A lot of questions have popped up about the much-talked about Ukrainian counteroffensive for Kherson, among the biggest of which is “Where is it?”
Anders Puck Nielsen, a military analyst at the Royal Danish Defence College, has some answers. What Ukraine is doing right now is not a traditional counteroffensive, but a prolonged attrition strategy to degrade Russian logistics and forces.
Some takeaways:
Usually you want some level of operational secrecy, but Ukrainian officials have been talking up the “Kherson Offensive” since at least June.
“I think it was meant as a kind of trap. It was not enough for Ukraine to liberate Kherson, but they also wanted to take out a lot of Russian soldiers in the process.”
“This area west of Dnipro is probably the one area in the whole operational theater where Ukraine has all the advantages, and Russia has all the disadvantages. So it is better for Ukraine to fight as many Russians as possible in this area than it is to fight them later on somewhere else.”
Putin was faced with withdrawing or reinforcing. “And of course Putin was not going to give up Kherson without a fight, so Russia started pouring reinforcements into the area.”
The phrase that describes Ukraine’s strategy is “accelerated attritional warfare.”
Ukraine’s strategy: “To cause the Russians to have as many casualties as possible rather than defending specific pieces of terrain. And then what we see around Kherson is that Ukraine has figured out a way to accelerate that attrition among the Russians by luring them into a trap where they send reinforcements into an essentially undefendable area.”
So the frontline isn’t moving, but “the Ukrainians expect them to run out of supplies eventually, and then it will be easy.”
“I talked about the bridges, and how Ukraine can target the Russian logistics by destroying the bridges. And I also talked about how this war seems to have entered into what can be called the third phase of the war.”
Phase 1: Russia invades, tries to take Kiev, and fails, because their logistics suck. Advantage Ukraine.
Phase 2: Russia grinds out gains in Dobas, with logistics adequate to the task. Advantage Russia.
Phase 3 (current): Ukraine starts degrading vulnerable Russian forces in the south. “So they are going very hard after the Russian logistics systems. And that is what the attacks in Crimea and other places long behind the frontlines are about.”
“But the point of the attacks is exactly to make the Russian logistics as complicated as possible. To make the supply lines as long as they can possibly be. Because Russia now has to pull the ammunition depots even further away from the frontline, and they have to use trucks instead of railroads and stuff like that.”
“And the supply lines in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts are actually beginning to look very much like they did in northern Ukraine in phase one of the war.”
“That accelerated attrition [and] the sustained attacks on the Russian supply lines will mean that Ukraine can be in a pretty good position after the battle of Kherson. They will have all the territory west of the Dnipro. And it will be very easy to defend afterwards, because Russia is not going to come back across the river once they have lost that foothold. And then Ukraine will have freed up all those forces from the Kherson area that they can redeploy for a new counteroffensive somewhere else. So that could for example be an attack from the north down toward the Melitopol area. And Russia would be in a really tough position for such a fight. Because they don’t have more forces they can move from the Donbas area, because they already did that for the battle for Kherson. And they don’t have good logistics because Ukraine will have been hitting the infrastructure for months.
Conclusion: There’s no guarantee of Ukrainian success, but it’s hard to see what Russia can do to counter this strategy. “After that Ukraine will redeploy and make a new counteroffensive somewhere else. Perhaps a Christmas offensive or something like that.”
Winter offenses are always a hard sledding in this part of Europe, but the rest of his analysis accords pretty closely with what we’ve been seeing.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 24th, 2022 at 1:23 PM and is filed under Military, unions, video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
An alternative possibility is Ukraine was not able to effect a counter attack and is now spinning that this is what they intended all along.
It is good you mention oncoming winter. Ukraine is running out of time. The European governments cannot allow Ukraine to continue the war into winter and western Europeans thereby lose access to Russian gas. The European people are content to send a little money or obsolete equipment to Ukraine. The Europeans have not shown they are prepared to suffer or die for Ukraine.
If the Battle for Kiev is like the Battle of Cowpens, with exhausted troops meeting unexpected resistance, then the Ukes at Kherson are going for a Battle of Guilford Courthouse, drawing the Russians into a Pyrrhic victory.
Didn’t work for the Confederates in the Battle of the Wilderness, though. Grant recognized that destroying the Confederate Army was more important than taking territory. Of course, had any Zhukov-like figure with the military insight of a U. S. Grant survived the decades-long purge of the Putin regime, the invasion never would have happened. The political-strategic objective is utterly unrealistic.
