SSTF

I assumed naturally they did bring AA, but the fact that AA of a force on the move is able to apparently overcome the ability of Russia to deploy air power in any significant way on its home turf is really something.

Peeling off Russian forces is exactly what Ukraine has already done with this force. I believe it was entirely the point.

Russia is forced not to ignore this for numerous reasons, and it forces them to attack to expel the Ukrainian forces. Successfully attacking with conscripts is a more difficult proposition than defending.

Ukrainian forces inside Russia can continue to force the confrontation by advancing into undefended territory and/or launching limited small scale attacks to be a constant wound inside of Russia. Ukrainians have already been conducting these attacks on reinforcements on their way to stop the main Ukrainian forces.

All the while Ukrainians inside Russia can refuse to assault defended positions. Which is exactly what they did initially. They bypassed the heavy positions and refused to engage in heavy force on force assaults. Instead as local defenders they are creating a lopsided local situation.

As an aside, where are Russian air assets? Inside Ukraine the skies were contested, but the apparent inability of air assets to repel Ukrainians from Russian territory with air power is not a good sign for Russia.

Why counter attack (with the majority of forces) right away? Russians have shown poorer abilities when organizing offensives compared to defending. The incursion into Russia by Ukraine forces the Russian military into attacking. This is as opposed to sitting behind a thousand minefields in unmoving lines inside Ukraine.

Ukraine can set up elaborate layered defenses and enjoy the defensive advantage to grind up more Russian military assets. This also gives Ukraine opportunities for small detachments to hit the Russian reinforcements on the move, which is something they’ve already been doing.

Russia has undeniably made gains. Avdiivka is comparable in size to the Russian territory taken by Ukraine. Except it took Russia a year and 30,000 casualties and hundreds of armored vehicles losses. Ukraine’s push into Russia has happened over days and Russia still hasn’t pivoted with a coherent response.

I post updates when relevant to !military@lemmy.world

Donetsk and Crimea? No.

This is on the Russian side of the border north of Ukraine in an area that Ukraine has never previously laid claim to.

As a completely uncredentialed internet commenter, this looks like true maneuver warfare in action. The goal is destroying the ability of enemy forces rather than capturing territory. A subtle but important distinction. Any territory taken should be in furtherance of the main goal, and if holding the territory distracts from that it is to be abandoned.

(If numbers are anything close to believable) this has been happening inside Ukraine where defensible positions are held by Ukrainians to cause huge losses to attacking Russian forces, yet the Ukrainians don’t immediately press the local advance often to take back disputed territory. A big exception was Ukraine’s initial, and I think it will come out as disastrous armored offensive early in the war, probably a result of over confidence in thinking they’d whittled down the Russian forces that early. Looks like lessons learned as Ukraine has become much more cautious of large scale offensives. I believe last year they were assaulting Russian defensive lines inside Ukraine but (if numbers are to be believed) they were inflicting more losses on the defenders than they were taking, which is insane for assaulting static positions. Russia seems to have held those positions by simply pouring fresh troops into them over and over, sacrificing men to prevent the lines on the map from moving. Years of those kinds of losses seem to be at the point where Russia can’t pivot to defend itself in any kind of reasonable time. Even if the Ukrainians pull out of the Russian territory, the damage by showing what they are able to do is done.

In a funny twist, at least from the snippets of news reporting (which I stress we should always be willing to rethink) it sounds like the Ukraine incursion is using a sort of variant of “deep battle” by bypassing enemy defenses with the majority of its forces. This is funny because early in the war the massive Russian tank losses from their disorganized dollar store thunder run were explained as expected deep battle losses by pro-Russians on the internet.

use its armoured vehicles to head towards Russian positions and use a third of them to tie down the defenders while the rest were “bypassing it, entering nearby settlements and setting up ambushes”

The mythical Deep Battle strategy actually being used?