They’re asking the word ‘offset’ to carry a lot here. But i thought the bigger story here says a lot about the state of things for Russia in the late stage madness of this insane war.
Namely - suggesting that the eventual capture of a completely decimated industrial Donbas town of less than 3000 people somehow offsets the massie strategic collapse that is happening in the entire Crimean peninsula is truly absurd messaging, even for the Russians. Doubtful that any Russian with more than 3 brain cells would see this as good news compared to losing Crimea. But - in a sense, it’s good news to Ukriane if they are trying to sell that message.
Size and perspective matters, especialy in war. Some context. Kostiantynivka is a smaller (former) glass-manufacturing city about 90km north of Donetsk city. It used to have about 60k people, but is now down to a tiny fraction of that. It’s a tragedy for any Ukrainian cities to be lost and destoyed, just like Sieverodonetsk, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Pokrovsk and others before it. Crimea, on the other hand, is 27,000 square kilometers and has a population of 2.5 million. Not to mention vital Black Sea access and the port of Sevastopol. All of it is becoming unusable to the Russians.
Hoping the destruction of a grim industrial town after years of fighting offsets the bad news in Crimea? War isn’t that sort of 1:1 transactional business. The loss of control in Crimea has virtually nothing to do with Kostiantynivka. It’s not an either-or situaiton, and if Russia is going to celebrate infesting the charred rubble of this small town as being the equivalent of literally losing control of Crimea…well, that’s certainly a choice.
The basic calculus of this war continues to tip in Ukraine’s favor. Russia is losing faaaaaaaaaar more than Ukraine is. Hubris, sunk cost fallacy and sheer brutality keeps the Russians moving forward, slowly, for now, and only in areas with the simplest logistics for them. There’ll come a time very quickly, where even with the depraved and cruel mentality of the Russian regime, that the price of detroying the next town over in the Donbas doesn’t offset having lost control of Crimea. Moreover - then what? None of the cities lost to and destroyed by the Russians has created any kind of strategic momentum for them. And there’s no certainty that they will be able to keep and rebuild these blasted piles of concrete dust, twisted rebar and charred brick into a prize that justified their losses.
Russia has long since passed the point where they should have stopped. At this point, this is simply industrial murder so that Pootz doesn’t have to face reality. If this is their messaging…then carry on, Ukraine. It’s laughable if they consider Kostiantynivka to be an acceptable offset to losing Crimea - they don’t really, but it’s where they find themselves. One hopes that the weight of the absurdity eventually dawns on them.
Actually, Kostyantynivka is pretty vital for m*scovian advance, it’s the last ‘big’ urban environment where we can hold position, after it there is very small and practically destroyed already Druzhkivka, thay has single road (like Kostyantynivka before it), and after Druzhkivka is the last unoccupied city/aglomeration Slovyansk-Kramatorsk in Donetsk oblast. And they have a single road problem as well. Situation is pretty fucked tbh.
Control over Crimea isn’t lost by any stretch of imagination even control over occupied parts Kherson/Zaporizzha isn’t lost. At best it can be said that currently r*ssians have some big problems (realistically they don’t care about numbers of dead).
Nothing new tbh tactical - slow retreat, strategical - slow advance of the last three months. I would love some orbital artillery right now. 🙃
Understood it is important - it all is for many reasons. Kramatorsk will be a bloodbath maybe past the scale of Bakhmut, Pokrovsk etc, and there’s no guarantee the current version of the Russian army will be successful there. That will take a least a year maybe 2-3 at current pace. Ukraine might find it worthwhile for it to be a Stalingrad of sorts. In that time, all of Russia will have endured years of drone attacks, fuel shortages, surging inflation, mini mobilizations & press gangs in remaining cities that have men suitable for military service. But those troops won’t have the materials and mechanized support that the lower-functioning useless mouths before them had. They’re likely to die faster and be harder to replace in successive rounds of meat waves.
The other thing - Ukraine gets a very big vote in what happens next. It’s not just up to Russia. Crimea in particular will be under tremendous stress over the timeframe to capture the rest of the Donbas if UAF are able to continue stopping fuel & supplies coming into the peninsula. Russian civilian sentiment is just barely starting to grumble a bit. Per the point of the article - if in their minds Crimea is “lost”, it seems unlikely that they’ll be consoled by the trade off prize of Kostyantynivka.
I would rather face orbital artillery than a deluge that never ends of 155mm bohdanas mounted on top-of-the-line truck frames.