Russia cannot take much more as battlefield setbacks mount

Today, the biggest news is coming from the Kharkiv region.

Here, Putin is going to snap as his most recent major victory over Ukraine is turning into yet another humiliating defeat.

With Ukrainian assault groups advancing further into the Russian advances and dismantling their pincer efforts, Russians are panicking once again. Their objective of encircling thousands of Ukrainian soldiers against the international border has collapsed, as Ukrainians are breaking open ground lines of communication into the beleaguered pocket.

Currently, in addition to intensifying their shelling efforts, Russians are trying to rush in reinforcements to try and break the Ukrainian assaults and gain back control of the situation. However, Ukrainians are striking Russian deployment points before they even manage to cross the border into Ukraine. Geolocated footage shows a column of six Russian military vehicles attempting to deploy forces inside an abandoned poultry farm just across the border. Ukrainians followed Russian movements and tracked precisely which buildings they had entered. Then, the shelling commenced, with explosions tearing apart the large facility from all sides. FPV drones with extended range were launched, likely from mothership drones, to chase down Russian infantry that had managed to dismount. The drones also ensured that the Russian vehicles were destroyed, as a hit on a fuel truck caused the entire building to engulf in flames.

With their rear areas coming under intense Ukrainian pressure, Russian forces failed to even launch any significant counterattacks against the advancing Ukrainian forces. As a result, the corridor that Ukrainians had broken open remained as such.

Looking at the bigger picture, this is the sixth time that Russians claim to have achieved a major victory, before Ukrainians humiliate them by dismantling the Russian fantasy bit by bit. At Stepnohirsk, Uspenivka, Komar, Liman, and Kupiansk even twice, Russians suffered major defeats and extensive public backlash after overexaggerated claims of Russian advances. After suffering several major defeats at the hands of Ukrainians in such a short amount of time, the image of the Russian army and Putin himself by extension, is crumbling for everyone to see.

The reason they’re faking so many major victories is that in reality they are failing to advance or achieve their goals on so many fronts. Therefore, Russians need to keep the illusion of a constant Russian advance and inevitable victory alive through other means. Predominantly, this is done through smaller fake advances by infiltrating deep behind Ukrainian lines and waving around the Russian flag, which does not equate to any real territorial control. Often this also does not even have a meaningful impact on cutting Ukrainian supply lines, as Ukrainians have often shown flag-wavers to survive not even an hour after filming their videos, with other flag-waving videos being revealed as made by AI.

The problem however is that repeated faking of advances eventually leads to the illusion collapsing under its own weight. Notably, in the most extreme cases, the frontline maps shared and used by Russian military command show areas more than twenty kilometers from the real Russian area of control. Aside from creating major problems in delivering accurate orders and fire support, the events here show that it leads to massive public defeats as well.

Russians had already claimed that they had encircled Ukrainians in a four-hundred-thirty square kilometers large pocket. This would have been the single largest encirclement of Ukrainian forces in years, and the largest Russian territorial advancement since the Russian advance from Avdiivka to the approaches to Pokrovsk, which still took Russians over a year to complete. With the reality on the ground failing to live up to these excessive Russian claims of victory, Putin himself is left humiliated by the failures and setbacks on the frontline in Ukraine, with the Russian army’s capabilities visually deteriorating with every day that passes.

Overall, Ukrainians once again unmasked a major Russian façade on the frontline. Claiming an encirclement of over four-hundred-thirty square kilometers before it was actually completed was the latest in the series of Russian media victories that Ukrainians dismantled piece by piece. With Russian forces being beaten back, and their counterattacks destroyed before they could even launch, Russian commanders won’t be able to salvage their situation. As repeated military failures build up, an upcoming command reshuffle will undoubtedly result in record sales for Russian window makers.