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Notes -
I caution against the strength of this assessment. What we're seeing is compatible with this assessment, and it's not an unreasonable assessment, but it's also compatible with Russia having learned an important lesson from the retreat at Izyum, where they lost control of the narrative and received much more damage from an obviously pending issue because no one official could say what was obvious in the social media space, that the position was untenable. This combination of maneuver and publicity is absolutely taking control of the narrative in a way the Russians consistently try to influence, without the making-it-up-as-they-go-along that was a large part of what made Izyum a catastrophe.
A point to be made is that even if Kherson wasn't about to fall immediately but in the coming months, its nature of it as an untenable position has been generally recognized for some time. If even Putin can be made to recognize that- and implicitly this is a shared assumption in the negotiation hypothesis or else Putin wouldn't have a need to make a deal there- then even in the lack of an agreement, there would need to be maneuver and publicity to exit in as good order and with as much damage control as possible.
The issue with this test is that smashing and running six divicisions into Kherson may not be within their capability. The Ukrainians weren't exactly days or maybe even weeks from breaking into Kherson before this announcement, and have been trying to smash the bridges for months with mixed effects at best.
There is also a domestic Ukrainian political consideration to consider. Kherson has been a significant meat-grinder for some time, and while the Ukrainians have made it work (as obvious output is now obvious), there's always a balance between pure military optimization (destroy as many Russians as fast as possible), and military-political strategy (not lose political support, by politicians or public, increasing the casualties of an already 'won' engagement that won't end the war). If the Ukrainians ran six divisions at Kherson, and got a bloody nose for the trouble but no appreciable change to the strategic balance of power, that would be both an internal liability, but also an external diplomatic liability.
And this is without the third level of meta-strategy on how to deal with the people who do want to try and leverage this into talks/peace settlements. Regardless of whether this evacuation is part of a deal, there are significant parts of the Western governments backing Ukraine who will seek to make it the basis of a deal and compel an armistice. This goes into a rabbit hole of competing theories/counter-theories and distinction of positions, but a point here is that if you are a Ukrainian maximalist, the key to success in the longer war isn't destroying the Russian forces located in Kherson now, but to sustain Western support long enough for a long war, and so operational maximalism is in tension with strategic optimization.
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