I haven't been cogitating much about the war here and this will continue to be the trend, as I will be more involved with other activities from this week onwards and my side projects, namely my dissertation writings, will have to slow down. But still, via Facebook and namely Twitter I continue, and will continue, to share some thoughts, things from the moment, usually a reaction to some development shared online, but coming here and write a thorough and more detailed line of thought, with the references to contextualise will become less frequent.
My previous cogitation was published 18 days ago, I didn't even shared in the other social media so it had in practice no, ZERO, views whatsoever (Blogger tells me it had 2, I guess they are both me, as I read again my own text, later to detect typos and mistakes). For the sake of sharing, here are links to those momentary reactions in other places, in case you want a sort of recap:
- Small Twitter thread on the reports that Spain considers sending to Ukraine their old (and in storage) Leopard 2 tanks;
- Another Twitter thread on what I call intellectual dishonesty (triggered by behaviours related with the war);
- Somebody tried to fact-check me on Twitter and ended up proving exactly my point on how the international media in English language have been misleading public opinion on some European leaders' positions;
- And then I took notice of poor news reporting coming from Portugal's public TV network and ranted about it on Facebook (in Portuguese language).
But you might have noticed the images on top, a collation of different maps, and my main focus in indeed on that.
Just to remind everyone, Russia announced the first phase of their "special military operation" was over back on the 25-March, and the second phase was the focus on the Donbas to gain all the territory of the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. And ever since that happened, we see every now and then claims that they are winning and that Ukraine will lose for sure, in particular due to the high concentration of equipment and the Russians finally using their massive numbers of artillery pieces, to slowly and continuously pound the Ukrainian lines and forces.
Also on Twitter I came across a tweet by a guy saying we needed to accept that Ukraine "was outgunned 15:1 and has lost it" (the Donbas), but I fixed the guy's tweet for, saying that in spite of being outgunned 15:1, Ukraine still hasn't lost it, after all this time!
The collage of maps on the top are a clear indication of that and people say that a picture is worth a thousand words, in this case these maps are worth more than all those claims people are making that finally (and this "finally" is being repeatedly for the last 3 months) Russia is winning, or Ukraine is losing.
The first one shows the overtall territory that Russia managed to occupy in their first phase and lost it again, some because they simply left, to Ukraine. The second map shows on little it changed in terms of territorial gains in the 1 month after the previous map, and finally I wanted to to include the last one to show how diminishing the goals from Russia have become with time, after continuously failing in their previous objectives.
Russia went from taking Kyiv and install a puppet leader, to make Ukraine a complete landlocked country, to occupy all of East Ukraine (east of the Dnipro river), to occupy all of the Donbas, and now to not even occupy Sloviansk (connecting their Lyman and Popasna axis, and make a new line somewhere between Sivers'k and Soledar).
This is basically what I wanted to cogitate about today. Russian still holds a big chunk of Ukraine and the developments in the South actually worry me much more (trying to incorporate Kherson Oblast into the Federation, banning Ukrainian language, kidnapping family of Ukrainian soldiers, etc).
But for all the talk about the Donbas, as we say in Portugal (proverb translation) the mountain gave birth to a mouse, and in spite of inflicting damaging losses of equipment in personnel to Ukraine in the East, Russians continue to bleed out for very small tactical gains. And as long as Ukraine continues to hold like it did and continue to fight, Russia will eventually be forced to stop, due to lack of resources (economic, personnel, equipment, even the will to fight).
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