As Ukraine’s Kharkiv counteroffensive developed earlier this week, it was apparent that the occupied city of Izyum, the linchpin of Russia’s northeast line, was in danger of being encircled. I anticipated a few weeks of hard fighting while Ukraine slowly tightened the noose while pounding the besieged city with artillery.
That’s not what happened.
Instead, Russia just buggered out of Iyzum entirely.
Russian forces have withdrawn from key eastern towns, as a rapid Ukrainian counter-attack makes further gains.
Ukrainian officials said troops entered Kupiansk, a vital eastern supply hub for Russian forces, on Saturday.
Russia’s defence ministry then said its troops have retreated from nearby Izyum to allow them “to regroup”.
The ministry also confirmed the withdrawal of troops from a third key town, Balaklyia, in order to “bolster efforts” on the Donetsk front.
The Ukrainian advances – if held – would be the most significant since Russia withdrew from areas around Kyiv in April.
In his nightly video address on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that Ukraine had now liberated 2,000 sq km (700 sq miles) from Russia since beginning a renewed counter-offensive earlier this month.
His claim would suggest that half of that area has been recaptured in the last 48 hours alone – as it istwice the area of territory Mr Zelensky said had been liberated when he spoke on Thursday evening.
The announcement by Russia that its troops had withdrawn from Izyum is also significant, as it was a major military hub for Moscow.
“A three-day operation was carried out on the drawdown and organised transfer of the Izyum-Balakliya group of troops to the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” the Russian statement said.
Taking Kupiansk is also huge. It’s a major crossroads and an important crossing over the north end of the Oskil River.
Livemap confirms it:
See that little blue rifle down in the southeast corner of the map? That indicates that Ukrainian troops are just outside Lysychansk, the Ukrainian city Russia spent so much time and effort taking back in July. Suchomimus says Ukrainian troops are even on the edge of Severodonetsk.
Supposedly Russia left a lot of gear behind as well.
#russia has gifted all this gear to #Ukraine only in Izyum – #SlavaUkraini 🇺🇦 💙💛 pic.twitter.com/uOWxLTTvGP
— Anonymous (@AnonymousUK2022) September 10, 2022
This is looking less like a full-blown Russian strategic withdrawal than an absolute rout.
Developing…
Tags: Balaklyia, Izyum, Kharkiv, Kupiansk, Lysychansk, Military, Oskil River, Russo-Ukrainian War, Suchomimus, Ukraine, video
Hoping it’s not a trap.
I doubt it’s a trap.
What you see in the Russian/Chinese oligarchy is the classic problem of a system where the information flow is corrupted because the people on the top of it all are delusional freaks who can’t countenance anyone telling them that their cherished theories and fantasies are wrong.
You can gauge how ‘effed up the Russians are by the number of defenestrated critics, most of whom really had the best interests of Russia and the Russian people at heart. Every single one of those critical voices that Putin has silenced? They carried critical data he needed to incorporate into his decision-making processes, if only to be able to determine what people were thinking out in the real world beyond the Kremlin bubble.
Same thing is going on in China, with Xi. You can’t “manage” or “plan” a modern economy or much of any other modern enterprise. There are too many factors influencing things and modifying the reality you’re responding to.
Case in point would be what got highlighted here the other day, about all the real estate investors starting to lose their shirts. They had a good thing going, but it was predicated on conditions remaining static and unchanging; conditions changed, and now what was a solid economic premise is entirely inoperative. In a totalitarian top-down system, the market feedback of “bankruptcy” that signals to the idiots that things have changed is never allowed to happen, so the morons go happily along, assuming that nothing will ever change…
Which is how you get “ghost cities” in China, and a whole host of other crippling problems.
Russia and China are doomed, as are all the idiots of the WEF. They imagine that they have God-like powers of prognostication and control, and can “manage” everything around them. This is totally untrue, and it gets more untrue the more they try to suppress actual accurate information from contradicting their fantasies. Nobody dared tell Hitler or Stalin that they were wrong about anything, and that’s how we got the monumental maladministration of that war in the first place. Germans lower in the hierarchy knew that they were biting off more than they could handle, but they went along with it all, ‘cos they’d spent the 1930s watching dissenters get rounded up and slaughtered or sent to the camps. Same with the Soviet Union and Stalin.
You want a real world-conquering despot? You need someone like Ghengiz Khan, who apparently was quite open to his subordinates telling him things that he thought were correct were wrong. The guy to fear isn’t a Putin or a Xi, because they will inevitably be hoist upon their own petards, but someone like Churchill or FDR, who will be held accountable for screwing things up, and who has to listen to his subordinates in order to get things done.
Totalitarianism has a siren song that lures the unwary into the deeps and then drowns them; the certainties, the apparent unison, and the lack of dissent fool you all into going along… Right up until the inevitable crash of a Napoleonic retreat from Moscow. If you ever encounter someone who “can do no wrong”, and whose merest word is the writ of God? Watch the hell out, and get away from the impact area, because there’s an inevitable ugly denouement on the way–And, you don’t want to be there. Think “Elizabeth Holmes”, for corporate examples. Or, the guys at ENRON.