With Russina soliders reportedly dropping their arms and running in some engagements and the Ukrainians claiming to have retaked miles and MILES of territory back from the Russians?
How does the Russian handle this?
They show their troop’s pulling back….
The Western media can’t be ignored
And?
That media is projecting a massive positive for the Ukraine military….
The media is also reporting the indescrimnate killing of Ukrainian civilinas by Russian troops…..
“They just dropped rifles on the ground,” Olena Matvienko said Sunday as she stood, still disoriented, in a village littered with ammo crates and torched vehicles, including a Russian tank loaded on a flatbed. The first investigators from Kharkiv had just pulled in to collect the bodies of civilians shot by Russians, some that have been lying exposed for months.
“I can’t believe that we went through something like this in the 21st century,” Matvienko said, tears welling.
The hasty flight of Russians from the village was part of a stunning new reality that took the world by surprise over the weekend: The invaders of February are on the run in some parts of Ukraine they seized early in the conflict.
The Russian Defense Ministry’s own daily briefing Sunday featured a map showing Russian forces retreating behind the Oskil river on the eastern edge of the Kharkiv region — a day after the ministry confirmed its troops had left the Balakliya and Izyum area in the Kharkiv region, following a decision to “regroup.”…
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On Sunday, Ukraine’s commander in chief, Valery Zaluzhny, said Ukrainian forces had retaken more than 3,000 square kilometers (more than 1,100 square miles) of territory, a claim that could not be independently verified, adding that they were advancing to the east, south and north.
“Ukrainian forces have penetrated Russian lines to a depth of up to 70 kilometers in some places,” reported the Institute for the Study of War, which closely tracks the conflict. They have captured more territory in the past five days “than Russian forces have captured in all their operations since April,” its campaign assessment posted Sunday said.
The apparent collapse of the Russian forces has caused shock waves in Moscow. The leader of the Chechen republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, who sent his own fighters to Ukraine, said if there are not immediate changes in Russia’s conduct of the invasion, “he would have to contact the leadership of the country to explain to them the real situation on the ground.”…
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“We’re here looking into war crimes,” said Serhii Bolvinov, chief investigator of the Kharkiv Regional Police, as his crew waited on demining techs to clear one area of explosives before they could recover some of the bodies….
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Half of the soldiers fled in their vehicles in the first hours of the offensive, they said. Those stranded grew desperate. Some residents overheard their radio pleas to unit commanders for someone to come get them.
“They said, ‘You’re on your own,’ ” Matvienko recounted. “They came into our houses to take clothes so the drones wouldn’t see them in uniforms. They took our bicycles. Two of them pointed guns at my ex-husband until he handed them his car keys.”…
Ukraine’s rapid offensive in the northeast has recaptured far more territory than it had expected and it needs to consolidate those gains, the country’s defense minister said.
The offensive has dramatically altered the battlefield, 200 days after Russia’s full-scale invasion began, and allowed the government in Kyiv to seize the initiative, though Oleksii Reznikov, the defense minister, said that this comes with risks.
“A counteroffensive liberates territory and after that you have to control it and be ready to defend it,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times newspaper published on Monday.
He said that, while the offensive had gone better than expected, there were reasons for Ukraine to worry.
One concern is that by advancing to the border of the Luhansk region in the east, Ukraine risked overextending its supply lines, according to John Blaxland, a professor of security and intelligence studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. That could potentially leave the military vulnerable, although he added that a Russian counterattack was “not necessarily going to happen,” in part because the morale of Moscow’s troops appears to be damaged.
Ukraine may be less vulnerable to supply issues than other advancing armies because it is fighting on home territory. In addition, its recapture of Izium, a rail hub that Russian forces abandoned on Saturday, deprives Moscow of a key military supply route and increases the transport links available to Kyiv’s troops….
This and More.…