Understanding the current Ukrainian strategy

Breif description of what the Ukrainian command is actually doing (now including maps with crayon annotations so even the village idiot can understand!)

The Ukrainians are very good at strategy. Specifically what they keep doing is forcing Russians to make choices that they don’t want to make, and putting them into situations where the outcomes of their choices are all bad.  That is an indicator of what makes them good at strategy (more precisely ‘operational art’) - they are dictating the pace and forcing the RA to respond to them. So what’s going on at the moment? In a sense, the only people who truly know how this will go are the Ukrainian general staff, and their US/UK colleagues working with them. However, credible OSINT specialists and other analysts have provided us with some probable scenarios of what is likely happening. 

Ok - so over the last 3 months, the Ukr have been softening up Kherson - taking territory, gentle shaping of the battlefield. Then over the last month or so, they have begun heavily shaping the battlefield and destroying RA command and control, logistics and infrastructure.  This caused russia to strip out units from elsewhere in Ukraine to reinforce in Kherson, but it also meant that russia put lots of its troops on the wrong side of a river in Kherson.

Previously, they had stripped out troops from elsewhere to do their offensive in the Donbas, and the Ukrainians took advantage of that and started nibbling at Kherson. Key point - the Russians don’t have nearly enough to do what they want to do, and the Ukrainians are exploiting that by holding the line on Russian attacks and then striking elsewhere. Then last week or so, the UA announced that they were starting their Kherson offensive proper. This seems to have been pretty successful. It pinned a lot of Russian troops the wrong side of the Dnipro River and means the UA can take their time. 

But because the Russians had stripped troops out of everywhere else to reinforce Kherson, the Ukrainians sensed an opportunity in the north east in Kharkiv. And this lays bare a huge advantage that the UA have over the RA- interior lines versus exterior lines. If the UA (blue) want to shift axis of advance or reinforce look how short a journey it is compared to the Russians.

This gives the UA a SIGNIFICANT advantage in what militaries call balance - they can keep their force balanced and shift reserves or key assets around much easier and faster than the Russians. 

So what is happening in Kharkiv? 

Red is the RA front line. Red circle is Izyum which is a town the Russians need to hold for logistical reasons if they want to go further into Donbas. Yellow is a KEY railway junction and black is the railway from Russia down which all the supplies come.

So as you can see, the UA are taking advantage of the thinned out RA front lines to try and capture that railway junction which will cut the supplies to Izyum, which will cause most of that RA front to continue it's collapse. If they pull that off it’s serious rout time.

But there is something also very interesting. 

Kherson front = total news blackoutKharkiv front = loads of videos of RA prisoners, positions under attack, RA equip destroyed etc.(And russian telegram channels confirm that on both fronts the UA are making significant gains) 

So why the difference in what the UA are allowing out from the two fronts? They are the masters of info ops (or at least have been so far in the war) 

My guess is that Kherson is still the prize or main effort - more important strategically and lots of Ru troops trapped there in the blender.But they are releasing videos of panicking RA up in Kharkiv to overload RA decision making, and maybe force them to redeploy some assets. After all, Kharkiv is not a big front, the RA there can just retreat across the border. Donbas is more important to russia , and Crimea even more important still (Kherson is gateway to Crimea). And so looking forward, my prediction is that Kherson is the way to Crimea and Russian collapse, but the Kharkiv front is just a nice little side line that makes that easier.