Putin beordrar styrkor att gå in i Ukraina - INVASION NU (2022-02-24)

Russian advances in Soledar imperil Ukraine’s ability to defend the nearby city of Bakhmut, which Wagner’s troops have been storming for the past six months. A much bigger city and a gateway to the Ukrainian-controlled half of the Donetsk region claimed by Russia, Bakhmut has become a symbol of Ukrainian resistance in the war—and the conflict’s main battlefield in recent weeks.

Ukraine, however, is also taking high casualties on the Bakhmut-Soledar front, quickly depleting the strength of several brigades sent there as reinforcements in the past month.

At the time, however, Russia was mostly waging the war with professional contract troops, and suffered from severe manpower shortages. Mr. Putin’s October mobilization of 300,000 reservists, coupled with Wagner’s prison recruitment drive that started in earnest in August, have changed the arithmetic of attrition to be in Russia’s favor. Mr. Prigozhin has said that his goal in the Bakhmut area isn’t so much to seize the city itself as to destroy Ukraine’s most combat-capable forces.
Western—and some Ukrainian—officials, soldiers and analysts increasingly worry that Kyiv has allowed itself to be sucked into the battle for Bakhmut on Russian terms, losing the forces it needs for a planned spring offensive as it stubbornly clings to a town of limited strategic relevance. Some of them say that it would make sense to retreat to a new defensive line on the heights west of Bakhmut while such a pullback can still be organized in a coordinated fashion, preserving the Ukrainian military’s combat strength.

“It’s not me, it’s King Leonidas who figured out that you should fight the enemy on the terrain that is advantageous to you,” said one Ukrainian commander in Bakhmut, referring to the ruler of Sparta who battled the Persian Empire at Thermopylae. “So far, the exchange rate of trading our lives for theirs favors the Russians. If this goes on like this, we could run out.”

Vad som hände under demonstrationerna i Kiev tycker jag är oklart. Det är inte alls lika tydligt som när Trump i bananrepubliken USA, efter att ha förlorat presidentvalet uppmanade sina sympatisörer att storma kongressen för att se till att han skulle kunna fortsätta som president.