general was trying to leave the territory of Azovstal, but was captured and convoyed to Moscow. However there was no any official confirmation of this information

[whereismyjohnny]

Check European news sites?