Apparently the Ukrainian General Staff has now confirmed a successful river crossing.

I get a lot of flak for my predictions but I'm usually way ahead of brOSINT lol.

They claim heavy Russian casualties (and if photos are anything to go by they're right) but losing a significant part of a battalion to force a breach is normal and to be expected from my experience.

The operation continues.

I'll probably write a note tonight on brOSINT's cardinal sins - overinterpretation, credulity towards unreliable sources, and confirmation bias. It was on full display today.

This probably indicates the Ukrainian "offensive" on Izyum is over, and they're moving troops to prevent an outright collapse deeper in the Donbass.

Also this isn't much of a reconstitution for a brigade-size element. This unit may very well have taken 60-70% casualties thus far and lost all/almost all of its tanks.

The Allied Forces Offensive from Popasnaya: After the taking of Popasnaya, the Allied forces have commenced offensives in two directions simultaneously—eastwards, aiming, as expected, at Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) and northwards, targeting Kamyshevakha.

The goal is to split the forming Donbass Cauldron into two—the western Slavayansk-Kramatorsk operational area and the rapidly-forming eastern Severodonetsk cauldron that would include, among others, Troitskoye, Gorskoye, Lisichansk, and Seversk—and to prevent the withdrawal of troops in the latter to the more defensible positions at Artyomovsk and Slavyansk-Kramatorsk.

Ukrainian Material Fatigue: I will again repost this very instructive analysis from @Zornkrieger, with my very modest interjection, and pin it. A very useful statement—it behooves referring back to it from time to time.

@Zornkrieger

The resistance is reducing. The first 2 weeks we saw which defensible positions were defensible and which ones were not. Since then, a stalemate for the most part on the Donbas fortifications. Depreciated units always work the best on the defensive. Obviously. You can’t attack with 40% casualties but you sure as hell can defend, just not as well. Now we’re seeing the “Stalingrad” of the Donbas fall when most expectations would have optimistically put it at another month not factoring in combat losses.

It’s also why you didn’t see the Izyum bridgehead collapse when the Ukrainians threw every last reserve at it

It’s also why the Mariupol battle went from prolonged stalemate fighting to within 2 weeks the entire city was captured aside from Azovstal. It’s always exponential.

@Slavyangrad

It always catches people who do not understand military or engineering unawares. There is such a concept as material fatigue. Everything seems fine, until it is not, and you have a catastrophe on your hands.

@Zornkrieger

It’s not about the willingness to fight it’s about the ability to fight. It’s the reason why schools are opening in Mariupol while there’s still active enemies within the city.

Addendum to previous - map #2 is weird and apparently shows the wrong Belgorovka.

I'm just going to blame the forwarded post lol. This isn't my work.

By the time the forces doing the pinning were redeployed, the Mariupol saga was essentially over. In redeploying the North Front units, Russia was able to let them rest, but they did not take too long before being thrown back into warfare—indicating that there was no appreciable need for replenishment of personnel (confirming the relatively low casualties even in the North Front engagement—the major casualties for Russia were always going to come from the Donbass engagement), Ukraine is unable even to rotate its brigades for rest: The Ukrainian units are stuck at the front and have no option, but to fight without stop (the flood of relatives increasingly pleading with the Ukrainian authorities to allow their men to rest and rotate out of hot zones is becoming very pronounced).

The POW numbers tell their own story. It has been weeks (literally) since we last saw any video of Russian POWs in Ukrainian hands. Videos of Ukrainians surrendering to Russian forces are, on the other hand, a daily phenomenon. They surrender individually, in groups, and en masse. Some have even joined the DNR and LNR forces to fight against the Ukrainian army. Other have decided to stay in Donbass for good. Some help in Allied military and Donbass civilian hospitals. Still others eat, rest, smoke—perfectly safe in Russian captivity. I estimate in excess of 6,000 Ukrainian POW, and possibly as high as 8,000 in Russian hands. This speaks volume, considering the Russian MoD report that, once encircled, the Mariupol Ukrainian contingent numbered about 8,500 troops, and Russia assaulted it with about the same number. Whatever the number of Russian casualties, the number of Ukrainian POWs is likely higher than the entire group of those Russian soldiers that died.

3—Russia has lost so much armour and equipment, that it has to source new tanks from Iraq—Ukraine, by contrast, has been capturing Russian armoured vehicles in such numbers, that it has more now than it had before the conflict. Even farmers plow fields using Russian tanks.

