No SITREP - Housekeeping

Transparency.

I'm broken. That's the blunt, direct assessment.

You'd think that after 90 plus days of everything I've seen, everything I've read, every fact the team has checked that I've had to summarize, that 19 kids being shot to death in a school would just be, "meh, whatever."

There aren't pictures of little corpses. There is nothing to geolocate. There aren't statements to review. There aren't denials that it ever happened to sort out. I didn't have to drop a fourth grader off to school today.

For the last 90ish days I've reviewed at least a dozen Uvaldes a day - and worse. Far worse.

"I'm tired, boss. Mostly I'm tired of people being ugly to each other. I'm tired of all the pain I feel and hear in the world everyday. There's too much of it."

I'm broken. I need to step back.

Here is the good news, in an insane world.

Not much change in Ukraine today. The fighting spirit of the Ukrainian people is an inspiration. In a way I feel guilty. They don't have a moment to say, "I'm tired." They lost the T1302 near Bilohorivka [Donetsk Oblast] but took it back a few hours later. That high ground is everything.

They prevented Russian advances north of Avdiivka despite 24/7 artillery fire and air strikes.

They held more than half of Lyman, against impossible odds. Go find the video of the Ukrainian troops withdrawing from the northwest part of the city. It's inspirational - you wouldn't think they were retreating. You'd think they were on the brink of rolling into Sevastopol.

Multiple Russia-backed militias are in mutiny now and refusing to fight. The view they have is - they're starting to win - we're just cannon fodder, and we are doing this anymore. They're revealing the truth we suspected the whole time. Forced conscripts, no training, poor weapons, no body armor, no support. They were promised jobs of territorial guard and "policing" and instead they were thrown on the front lines.

Russia's offer to allow shipping traffic out of Odesa to begin again if sanctions are lifted is the clearest signal yet - sanctions are hurting the Russian economy.

The rumors of T-62 tanks built before most of the people reading this were born? Also true. They arrived in Melitopol today and insurgents took multiple pictures and videos of them. They aren't the most upgrade models either - most don't have ERA blocks. 

A tank is a tank, but these were built during an era where RPGs were invented to destroy them. You don't need a Javelin or an NLAW. Their fuel tanks are infamously under protected.

Russia leadership has said out loud they are abandoning all strategy for a larger encirclement.

The bad news is that with exception to the Popasna axis and Lyman, the rest of the axes are a World War I environment.

What that shows is what we assessed would happen. Russia has thrown everything it has left in the Donbas. It cannot operate offensives anywhere else. As long as Ukrainian forces can maintain a "bend but don't break" withdrawal out of Luhansk, and continue to force unsustainable losses, the brigades they are training move one day closer to taking the initiative. 

I'm going to go to bed - and I'm going to feel better in the morning.

I'm tired boss. Dog tired.