Hmm. Early this year, Putin was clearly trying to make all this a re-enactment of 1944 – but the reality is that he’s actually re-enacting 1941, from the opposite direction, with the Russians actually playing the Germans/Nazis.
And it’s basically played out much like 1941 – the blitzkrieg failed, the forces have gotten ground down and exhausted, the supply lines have gotten over-extended, and the invaders aren’t prepared or in good shape for the coming colder weather.
Something tells me that the Ukies know all this, and are going to take a page from the Zhukov playbook from late 1941 – a winter counteroffensive that the Russians will be in no condition to deal with.
[…] with monkey pox dies of sepsis in so-called ‘medical powerhouse’ of Cuba BattleSwarm: Ukraine’s Attrition Strategy Behind The Black: Red China launches hi-res Earth observation satellite, Indian research project […]
Where they are talking is not where they will be going. Do you understand the concept of a “head fake”?
Russian doesn’t care about “blood”. After all, most losses are among Chechens, ex-cons, and hirelings. Coffins are cheap. And Russia has to worry about China that has ancient claims on Siberia. The Ukraine is being “unpredictable”.
The U.S. is already pulling weapons from reserve units to keep the Ukraine functional. If Russia isn’t stopped in the Ukraine, Europe is next. Modern war uses supplies at a horrendous rate. No one has the supplies or manufacturing capability to keep up the pace of war. “Unpredictable” matters a lot. So does hitting the opponent’s logistics.
The reality here is that we’re really in unexplored territory.
This conflict is analogous to the Russo-Japanese War, in terms of “cusp-ishness” surrounding what is likely to be seen as a true “Revolution in Military Affairs”.
Drones are equivalent to the apparent value of the machinegun in the Russo-Japanese war. Same with the decentralized Ukrainian artillery fire control.
The root of what is happening lies in the confrontation between the traditional centralized command/control of the Russian approach to war vs. the decentralized chaos-acknowledging Ukrainian approach. The Russians think they can direct everything centrally, taking advantage of scale. The Ukrainian path lies along the direction of decentralized powering-down of fire control and everything else, taking advantage of momentary unplanned-for opportunities.
Which will prevail? I’m going to guess that centralized BS won’t. War is chaos; he who is most adapted to operating in those conditions, wins. He who thinks to impose his will upon everything? He will lose. Putin has a vision; the problem is, his vision does not encompass everything, nor does it allow for anyone who sees things differently.
My expectation is that Ukraine wins and that the remnant rump of the old Russian Empire dies an ugly death at the hands of its victims. Moscow will likely wind up being the sole power within a ring of the suburbs of Moscow, and all the other “Russian” territories will go their own way. Why should a Buryat die to make Russia great, again?
In a couple years or so somebody is going to write a book titled “The Ukrainian Way of War” (maybe several such) and it is going to become a required textbook in every military college as people scramble to adapt to the new dynamic.
“The root of what is happening lies in the confrontation between the traditional centralized command/control of the Russian approach to war vs. the decentralized chaos-acknowledging Ukrainian approach. The Russians think they can direct everything centrally, taking advantage of scale. The Ukrainian path lies along the direction of decentralized powering-down of fire control and everything else, taking advantage of momentary unplanned-for opportunities.”
The other factor for this is the developing insurgency in the Kherson and Melitopol areas along with the non-compliance in the supposedly Russophile Donbas that could easily turn into an insurgency. If the first 20 years of this century taught us anything, it’s that a decentralized insurgency can wear down a superior conventional force if the insurgents are allowed space to operate (of which there is a ton in south central Ukraine).
Back when this started, I said that the Russian adventure here was doomed. I reckoned that Ukraine conventional resistance would collapse in 6 weeks and then the Russians would be bled white over the next two years by an insurgency that they do not have the military and economic resources to control. It takes about 6 months to year to get an insurgency rolling and the first areas occupied by the Russians are falling right into schedule.
The Russians have 25,000 troops in Kherson, West of the Dnipro River, and being sustained by two pontoon bridges after the Ukrainians struck the road bridges.
The Ukrainians can cut those pontoon bridges with HIMARS rockets anytime they want, strangling the Russian forces of food, fuel and ammo.
