I wonder when this will really fall through. Russia has been playing it pretty safe for a long time, and even if they have the ability to gamble for a big breakthrough, I’m not sure they would.
They’re talking about all this being over by the fall so I don’t know how that doesn’t include big pushes on the front.
My guess would be that they’re right, but I’ve also made a lot of incorrect guesses about this war so
I expect that we’re going to be seeing more and more collapses of Ukrainian lines the way we saw in Avdeevka. Russian strategy is to push all across the front and force Ukraine to shuffle their increasingly depleted units to plug holes in the line. Once Russians find a spot where the line is starting to buckle, they push through. This avoids having to take significant losses doing big offensives the way Ukraine tried to do last summer, and it keeps depleting and demoralizing the army. There’s going to come an inflection point where there just aren’t enough well trained units to hold the army together and that’s going to lead to a general collapse in the Ukrainian army. At that point things are going to move very quickly.
