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In Ukraine news: Russia to withdraw from city of Kherson
As said in the article, this seems like big news, since Kherson was the only "big city" Russia has conquered in this period of war. Even the pro-Russian sources I follow on Twitter aren't trying to spin this ("Feint! Planned withdrawal! Actually good for Russia!") any more.
Of course this means that the new defensive line is harder to crack, but really, at some point, you'd imagine sheer morale questions would make it hard for Russians to proceed, at least. Where will the Ukrainians push next?
I've heard some ambiguous reports of Ukraine having moderate successes pushing against the line of contact near Lisichansk, but otherwise it seems that the holy grail for them would be to push downward to cut the land connection to Crimea around Melitopol.
I find it curious to see the contrast between how every city Russia captured from Ukraine was a month-long slog and massive drain on manpower and operational resources (consider Mariupol, where between logistics and the alignment of the local population the situation was very close to as good as they could hope for, and the struggles for Severodonetsk/Lisichansk and Liman later, not to mention that they still haven't cracked Avdeevka which is basically a suburb of Donetsk), and every city they surrendered so far was given up with barely a fight. What stopped them from digging in somewhere in Kherson and giving Ukraine its own Mariupol? Do they simply not have any sufficiently capable or fanatical troops willing to fight to the death under miserable conditions like Azov did, are they still thinking of saving them for some hypothetical more important future engagement, or do they figure Ukraine would have an easier time smoking them out for one reason or another? (I did already wonder why Russia struggled so much in Mariupol; do they just not have adequate bunker-buster bombs, or did they not want to use them because of the civilians sheltered with the Azovites? My read of the Russian public sphere was that sympathy for those civilians, most of whom were probably spouses/children of Azov fighters, was rather low, so in that case it really would have had to be about Western PR or "red lines".)
In related weird news, the Russian-appointed deputy governor of Kherson region, Kirill Stremousov, was reported to have died "in a traffic accident" today. I mean, who knows, maybe he really did just run a red light in front of a tank trying to get to the other shore faster, but given the timing and scarcity of information this seems like a likely cover story; more likely in my eyes that it was an assassination or that he even committed suicide in light of the situation. (edit, some relevant telegrams just now started circulating a picture of a thoroughly wrecked car on a road near Novaya Kakhovka (the city with the dam across the Dnepr northeast of Kherson) claiming it to be his.)
Well, one of the reasons might indeed be that there were considerable advantages for Ukraine for holding Mariupol: it kept Russian troops tied and away from the Donetsk front at a crucial time, and the bravery of the troops at Mariupol also served as an obvious inspiration at a dark period for Ukraine and offered propagandistic material, both internally and externally. This holding action got Ukraine through to the period in the summer when Western aid started showing up and making some difference.
More to the point, though... maybe it is true, the Russians really just don't have the sufficient spirit to do it?
Throughout the war, the pro-Russian side on the Internet has banged the drum about how Ukraine (as an entity separate from the Russian world) is FAKE FAKE FAKE, an invention of the Austrians and Poles and Germans, imagination of the exile communities, forcibly maintained by Nazi Banderites, an unsustainable made-up chimera, a "Reddit-ass country", "fighting for globohomo and Pride parades", a number of similar claims intended to bolster the idea that at any moment everything would just break and Russians would be received as liberators in the end and so on. Meanwhile, of course, Russia is a real country, the realest there is, and Russians would of course fight for it in the same way as in 1941 and would gladly just rather die in a nuclear hellfire than lose.
Well, the proof of the pudding etc., and the taste of the pudding would now seem to indicate that Ukrainians, individual cases indicating otherwise aside, are truly fighting like hell for their invented made-up Reddit Nazi globohomo country, while russians, individual cases indicating otherwise, are losing whatever spirit they might have had at some point, as indicated, for instance, the massive waves of exiles leaving the country at whatever indication there has been that they might be conscripted and have to fight.
Defending one's country is very different from participating in a bullshit war of aggression, even if one is the type to stan based $TEAM from the couch regardless of morality. And being forced by circumstance to defend your county makes this country more real in your mind. This is the issue Putin (and those loyalist commenters) have cynically and irrationally dismissed. In my opinion, Ukraine was a country of comparable «realness» with Russia before the war, but now it's a living movement. Nothing new since Machiavelli. All this pseudo-historical essentialist analysis about the origins of Ukraine, how could it persuade anyone that Ukrainians will fold? Nations are in fact imagined communities and so long as Ukrainians themselves don't imagine themselves to be meaningless Austro-Hungarian chimeras, they will act like people belonging to a nation.
That said, even back in 2013 there have been opinions stressing the fragility of Russian identity:
(This is, of course, just wishful thinking. But in a way, it's gentle. Russians do not start to identify as «Siberians»: they just learn English and leave).
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Eh, I think that read is a little too optimistic for the Ukrainian side too. Mariupol, in the end, was held by something as close to Nazi Banderites as it gets; the regulars in the city (who were holed up in the factory on its north) capitulated comparatively quickly. There's also the aspect that Ukraine seems to continue delivering unforced PR morsels to Russia (not that they make it far outside of Russian channels) with group photos of Zelenskiy's entourage or troops spearheading the recapture of territories regularly featuring someone in the background flashing swastika tattoos or SS uniform patches, which indicates to me that the neonazis are considered fairly indispensable as particularly trustworthy or otherwise "elite" units (in the case of the presidential entourage, perhaps even that the loyalty of anyone else is considered too questionable for safety). Perhaps the real lesson is that neonazis are the only ones (in this conflict, at least) who are really willing to keep up the fight "in the dark". It's not like Russia didn't try to establish their own unit of Nazi LARPers (Wagner), but the memeplex just doesn't work that well without a coherent ethnonationalist idea behind it.
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