Russia does have to care about “blood”. While they used ex-cons and Chechens, those make up a small portion of the Russian forces. “Hirelings” are what Russians call “Kontrakti”, ie not draftees… soldiers who agreed to stay on or rejoin. The rest of the world calls them “regulars”.
– but back to “blood”. Russian demographics are horrendous. I am acquainted with many Russian families (in Russia), and in the current generation- one child is the norm, two maximum. Not because of a Chinese-style rule, but for economic, work-related, and social reasons. Large numbers of only children or only sons coming back in coffins could lead to unrest that even the Putin thuggocracy can’t put down. Think 1905 and 1917.
Meanwhile, western economic sanctions degrade the Russian economy. The public can only get wiser about the Glorious Special Military Action to destroy the Nazis in Ukraine, which makes it harder for Putin to find recruits to replace casualties. By several important metrics, the ongoing cost to Putin of this invasion increases every day.
But then again, we could wake up tomorrow to find that Putin is no longer in charge and his replacement, having other priorities, wants to rejoin the world.
I would advise against templating Western expectations against Russian behavior as a nation or individuals. We think “Oh, the regime kills off the young men, and the masses will revolt…” This is not how the Russians think or behave, either at the state or individual level.
There are a lot of “unknown unknowns” here, and the real danger is that even the Russian oligarchy doesn’t recognize their ignorance of them. Unexplored territory, and all that… Also, I suspect that Putin is running on Soviet scripts, thinking that he’s in charge of the Soviet Union, instead of this new thing, Russia. That does not bode well for his thinking being in alignment with reality, along with his health issues. And, what with the Russians being a continuation of authoritarian leadership traditions going back to Ivan the Terrible, welllll… Things could get very unpredictable and very “dynamic”.
Russia has been ignored for way too long, allowed to get away with things like the Georgian campaign and Donbas/Crimea. If anyone had bothered to push back on either of those, with any seriousness, we’d be in a different place. Unfortunately, the Europeans have yet again talked great game about “international accountability” and then gone right back to the same playbook they used in Iraq, which was deliberately and with malice aforethought undermining sanctions and controls. You rather get the idea that they go along with those things in the first in order to jack their prices up to the sanctioned nations. We were finding things in Iraq, things that were never publicized, that clearly showed the Euros were cynically exploiting the sanctions regime for pure profit, and not to the benefit of the Iraqi people. If they’d been selling infrastructure items and medicines under the table in violation, I’d kinda understand, but nearly everything we found that I know of was weapons and luxury goods for the regime. Saddam was getting in luxury construction materials like Italian marble while the water plant in his hometown of Tikrit hadn’t had maintenance since the British built the damn thing back when Iraq was still a protectorate… Mind-boggling, when contrasted to the pious smarminess of the Eurotrash elite.
No idea where any of this is going, but I suspect that Russia is going to be an even bigger mess than it is now, and that Ukraine ain’t going anywhere. If anything, this whole thing is merely solidifying and cementing Ukraine as a national identity in opposition to Russian imperialism, which is why all the “Russia Stronk” types in Russia are talking genocide. They know how hated they are as an ethnicity, and don’t grasp that they’re no longer at the head of a demographic juggernaut like the Tsar and early Communists were. Instead, by doubling-down on the stupid, they’re basically signing their death-warrants as a nation. Stupid is as stupid does, and Russia is pretty damn stupid in a lot of significant ways.
Quote: In between rounds, my coach said to me “good strategy, getting him so tired out from hitting you!”
A better strategy would have worked. Move quickly and exhaust him from trying to hit you.
—
Another quote: “Alternatively, the Russians will get really pissed off, remove the kid gloves and bomb Ukraine back to the Stone Age.”
Not much chance of that unless Putin turns to nukes. Months into this war Russia hasn’t even be able to achieve air superiority. It would be bled dry if it turned to bombing on a large scale. That’s why it has been using massed artillery, and that tactic seems to be collapsing as Ukraine takes out ammunition dumps.
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
It will be interesting to see what happens when Putin turns the gas off and winter comes. I think Putin’s calculation is that Germany will give in to some demands in order to heat homes and run factories, and that the Greens in Germany will follow the Russian line. However, if getting the gas turned on is viewed as capitulation, there could be a very different outcome.
Another quote: “Alternatively, the Russians will get really pissed off, remove the kid gloves and bomb Ukraine back to the Stone Age.”
Not much chance of that unless Putin turns to nukes.
