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Originally Posted by
anticausal
So we have Putin is doomed on one end and Putin is about to flatten every Ukrainian city on the other. I get the general feeling that most western commentators simply have no idea what to make of this situation, but they still gotta write something.
The explanation that seems to fit the pace of the war best is that Russia has large segments of the Ukie army surrounded, and because they would rather not annihilate all these men wholesale, they are killing them slowly to persuade more to surrender and abandon (the "cauldron" strategy identified early in the war). This isn't having as quick an effect as hoped since the Zelensky regime seems willing to sacrifice every last Ukrainian male in protest to Putin's actions. In the cities like Mariupol, where Azov are hiding like rats, the strategy is different. They will find and kill those guys no matter what, and they don't care at all how many of them die. All of this squares with their goals stated from day one, i.e. "de-nazification", and I don't get why most Western commentators won't even consider it. The guy above thinks Putin is already at the "flatten Ukraine" stage, when he still hasn't even gone into the "utterly destroy the Ukrainian army" stage.
Russia called the invasion a "special military operation" for good reason. It's not just something a propagandist pulled out of his ass, although propaganda effect is always considered. The Western notion that everything another country claims is a pure inversion of truth is projection more than anything. Deep down, they all know "The War on Terror" was really "The War on Freedom", so they assume everyone else is just as degenerate in their propaganda. In fact, probably the best way to confuse Westerners is to tell them the actual, honest to God, truth. They'll never see it coming.