Even the Ukrainian Goebbels Arestovich said, on April 26: "We do not have any heavy weaponry. We need it. The West will help us, and we will go on the offensive." The fairy tales of Ukrainian farmers towing Russian tanks and Ukrainian forces massively taking abandoned Russian equipment were always just that—fairy tales of the worst kind, the ones that have no truth, morale, or purpose, except to perpetuate a lie. The Russian army has been completely undeterred by any losses of any equipment—armoured vehicles, specialized vehicles, MLRS, aircraft, helicopters, and so on—that it may have suffered. On the contrary, its movements and redeployments continue being rapid, the pace of the offensive—considering the vast territory and the enormous length of the front—remain exemplary. All this indicates that all the Western and Ukrainian reporting on the topic of Russian losses of any kind has been one Big Lie, die große Lüge.

4—Ukraine forced the Russian troops from the areas near Kiev, Chernigov, Sumy, Kharkov—but Ukraine withdrew, in an organized fashion, from Severodonetsk, Popasnaya, and Izyum.

This one is complete gobbledygook and gibberish. Let's deal with the Ukrainian first. The Ukrainian forces have not—to date—conducted an organized retreat from any place, with the exception, possibly of the withdrawal of a brigade from Lisichansk. This could be considered organized retreat, but only if one ignores that the city was near to falling into a Cauldron, and their desperate comrades, across the Seversky Donets river, in Severodonetsk, were abandoned and left to die by the Ukrainian General Staff. Popasnaya was a monumental defeat, and the Ukrainian 24th Brigade may cease to exist as a result, as it suffered major losses even in withdrawal. Finally, Izyum, actually, is an example of the resilience and perseverence of Ukrainian troops, which managed, for nearly a month, if my memory serves me correctly, to defend in the southern peninsula-like district of the city, across the Seversky Donets river from the advancing Russian forces. They did not withdraw from there either, but died there.

As for Russians—where is the evidence, photographic or otherwise, that Ukrainians are so fond of, of them forcing Russians from Kiev, Chernigov, Sumy, and Kharkov? These were not fights or battles. The best Ukraine could hope for was shell with artillery and MLRS from within these cities at the Russian positions all around them. In Kiev, Chernigov, and Sumy, it was only on 2nd or 3rd day after the Russian armies left in an organized fashion, for redeployment to Donbass, that Ukrainians dared to poke their nose into the settlements around the previously-blockaded centres. In Kharkov, the same pattern repeats—the Allied forces withdrew in the face of the threat of operation encirclement, and Ukrainians moved in to take the empty settlements. The only examples of actual fighting—an attempted assault on Kazachya Lopan, for instance, cost the Ukrainians two villages and a complete failure, and, perhaps, only Rubezhnoye stands as an example of a pitched battle, but I do not have any further information about what happened there. The fighting for Liptsy continues, as far as I can tell. In other words, we are dealing with the Allied armies doing what they want, and the Ukrainians—what the Russian forces allow them to do. Why are the Ukrainians allowed to take back land—that's a question of politics, tactics, and strategy not suitable for this discussion, and better answered elsewhere.

Time and again, we see Russia implementing a strategy—pinning Ukrainians in the north, then withdrawing, once that mission had run its court, to be redeployed to the second phase of the operation in Donbass. Pinning the Ukrainians in Kharkov, while the new battlegroups rip down the eastern bank of the Oskol river and the Northern command of the Russian forces takes Izyum and spreads the tentacles of its units to Velikaya Kamyshevakha (onwards to Lozovaya, and, possibly, Pavlograd, with time), Barvenkovo, and Slavyansk. Breaking through the defences around Rubezhnoye and piercing toward Yampol and Lyman. Taking Shandrigolovo and Novoselovka to split the Ukrainian side. Grinding down Popasnaya and then splitting the offensive west and north to Artyomovsk and Kamyshevakha. Ukrainians are reacting to this strategy, on the defensive, and largerly dancing to the Russian fiddle (the modest attempts at Zmeiny island and around Kharkov notwithstanding, though, allowed to be emboldened, the Ukrainian forces may take this germs of strategy to the next level).

Flip the narrative and the picture becomes clear.

I thought the crossing at Belgorovka was unsuccessful... /sarcasm

🇷🇺🇺🇦⚡AFU are preparing for two big Russian offensives - on Severodonetsk and on the Lisichansk-Artemovsk highway from Popasna and Belogorivka, - Gauleiter of Lugansk region