I took that as implicit; what else are they going to use to do that? It certainly looks like the Russians used up all their ‘good’ (read: precision) munitions earlier, lack the ability to make more in any sort of quantity, and therefore the only way to ‘remove the kid gloves’ would be to use nukes.
Helps that ‘bomb X to the Stone Age’ is a phrase commonly used with nuclear weapons in mind.
There have been suggestions that the Russians’ shiny new ICBMs could be used to deliver conventional warheads, but that seems a weird combination of overkill and brinksmanship.
Re the Ukraine offensive
Why rush in? The Ukrainians will want minimise casualties and equipment losses and maximise the hit on the Russians. The more they degrade Russian logistics and morale, and likely the worse the weather gets as the Summer ends, the bigger their advantage. Its not about the timeframe to make the press happy, its about getting the best long-term outcome.
Announcing the offensive is unusual, but in this case does seem like the smart play. It forces the Russians to reinforce (they can’t claim they were ambushed) at a place of the Ukrainians have selected as optimal. It’s obviously a set up, but Putin’s ego leaves him with no choice other than to fall into the trap.
“This area west of Dnipro is probably the one area in the whole operational theater where Ukraine has all the advantages, and Russia has all the disadvantages. So it is better for Ukraine to fight as many Russians as possible in this area than it is to fight them later on somewhere else.”
I remember one day in my teens at boxing club. Other guy was bigger, faster, and a much better fighter. I was being battered.
In between rounds, my coach said to me “good strategy, getting him so tired out from hitting you!”
Yeah, right.
An alternative possibility is Ukraine was not able to effect a counter attack and is now spinning that this is what they intended all along.
It is good you mention oncoming winter. Ukraine is running out of time. The European governments cannot allow Ukraine to continue the war into winter and western Europeans thereby lose access to Russian gas. The European people are content to send a little money or obsolete equipment to Ukraine. The Europeans have not shown they are prepared to suffer or die for Ukraine.
Alternatively, the Russians will get really pissed off, remove the kid gloves and bomb Ukraine back to the Stone Age.
If the Battle for Kiev is like the Battle of Cowpens, with exhausted troops meeting unexpected resistance, then the Ukes at Kherson are going for a Battle of Guilford Courthouse, drawing the Russians into a Pyrrhic victory.
Didn’t work for the Confederates in the Battle of the Wilderness, though. Grant recognized that destroying the Confederate Army was more important than taking territory. Of course, had any Zhukov-like figure with the military insight of a U. S. Grant survived the decades-long purge of the Putin regime, the invasion never would have happened. The political-strategic objective is utterly unrealistic.
Hmm. Early this year, Putin was clearly trying to make all this a re-enactment of 1944 – but the reality is that he’s actually re-enacting 1941, from the opposite direction, with the Russians actually playing the Germans/Nazis.
And it’s basically played out much like 1941 – the blitzkrieg failed, the forces have gotten ground down and exhausted, the supply lines have gotten over-extended, and the invaders aren’t prepared or in good shape for the coming colder weather.
Something tells me that the Ukies know all this, and are going to take a page from the Zhukov playbook from late 1941 – a winter counteroffensive that the Russians will be in no condition to deal with.
[…] with monkey pox dies of sepsis in so-called ‘medical powerhouse’ of Cuba BattleSwarm: Ukraine’s Attrition Strategy Behind The Black: Red China launches hi-res Earth observation satellite, Indian research project […]
Where they are talking is not where they will be going. Do you understand the concept of a “head fake”?
Russian doesn’t care about “blood”. After all, most losses are among Chechens, ex-cons, and hirelings. Coffins are cheap. And Russia has to worry about China that has ancient claims on Siberia. The Ukraine is being “unpredictable”.
The U.S. is already pulling weapons from reserve units to keep the Ukraine functional. If Russia isn’t stopped in the Ukraine, Europe is next. Modern war uses supplies at a horrendous rate. No one has the supplies or manufacturing capability to keep up the pace of war. “Unpredictable” matters a lot. So does hitting the opponent’s logistics.
The reality here is that we’re really in unexplored territory.
This conflict is analogous to the Russo-Japanese War, in terms of “cusp-ishness” surrounding what is likely to be seen as a true “Revolution in Military Affairs”.
Drones are equivalent to the apparent value of the machinegun in the Russo-Japanese war. Same with the decentralized Ukrainian artillery fire control.
