War in Ukraine

Breaking news - Ukraine has just started to launch a "counter-offensive" against Russia in Kursk. It is a small group of troops and vehicles, but Ukraine may expand it if it is successful.

Ukraine launches 'counterattack' in Russia's Kursk region, Moscow says

 

Sorry about that.

 

Bristol is more his style

 

Subway station in backwards Russia …

 

That is not what Ukrainian military intelligence concluded. According to the opinion article in The Hill, this is what happened:

In April 2024, the leadership of Ukraine’s military intelligence participated in a series of roundtable discussions at Washington think tanks and policymakers. A former American diplomat familiar with the visit told this author, “They expressed their reservations about continuing full scale conventional warfare. They were concerned that Ukraine had lost momentum and would be overwhelmed. They advocated instead for increased asymmetric warfare inside Russia to gain an upper hand in negotiations to end the war.” The result of this engagement was that the chief of military of intelligence, Kyril Budanov, was muzzled by Team Zelensky in a series of media attacks in pro-government websites. His key deputies were fired without his consent, weakening his agency.

So what do we really know:
1. The article was written by a well known skeptic of the Ukrainian War, so lets keep that in mind. This article relies on a lot of third hand information since the author was not in the meetings and neither was his former "American Diplomat".
2. According to his "reporting," Ukrainian military intelligence stated they had reservations about continuing conventional warfare and their ability to hold the line.
3. Seeing as we are in Jan '25 and the RGF have still not reached Pokrovsk, these reservations seem to have been overblown.
4. This was during a period where the Ukrainians were pushing hard to remove restrictions on long range fires as they had just received ATACMS missiles, so making the argument the situation was more dire than it was likely part of a PR campaign to the Biden Admin to remove those restrictions.

What likely happened was the Ukrainians came to Washington selling as woe-is-us PR strategy to the Biden admin in order to allow them to use US munition in mainland Russia and this author fell for it, since it confirmed his priors about the Ukraine Conflict.

 

I’m a little worried now. What if Ukraine collapses before Pokrovsk is captured ? Would that mean that Russia technically lost the war ? It seems like everything hinges on Pokrovsk.

 

Some additional information from the article: Russia is running out of armored vehicles. They are not being used in combat in situations where Ukraine's military would expect them to be used, so Russia is apparently conserving their dwindling supply for future use.

 

Not sure how Russia would exploit a breakthrough without a surplus of armored vehicles they could mass at the decisive time and place. Not that they’re in any danger of achieving a breakthrough.

 

Not sure about this. Based on this quotation alone, it seems like typical Russian snark rather than a serious press release:

I found this article that seemed to have a bit more information. The key metric would be the capture of 100 Russian soldiers.

Ukraine takes Russia by surprise with 'counter-attack' into Kursk border region

 

Explain the importance of Pokrovsk in the region to the board and if you are close enough, I’ll respond to your question.

 

I’ll make sure the Great Danes are locked up until then.

 

(Scoffs) Don’t you know Pokrovsk was just another brilliantly executed feint, just like Kyiv, Kherson, Odessa, and Kharkiv? If the Russians had wanted to take it they would have. Instead, they suckered the Ukrainians into wasting their munitions on hundreds of thousands of Russian personnel. When those idiot Ukrainians have spent their last round, the Russians will just be able to calmly walk in and take everything.

 

Another regime change expected as early as tomorrow …

 

their upstream warehouses are empty of even old armor. posted articles a few pages back with images of empty warehouse that uses to store the oldest of their old gear

 

Ukraine launches Kursk offensive: What we know

Another blogger, which purports to have ties to the Kremlin's security services, said Ukrainian forces were operating in Berdin and the surrounding area, with Russian artillery "unable to cope."
"All radio frequencies and even the Internet were jammed during the offensive," the account reported.
Footage claiming to show Ukrainian vehicles close to Bolshoye Soldatskoye on Sunday has circulated on social media, although it could not be independently verified.

 

** Zelenskyy signals that he would relinquish the current occupied territories to Russia in exchange for an agreement to allow Ukraine to enter NATO.

Lex Fridman interviews Zelenskyy

This goes more than two hours and I continue to appreciate the great work Lex Fridman does with his podcast. This was a huge score. Supposedly, Zelenskyy has agreed to do more podcasts with Fridman in the future AND Fridman has plans to fly to Moscow to do this same style of interview with Putin. Frankly, I will be more interested if Lex interviews Putin than I was with the Tucker Carlson interview. Lex tries to remain neutral. I found it noteworthy Zelenskyy refused to conduct the interview in Russian. Fridman speaks fluent Russian, but does not speak Ukrainian. Zelenskyy gave his explanation, which is understandable, but still interesting to watch that play out as they had a 10 to 15 minute conversation at the start of this interview about language. Enjoy...

 

I mean - I kind of wish that Ukraine would get that deal (entry into NATO for exchange of currently occupied territory) - but the whole point of the war from Russia's stated view was to keep Ukraine out of NATO - so how is that deal acceptable for the territory they currently occupy? Seems like a steep price for Russia to pay while getting almost nothing they wanted.

 

It’s being described as a three hour long suckup.