First, a lightning sweep across Kharkiv. Then, a slower grind into Kherson. In two months of stunning gains, Ukraine's military redrew the battlefield map and proved it can fight to win.
LARIS KARKLIS/THE WASHINGTON POST
In the distance, the Ukrainian troops could see other Russian vehicles heading in the correct direction — out of the city. “When we entered Izyum, some kind of feeling arose, like the taste of victory,” said the company’s 36-year-old chief sergeant, Anton Chornyi. “It seemed to everyone like the beginning of the end.”
Left with little choice, he declared what he called a “partial mobilization” to conscript up to 300,000 troops, his biggest and riskiest escalation since the start of the war. Hundreds of thousands of Russian men fled the country in a frenzy. With a direct line to Surovikin, Putin began to receive a more unvarnished picture of the problems on the battlefield, according to two people familiar with the matter, who said that previously Putin had been given overly rosy assessments by his top defense officials.
After Korovii Yar, the company moved farther south, taking up a position outside Lyman. The Russians in the city were nearly surrounded, but unlike their compatriots in Izyum, they fought. “The minefields they set up there — they practically didn’t know themselves how many they set up. Everyone who came there would change them and add additional minefields,” said Maj. Gen. Andriy Kovalchuk, who was tasked with leading the Kherson counteroffensive. “We didn’t have the option to advance rapidly.”
The American and British war-gamers ran their own simulations using the same inputs but different software and analysis. They couldn’t get the operation to work.
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