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   Chuck Darwin (cdarwin@c.im)'s status on Sunday, 11-Aug-2024 08:51:59 JST Chuck Darwin

   Surprise Ukraine offensive pokes Russia’s soft underbelly
   
Kyiv just made a move that military analysts, and Moscow, apparently, didn’t think was possible.


As the war in Ukraine settled into a stalemate, two assumptions became prevalent among analysts:

   First, that it is nearly impossible to achieve any #surprise on a battlefield blanketed by drones.

   Second, that it is nearly impossible to mount #fast-moving #offensive operations, given the extensive defenses erected by both sides.

   🔥Ukraine has challenged both assumptions over the past few days with its surprise, lightning-fast thrust into Russia’s #Kursk region
   — ♦️an area familiar to military historians as the site, during World War II, of the biggest tank battle in history.
   
The Ukrainian military shocked the entire world
   — and the Russian defenders
   — when it sent an armored column on Tuesday across the border from Ukraine’s Sumy region.

   There had been cross-border raids by Ukraine before,
   but those were much smaller operations conducted by Russian volunteers.

   This was something much more ambitious:
   a combined-arms offensive utilizing armored vehicles (some of them German- and U.S.-made),
   infantry,
   artillery
   and electronic-warfare equipment.

   Ukraine reportedly committed elements of four elite brigades to the operation.

This was, in fact, the kind of well-planned, well-executed assault that the Ukrainians had hoped to pull off last year, on a much grander scale,
   when their objective was to slice through Russian lines in southern Ukraine and break the land bridge between Crimea and Russia.

   That offensive failed against well-prepared Russian defenses full of mines and trenches, all covered by heavy artillery fire and large numbers of drones.
   
⭐️By contrast, the Ukrainians have practically waltzed into the Kursk region, because the Russians weren’t expecting an attack there.

   This reinforces the lesson of the June 2023 rebellion by Wagner Group mercenaries,
   who found a practically open road to Moscow before turning back at the last moment.

   ⚠️The interior of Russia is lightly defended, and the lumbering Russian military cannot react quickly to new threats.

   It makes you wonder why the Ukrainians mounted a costly and futile frontal assault on Russian lines last summer
   instead of staging a “left hook” through Russian territory to attack the Russian defenders from the rear
   — similar to the maneuver that the United States employed against Iraqi forces in Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1991

   https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/10/ukraine-offensive-kursk-russia/