Does it matter?
Yesterday the pentagon was saying that Russian gains toward their eastern and southern objectives were substantial and all but a given to be fulfilled.
There will be partition with western Ukraine agreeing never to seek NATO entrance. Hell, that was a given since day 1.
You have a link for that?
That would be a complete reversal of what the Pentagon has been saying. Not that Kirby isn't an idiot.
Pentagon press briefings are a joke. This was yesterday:
"In the Donbas region we would still assess that the Ukrainians are putting up a very stiff resistance and that the Russians have not made the progress that we believe they expected to make by this point.
That's not to say they haven't made any progress. I think we would continue assess it as incremental and uneven, but not non-existent. And again we think that that's partly -- a big part of it is the Ukrainian resistance but also partly through their own uneven efforts to fix the challenges that they had north around Kyiv.
I can't say that looking at the -- looking at what we can see that we can say definitively that there's a change in behavior or aggressive or momentum based on the coming day of May ninth. And what they plan to do or say on Victory Day, that's really up to them. I don’t think we have a perfect sense.
But I can't sit here honestly and tell you that we -- that we're seeing a correlation between the looming deadline of the ninth and the way they're behaving in the Donbas. It's still uneven plotting, incremental but they have made some small progress particularly in the north part of the Donbas. So I think I'd leave it at that."
There's a lot he leaves out-
Ukraine has cleared the villages around Kharkiv and pushed the Russians either across the border towards Belgorod, or to the eastern bank of the Donets. Kharkiv is finally out of conventional artillery range.
Ukraine has also made gains in the Kherson area and has taken several villages.
Ukraine is offensive in posture on each end of the line of contact, and defensive in the center. There is no real expectation that Russia will be making large territorial advances with the forces they have in Ukraine.
The Russian forces defending west of Mariupol and from Kharkiv SE to Izium are militia units from the DNR/LNR, mostly poorly trained and equipped conscripts. They are opposed by Ukrainian territorial militia brigades- who are also not very well trained and equipped, so it's kind of a wash.
Bottom line, it's a stalemate for now.
Best channel I've found for daily updates with troop formations:
www.rt.com
