ChrisO_wiki

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🔹 t.me/rybar/72129
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🔹 t.me/yurasumy/24487
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🔹 t.me/yurasumy/24508
🔹 t.me/milinfolive/...
🔹 t.me/yurasumy/24857

43/ Zelenskyy's appearance at the gates of Kupyansk doesn't mean that Ukraine has won the battle. But it does demonstrate, as the Russian warbloggers themselves acknowledge, that Gerasimov's claims have been proven false in the most public way possible. /end

42/ "[The Ukrainians] are clinging on and mining everything in sight, pounding it with drones. There's no sign of capture there. The meat grinder continues."

41/ "Well, guys, everyone's been talking about the capture of Kupyansk for weeks now. Only our brothers in the area can't confirm it. The fighting is going on house after house. Every block is being torn apart.

40/ The reality on the ground was – and remains – that Kupyansk is a bloody meat-grinder for the Russians. 'Brothers in Arms' commented on 9 December about the situation in the city:

39/ "And what is the result? The result is that the President hears endless reports from Kuzovlev [euphemism for Gerasimov] about the successes of our army in Kupyansk, which leads to new demands from above for further advances."

38/ "In accordance with geopolitical motives (the so-called “peace process” that everyone believes in so much), we continue to report on the liberation of city after city, village after village “on credit.” The example of Kupyansk shows us why this is a bad initiative...

37/ As another warblogger noted, the exaggerated claims seem to be linked to a desire to persuade Donald Trump that Ukraine is doomed and to impress Vladimir Putin, who seems to be cut off from objective sources of information:

36/ 'DONTSTOPWAR' wrote:

"It seems that the decision to continue the offensive is dictated by the need to report success, rather than by the actual operational situation. Take off your rose-colored glasses; the political officers are already misleading everyone."

35/ By 4 December, Russian warbloggers were reporting that it was impossible to make any real advances in the city due to extreme logistical difficulties – the only way to get supplies in was to drop them from drones.

34/ On 20 November, Gerasimov personally reported to Putin that Kupyansk had been "liberated". Russian warbloggers once again cried foul, pointing out that there was no objective evidence of the claim. Meanwhile, the fighting continued into December.
bsky.app/profile/sone...

33/ "At best, soldiers would emerge from closed, unmarked spaces, basements, introducing themselves as commanders of assault units, reporting the liberation of ... a certain number of buildings in Kupyansk and their advance. But there was no confirmation."

32/ "Colleagues noted something that was immediately obvious, or rather, completely unobtrusive: the complete lack of visual [objective] monitoring of military operations in the city.

31/ 'Voenkor Kotenok' observed:

"It's long been known that the situation in Kupyansk, Kharkiv Oblast, is strikingly different from what's being presented in reports to higher-ups and even in the media..."

30/ "However, most of these reports are not only far from reality, but have also played into the hands of the enemy, who have refuted them with objective surveillance footage and received a much-needed dose of 'anti-crisis.'"

29/ "For several weeks now, reports have been emerging from the Kupyansk direction, one more triumphant than the other: men in clean camouflage uniforms are reading from basements from pieces of paper about large-scale successes and the clearing of key points.

28/ By late November, the Russian military was resorting to posting obviously staged videos to promote its claims of capturing Kupyansk. They were so obvious that they were called out by Russian warbloggers such as Rybar:

27/ Despite the ridicule, Gerasimov repeated the same claims about Kupyansk in late October and added a claim that 18 Ukrainian battalions (10,000 men) were trapped there. This prompted Russian warbloggers to speculate that he was trying to impress Donald Trump as much as Vladimir Putin.

26/ "This means we supposedly control the entire right-bank part of Kupyansk and the northern part of the left bank. Well, you get the idea, we've already "practically taken" Kupyansk without anyone noticing."

25/ "Well, it has finally become clear what exactly was reported to the higher-ups regarding control of Kupyansk. This is a section of a map from the Russian Ministry of Defense's Telegram channel. The Kupyansk area is roughly coloured like this.

24/ As several pointed out, the map showed Kupyansk virtually surrounded and a large part of the city captured. Yuri Podolyaka observed that this likely represented what the senior generals were using to direct the campaign, based on the false information they were receiving:

23/ By late September, the Russian advance had slowed to such a crawl that the Russian MOD was issuing statements proclaiming the capture of individual buildings. It published a report that included a map of recent advances that attracted instant ridicule from warbloggers.

22/ "When we consolidate our position in the town and have a vast gray zone around it, that's when we should trumpet that the town is ours. As long as individual assault groups are moving in, that doesn't mean it's ours."

21/ 'Rupor Fausta Z', a war veteran, commented that the troops were "really sick of liberating Kupyansk. Like Bilohorivka, they take it 10 times a year, but they still haven't taken it...

20/ "They were very surprised to learn of advances in their sectors, where a well-equipped enemy, entrenched in the ground for years and even superior in FPV aviation, had been operating."

19/ "Fantasies were born and passed on to the higher-ups, causing confusion among the commanders and soldiers of units carrying out combat missions in the sector.

18/ 'Voenkor Kotenok' commented: "Reports from the Kupyansk sector have long been perplexing, to put it mildly, and require re-examination, as they're significantly ahead of the events.

17/ He pointed out that the claim was backed up by the flimsiest evidence – a Russian flag being dropped by drone onto the city's TV tower in a so-called "anti-crisis operation", after hard questions were asked about Gerasimov's claims.

16/ "After all, all of this is ultimately reported to the Supreme Commander [Putin]. And this, to put it mildly, is a gross exaggeration of our successes on this section of the front."