I wrote the following to a private email list. Some of this I may of stated here already.
[I haven't being paying much attention to the battle in Ukraine for almost a year, not until this week when one couldn't avoid it if one wanted to. The "boring" part of the news until this week was the slow and steady progress by Russian Forces in the East of Ukraine. This is a short piece on just the incursion of late and Russian intelligence specifically.] A very short comment on the recent, and so far successful incursion by the Ukrainian army (AFU) and inability of the Russian Forces (RU), so far, to really stop them (for now, as of when I write this). This very short comment involves the much talked about "Russian intelligence failure". I happen to disagree with the pundits on this. To say it was failure strongly implies incompetence. Russian intelligence is anything but that. They were outsmarted by the AFU without a doubt. You can see this if you read enough of the critiques of the RF failure here. Being outsmarted doesn't necessarily make one stupid or incompetent. Just means the other guy has a better and more creative game plan. There has been on going incursion by RFs around Kharkiv in the north for months now. For the most part they have been beaten back by the AFU. There are still a few small areas in Ukraine's north that are still occupied with fighting ongoing. The area of Russia the AFU crossed over too and now are in more...or less...control over, some 1000 sq km, is a small area of the border that saw very little righting of late. Almost none. The Ukrainians, without trying to hide moved AFUs units to a small town around 20km from the border. RFs intelligence saw this. There was no missing it. But the Russians, understandably , believed these forces to be "blocking forces" in case the RFs came streaming across the border into Kharkiv Oblast from this area. They were deployed in such a way that they could in theory respond to any RFs incursion. This fooled the Russians, seemingly, completely....as these forces came together and over the course of a few hours in the late morning, drove the 40 minutes to get to the border and poured over it, resulting in what we see today. No one expected this. It was quite a brilliant move on part of the AFUs. Neither the Russians nor Ukraine's allies NOR 99% of the Ukrainian population had a clue about what was going to happen. Interestingly, word to the actual troops of the AFU that were going to take part were able to enforce total and absolute operational security on this for a total of 72 hours/3 days before the event. No one tattled on the AFU. I didn't write this to point out RFs failure in "intelligence". Some time shit just happens. I suspect heads will roll in Russia however. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#31645): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/31645 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/107915103/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
