The Russian offensive is a final push by Putin before he exhausts his military capability—Ukraine can defeat them if it keeps up its morale
To use a Chinese expression, the recent Russian offensive in Donbas is a military paper tiger.
Putin is throwing everything he’s got into this offensive. Unfortunately for him, he can’t realistically sustain it. And on top of that, the Russians have made surprisingly little headway – and some of their small gains have been reclaimed by Ukraine.
Neither Ukrainians nor their friends around the world must give in to Putin or be deluded by the current mirage of Russian success and power he is presenting in the Battle of Severodonetsk. For mirage it is. Russia’s drive in Luhansk is the desperate gamble of a dictator staking the last of the offensive combat power he can scrape together in hopes of breaking his enemies’ will to continue the fight.
[ ... ]
Even if Putin ordered general mobilization tomorrow, fresh troops would not start streaming into Ukraine for many months—such are the realities of mobilizing and training soldiers even to be cannon fodder.
The Russian military certainly cannot sustain the current offensive long enough and far enough to destroy the Ukrainian military or seize other major cities.
It’s not just in Donbas that Russia is facing difficulties. Ukrainian partisans, the equivalent of the French resistance in World War II, are operating behind Russian lines in occupied territory.
‘The occupier should never feel safe’: rise in partisan attacks in Ukraine
The increase in partisan warfare, particularly in the country’s south around Kherson, follows warnings at the outset of Russia’s war against Ukraine that any area under occupation was likely to see the emergence of guerrilla warfare.
[ ... ]
Partisans are usually defined as members of an armed group formed to fight secretly against an occupying force, for instance in Nazi-occupied Europe. The term holds more positive connotations than insurgent.
[ ... ]
Ukrainian partisan forces started being trained after Russia’s intervention in 2014 but they became part of Ukraine’s state structures last summer, according to Serhii Kuzan, head of the Ukrainian Center for Security and Cooperation, a Ukrainian thinktank that specialises in military analysis.
Partisan forces, along with Ukraine’s territorial army, were part of new self-defence measures introduced across the country, said Kuzan.
While thousands had joined the territorial army, hundreds had also volunteered to be trained as Ukrainian partisans, said Kuzan. Both forces are made up of people from a given region.
The Ukrainian partisan forces were trained to be an underground resistance movement in the event their region became occupied, said Kuzan. Their task is to build networks of informants, launch information campaigns against the occupiers, pass information back to the Ukrainian authorities, and to kill high-level political collaborators and the occupying commanders, said Kuzan.
Ukrainian partisans were led and trained by Ukrainian special forces, who were responsible for carrying out the higher-level acts of subversion, said Kuzan.
“The idea is for the occupier to always feel the presence of the partisans and for them never to feel safe,” said Kuzan. “Recently, the partisan forces in Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions carried out a coordinated sticker and flyer campaign against the so-called Russian world.”
If Russian occupiers don’t feel safe in occupied territories then they will require an increased number of troops in such areas. That means fewer troops will be available for conducting combat operations elsewhere.
