Quote (Black XistenZ @ Mar 19 2024 10:43am)
It took Russia months of intense and costly fighting to take small-ish cities like Avdiivka and Bakhmut, cities which ultimately didn't have utmost strategic value to Ukraine and could be given up. Kharkiv is a much bigger city and losing it would basically be the death knell for Ukraine's efforts, they will throw everything they have at holding it. It is also a battle-hardened city, "Battle of Kharkiv" has its own disambiguation site on wikipedia because there's been 4 or 5 major battles in that city over the past century alone.
So unless Ukraine completely runs out of shells, I don't see Russian offenses toward Kharkiv as promising. And in that scenario, Russia is free to do whatever it wants anyway.
Sumy makes no sense to me, they already tried to capture that territory in Northern Ukraine back in 2022 at the start of this war and failed miserably.
They literally withdrew from those areas when the Kiev feint failed and they realized they are in for a protracted long war after blitzkrieg failed. Pro-Ukrainian people keep highlighting how Ukraine was able to overtake large swaths of territory back but don't really want to tell the whole truth, that in reality there were no large scale grindy battles fought in those areas, the Russians realizing they were stretched thin just pulled back. It would be easy for Russians to go into north east Sumy but the objective has never been for them to gobble as much landmass as possible. Look at the map of east Chernihiv and northeast Sumy, it's basically sparsely populated forests and small towns, this area would be really easy to take but harder to hold long term. What they really want is the full Donbass, most likely Kharkiv and the real prize would be Odessa. These are the historical pro-Russian lands, those are the places they enjoyed the most local support.
To me, if they decide to move into those two regions, it indicates one of three things really. One, it could mean that their sights are on much more than just the few regions they already posses and they maybe want to a lot more territory, maybe try most of everything to the east of Dnieper, to me this is unlikely though. Two, it's a way to stretch already limited Ukrainian resources even thinner. It basically opens up a new front and forces Ukraine to dedicate troops there, leaving the east and south thinner. The real objective is to 'thin' out in areas where they really would like to advance. Thirdly, it's to setup some buffer regions between Russia and Ukraine, so Ukraine can't harass with these border raids.
2 or 3 to me seems most likely.
This post was edited by ofthevoid on Mar 19 2024 09:17am