I was initially skeptical of the sheer magnitude of reported Russian casualties but if their positions are starting to collapse, that tells me they're running out of meat to feed the grinder.
On one hand, I'm glad the Ukrainians are starting to make progress defending their homes. On the other, I'm sad because this is shaping up to be a very long war
This war has already been a slaughter and both sides are lying about the casualties. This is the first war of the modern era where two peer powers are going at each other with modern weapons. The result it seems is that war never changes. All the precision and tech in the world does not mean diddly squat. The only difference is that instead of blowing an entire squad of men into chuncks of meat at 50 meters with Cannister shot we are doing it at 1,000 meters with a Javeline or NLAW. End result is the same.
The real shocker here is nobody saw this war coming. The west assumed that Ukraine would fold immediately and Russia apparently assumed it would too.
I've been wracking my brains for an event in history similar to this, and I have only one example.
The American Civil War. In the American Civil War, you had two societies, different yes, but more alike then they were different. They had common language, similar (but different) cultures, even a largely common history. Families straddled both sides of the border, friendships too, and one side was vastly inferior in every military metric to the other.
Yet the two, largely due to competing politics, stumbled into an armed conflict. The Confederate Americans appealed to a basic principle of law. They were sovereign states, who could do what they wanted. The Union Americans argued they were going down the wrong path, and also no they could not. There was low level conflict between the two sides for an entire decade. Hundreds of people were killed in various skirmishes that were armed conflict in all but name.
But when the final moment came, and full on war began, neither side really appreciated just what had happened. The South assumed the North would take its bloody nose and walk away, while the North assumed the South would cave immediately to its superior numbers and righteous cause.
The opposite in fact happened. The inferior southern states fought the larger union states to a stand still in 1861, and what followed was 3 more years of slaughter that killed 10% male population in the United States and by its end the implementation of total war tactics, involving battles where actual brothers ended up on opposing sides.
The interviews with firefighters in Kharkiv remind me very strongly of letters from the American Civil War. Absolute bafflement at how the same people are so busy trying to kill each other, but also grim determination that if it's war, then they were going to win it.
Rather depressing tbh. Nobody is going to win this one.