Russians Taken By Surprise and Beaten Back? What's Going On?

A very strange war, indeed.

Outnumbered Russians were overrun by a “surprise” Ukrainian offensive that took Balakleya. Or at least most of the town.

Here come the 5D Chess theorists to explain that actually this was all part of the plan and that nothing is happening, really. If the Russians were forced to retreat, of course, then there is akshully a really complicated explanation for why it happen.

I have a simple reason for what happened: the Russians are outnumbered and the contact line is too long. This operation is part of a larger Ukrainian counter-offensive that had been largely unsuccessful up to this point. Marko has a good write-up of what happened and more surrounding the op. He’s our military go-to guy. Me, I’m going to do what I always do and focus more on the reaction within Russia to this news.

In short, the reaction was to be expected: “traitors in power!” was the cry from the patriotic community. As readers of the blog know, I always take what they say with a grain of salt because they have a vested political interest in proving that changes need to be made. That being said, I support the patriotic community, so I’m not against their propaganda efforts in principle - I too wouldn’t mind seeing some staff changes in the Russian government.

With all that out of the way.

From Katyusha:

The attack of the Ukrainian army on Balkleya, which was being openly prepared for a month, surprised our command with a successful operation. It turns out that Kiev had a better headcount who many troops were deployed in the area than Moscow. Only because of the heroism of our soldiers was Ukraine unable to break through to Kupyansk, the territory of the liberated Kharkov oblast, and unable to hit our grouping in Izyum from behind. Right now both sides have reinforced their positions and the battle is intensifying. How it will end, no one knows, but it is clear that without a change in tactics - under which a well-written report is more important than results - the march to victory will be long and with heavy losses.

Well, that intro really set the tone, didn’t it?

The patriots are now saying that the people running the operation are incompetent. A couple of months ago, the line was that the politicians were hampering the war efforts and not allowing the pros to do what needed to be done. Now, the line is that the pros are incompetent political appointees and that we need actual military men back in charge of the Russian army.

Machine translating the rest:

The fact that at the forefront of the Kharkov direction there is a terrible shortage of personnel, from infantry and artillery to a banal convoy, was generally known to everyone, except, apparently, the General Staff.

The fighters themselves and their commanders spoke about this. In June, several heads of the municipalities of the Belgorod region began to gather men and agitate to go to the front, because those who came with the Valuy division could not go on vacation for 3 months - there was no one to replace them.

…

That's when we got the answer from the big uncles [they mean the higher-ups] - "Don't panic, everything is under control." In August, when all the locals were discussing preparations for the offensive, and their acquaintances from the other side shared photos of columns going to "liberate" our Kharkiv region, we learned that since June nothing had fundamentally changed. The message was: "do not panic and do not escalate, everything is under control."

Moreover, the approximate date of the attack was known. The day before the attack in Kharkov, all civilian doctors were urgently transferred to the military. There was an increase in the medical staff of hospitals in Kharkov, Zmiev, all medical units in the direction of Balakliya.

…

That is, in general, the entire district knew that the offensive of the Ukrainians would begin at any moment. It seemed that it was high time to raise everyone to arms, but the officials were more afraid that "bad numbers" would come up in the reports, and from above, apparently, they simply did not know that 2/3 of the reported unit strengths was fake.

Yikes.

The solution: MORE TROOPS.

In the end, it turned out what happened and, thank God and the heroes of the SOBR, the National Guard, the militias, soldiers and officers who managed to withstand the onslaught of a superior enemy. But again, our victories are not thanks to, but in spite of [the higher-ups]. With great human losses and heroism. And if no one changes anything, and the system of "creating a positive image" on paper continues to be more important than the real state of affairs, then we, of course, will win, but at a huge cost and all this will take more than one year. A year during which Russia will be forced not only to change, but also to go through a huge number of trials. May the Lord give us the strength to carry on and keep our country!

RIA Katyusha

Again, this is the pro-SMO, pro-Russia, pro-Putin even, anti-vax, anti-LGBT, Russian patriots writing stuff like this.

Bloggers like the Saker and others are feeding you lies. Go on Katyusha yourselves. Translate the page - I did it myself today and the results were pretty good. You’ll get the gist of what the patriot bloc in Russia is saying and you won’t need to rely on someone chewing it all over for you and then rearranging the details to support their narrative.

Going forward, I will keep providing you with info on the patriot perspective within Russia and what they plan to do going forward.