The root of what is happening lies in the confrontation between the traditional centralized command/control of the Russian approach to war vs. the decentralized chaos-acknowledging Ukrainian approach. The Russians think they can direct everything centrally, taking advantage of scale. The Ukrainian path lies along the direction of decentralized powering-down of fire control and everything else, taking advantage of momentary unplanned-for opportunities.
Which will prevail? I’m going to guess that centralized BS won’t. War is chaos; he who is most adapted to operating in those conditions, wins. He who thinks to impose his will upon everything? He will lose. Putin has a vision; the problem is, his vision does not encompass everything, nor does it allow for anyone who sees things differently.
My expectation is that Ukraine wins and that the remnant rump of the old Russian Empire dies an ugly death at the hands of its victims. Moscow will likely wind up being the sole power within a ring of the suburbs of Moscow, and all the other “Russian” territories will go their own way. Why should a Buryat die to make Russia great, again?
Kirk is spot on.
In a couple years or so somebody is going to write a book titled “The Ukrainian Way of War” (maybe several such) and it is going to become a required textbook in every military college as people scramble to adapt to the new dynamic.
Kirk Says:
“The root of what is happening lies in the confrontation between the traditional centralized command/control of the Russian approach to war vs. the decentralized chaos-acknowledging Ukrainian approach. The Russians think they can direct everything centrally, taking advantage of scale. The Ukrainian path lies along the direction of decentralized powering-down of fire control and everything else, taking advantage of momentary unplanned-for opportunities.”
The other factor for this is the developing insurgency in the Kherson and Melitopol areas along with the non-compliance in the supposedly Russophile Donbas that could easily turn into an insurgency. If the first 20 years of this century taught us anything, it’s that a decentralized insurgency can wear down a superior conventional force if the insurgents are allowed space to operate (of which there is a ton in south central Ukraine).
Back when this started, I said that the Russian adventure here was doomed. I reckoned that Ukraine conventional resistance would collapse in 6 weeks and then the Russians would be bled white over the next two years by an insurgency that they do not have the military and economic resources to control. It takes about 6 months to year to get an insurgency rolling and the first areas occupied by the Russians are falling right into schedule.
The Russians have 25,000 troops in Kherson, West of the Dnipro River, and being sustained by two pontoon bridges after the Ukrainians struck the road bridges.
The Ukrainians can cut those pontoon bridges with HIMARS rockets anytime they want, strangling the Russian forces of food, fuel and ammo.
Interesting reading some of the comments: “Other guy was bigger, faster, and a much better fighter. I was being battered.”
Wow, the Ukrainians are getting battered, but for some reason never lose any land. A first in military history!
There is always a kind of giddy hilariousness in some of the rationalizations, though. I’ve been seeing versions of this:
“[T]he Russians will get really pissed off, remove the kid gloves and bomb Ukraine back to the Stone Age”
I’ve seen this from the 3rd day of the war. The Russians are badasses, they just hide it out of niceness!
Sounds in character for Russians to me.
Mike-SMO,
Russia does have to care about “blood”. While they used ex-cons and Chechens, those make up a small portion of the Russian forces. “Hirelings” are what Russians call “Kontrakti”, ie not draftees… soldiers who agreed to stay on or rejoin. The rest of the world calls them “regulars”.
– but back to “blood”. Russian demographics are horrendous. I am acquainted with many Russian families (in Russia), and in the current generation- one child is the norm, two maximum. Not because of a Chinese-style rule, but for economic, work-related, and social reasons. Large numbers of only children or only sons coming back in coffins could lead to unrest that even the Putin thuggocracy can’t put down. Think 1905 and 1917.
All combat operations are designed to attrit and degrade the enemies logistics and economy.
Meanwhile, western economic sanctions degrade the Russian economy. The public can only get wiser about the Glorious Special Military Action to destroy the Nazis in Ukraine, which makes it harder for Putin to find recruits to replace casualties. By several important metrics, the ongoing cost to Putin of this invasion increases every day.
But then again, we could wake up tomorrow to find that Putin is no longer in charge and his replacement, having other priorities, wants to rejoin the world.
I would advise against templating Western expectations against Russian behavior as a nation or individuals. We think “Oh, the regime kills off the young men, and the masses will revolt…” This is not how the Russians think or behave, either at the state or individual level.
