La lenta morte di Pokrovsk | Ucraina

Tonight I watched a documentary about Google’s DeepMind and its pursuit of AGI to solve the world’s problems. It’s completely useless, because most of the world’s problems come from greed and stupidity. I keep my fingers crossed for a magical moment that gets rid of Putin and Trump (and his corrupt administration) within the next year. I hope Ukraine gets out of this mess. Waking up everyday hoping for some serious blows to Russia so that one day they will be forced to make a fair peace deal. One can only hope. Stay strong!

Praying for all of Ukraine that this is all temporary and that all orcs are destroyed and all land restored. Slava Ukraini!

>”before a rapid Russian advance”

Oh come the fuck on. Snails would literally have advanced on Pokrovsk faster than Russia did. The article gives the actual distances but refuses to put it all together because to do so would undermine their own claim about Russian velocity.

What changed for Pokrovsk fundamentally was that Russian forces went from outside artillery range to inside artillery range. This did not involve some kind of shocking sudden advance due to the failure of Ukrainian defenses, Russia just needed to creep along for a few kilometers. After that, Pokrovsk had to be evacuated, that was inevitable. But it wasn’t because Russia somehow instantly overran the place.

Like… we were all alive in 2024, we all saw how Russia was stuck at the same distance from Pokrovsk and wasn’t advancing despite all the news pieces about how speedily they were advancing and how it was only a matter of hours before Pokrovsk fell… over and over… for more than year.

It’s not like the Guardian or anyone else can just make up a different version of events in which something else happened, and everyone will just be like, “Oh yeah the *rapid advance*, I totally remember that it was *so rapid!*”

At least … I hope not.

This piece also completely misapprehends the value of Pokrovsk to Ukraine. Ukraine has held, and then relinquished, any number of cities so far in this invasion. There is no reason to think that they would never ever do such a thing due to some political calculation. That is patently silly.

Rather, the value to Ukraine of Pokrovsk has for a long time been that it represents for Ukraine an opportunity that is nearly priceless on any battlefield, namely that for as long as they hold some part of the town, they know exactly what their adversary is going to do next.

Russia has handed Ukraine many such opportunities so far, and Ukraine has never failed to extract as much as they can from each one.

We can ask, “Yeah but why is Russia so predictably obsessed, what is the military value of Pokrovsk to them?” and that is a question of passing interest but from Ukraine’s point of view it doesn’t matter why the Kremlin thinks the way it does. What matters is the behavior. *That* is the strategic value of Pokrovsk. Not understanding that will always make Ukraine’s actions seem strange or whatever, but honestly it’s not that hard of a concept I don’t think.