The Russian Ministry of Defense began an information operation in order to present the counterattack of Ukraine as a failure almost immediately after it was announced on August 29. Several prominent military bloggers – even those who criticized the Kremlin – support this campaign, says the daily summary of the American Institute for Studying War (ISW).
Other bloggers promote the narrative that the Western curators of Ukraine allegedly pushed Kyiv to the premature and/or too late start of the counterattack.
The Kremlin media disseminates allegations of the military-civil conflict between the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky and Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny, to support the version that Zelensky tried to conduct a counterattack for inappropriate political reasons, while, according to the pile, Ukrainian forces As if they were not ready for this, the ISW reported.
At the same time, according to American experts, military operations on the scale of this counterattack cannot end with success or failure in a day or in a week.
“The Ukrainian authorities have long recognized that they did not have a huge mass of mechanized forces that would be required to conduct a lightning-fast operation to destroy the Russian defense in the Kherson region or anywhere else. Instead, they created conditions for the offensive for several months, Attacking and violating Russian ground-based communication lines, headquarters and control centers, as well as logistics systems in the southwest of occupied Ukraine. The time of the beginning of the counter-offset corresponds to the observed degradation of the combat effectiveness of Russian troops in the western part of the Kherson region and is associated with the need to begin the liberation of the occupied Ukrainian territories as soon as possible There is no reason to believe that inappropriate considerations or political friction have significantly influenced the choice of the time of Ukrainian counterattack, ”experts write.