There are a lot of “unknown unknowns” here, and the real danger is that even the Russian oligarchy doesn’t recognize their ignorance of them. Unexplored territory, and all that… Also, I suspect that Putin is running on Soviet scripts, thinking that he’s in charge of the Soviet Union, instead of this new thing, Russia. That does not bode well for his thinking being in alignment with reality, along with his health issues. And, what with the Russians being a continuation of authoritarian leadership traditions going back to Ivan the Terrible, welllll… Things could get very unpredictable and very “dynamic”.
Russia has been ignored for way too long, allowed to get away with things like the Georgian campaign and Donbas/Crimea. If anyone had bothered to push back on either of those, with any seriousness, we’d be in a different place. Unfortunately, the Europeans have yet again talked great game about “international accountability” and then gone right back to the same playbook they used in Iraq, which was deliberately and with malice aforethought undermining sanctions and controls. You rather get the idea that they go along with those things in the first in order to jack their prices up to the sanctioned nations. We were finding things in Iraq, things that were never publicized, that clearly showed the Euros were cynically exploiting the sanctions regime for pure profit, and not to the benefit of the Iraqi people. If they’d been selling infrastructure items and medicines under the table in violation, I’d kinda understand, but nearly everything we found that I know of was weapons and luxury goods for the regime. Saddam was getting in luxury construction materials like Italian marble while the water plant in his hometown of Tikrit hadn’t had maintenance since the British built the damn thing back when Iraq was still a protectorate… Mind-boggling, when contrasted to the pious smarminess of the Eurotrash elite.
No idea where any of this is going, but I suspect that Russia is going to be an even bigger mess than it is now, and that Ukraine ain’t going anywhere. If anything, this whole thing is merely solidifying and cementing Ukraine as a national identity in opposition to Russian imperialism, which is why all the “Russia Stronk” types in Russia are talking genocide. They know how hated they are as an ethnicity, and don’t grasp that they’re no longer at the head of a demographic juggernaut like the Tsar and early Communists were. Instead, by doubling-down on the stupid, they’re basically signing their death-warrants as a nation. Stupid is as stupid does, and Russia is pretty damn stupid in a lot of significant ways.
Quote: In between rounds, my coach said to me “good strategy, getting him so tired out from hitting you!”
A better strategy would have worked. Move quickly and exhaust him from trying to hit you.
—
Another quote: “Alternatively, the Russians will get really pissed off, remove the kid gloves and bomb Ukraine back to the Stone Age.”
Not much chance of that unless Putin turns to nukes. Months into this war Russia hasn’t even be able to achieve air superiority. It would be bled dry if it turned to bombing on a large scale. That’s why it has been using massed artillery, and that tactic seems to be collapsing as Ukraine takes out ammunition dumps.
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
It will be interesting to see what happens when Putin turns the gas off and winter comes. I think Putin’s calculation is that Germany will give in to some demands in order to heat homes and run factories, and that the Greens in Germany will follow the Russian line. However, if getting the gas turned on is viewed as capitulation, there could be a very different outcome.
[…] Another Logistics Failure […]
@Mike Perry
I took that as implicit; what else are they going to use to do that? It certainly looks like the Russians used up all their ‘good’ (read: precision) munitions earlier, lack the ability to make more in any sort of quantity, and therefore the only way to ‘remove the kid gloves’ would be to use nukes.
Helps that ‘bomb X to the Stone Age’ is a phrase commonly used with nuclear weapons in mind.
There have been suggestions that the Russians’ shiny new ICBMs could be used to deliver conventional warheads, but that seems a weird combination of overkill and brinksmanship.
Re the Ukraine offensive
Why rush in? The Ukrainians will want minimise casualties and equipment losses and maximise the hit on the Russians. The more they degrade Russian logistics and morale, and likely the worse the weather gets as the Summer ends, the bigger their advantage. Its not about the timeframe to make the press happy, its about getting the best long-term outcome.
Announcing the offensive is unusual, but in this case does seem like the smart play. It forces the Russians to reinforce (they can’t claim they were ambushed) at a place of the Ukrainians have selected as optimal. It’s obviously a set up, but Putin’s ego leaves him with no choice other than to fall into the trap.
“This area west of Dnipro is probably the one area in the whole operational theater where Ukraine has all the advantages, and Russia has all the disadvantages. So it is better for Ukraine to fight as many Russians as possible in this area than it is to fight them later on somewhere else.”
Basically, sums it all up nicely.