I'm about to make some people mad. Sorry!
Analysis of the strategic situation for Russia's Donbass offensive. Shits fucked bro. Its really fucking fucked.
This may be the most stupid post I've read on this thread in a while. It shows not only a complete lack of understanding of military operations, but also a complete lack of understanding of the current situation on the ground. Normally I wouldn't give a fuck, but you're being smug about something you've just made a really retarded and incorrect analysis of, so here goes;
The offensive on Kharkiv is in full collapse
I don't think you understand what "full collapse" or even what "offensive" means. The Russians were indeed advancing as convenient on the Kharkiv front; it would be stupid not to do so, since keeping your opponent's troops busy doing things that aren't important to the war is very important, and half of any given conflict. But was there any "Kharkiv offensive" as there is a Donbass offensive? Not really.
I'd compare it readily to the offensive on Krivoy Rog, which most closely resembles it, with a lot of fluidity in the capturing and losing of villages and small cities, and very little in the way of pitched battles or large confrontations. Anyway, as I said, there has been no reported heavy fighting in Kharkiv; the Russians readily withdraw and give very little fight in the face of UAF counter-offensive for a very simple reason, that being that the UAF leaving Kharkiv to conduct counter offensives won't bother the Russians, because as we all know, urban fighting is much harder than just shelling whatever tiny village or forests the enemy is using for cover and as a base of operations, which is exactly what happened.
Now, this does have a limit; the Russians aren't going to be pushed back to their border. Wanna know what happened to the last Ukrainian attack on Cossack Lopan, the last large-ish city near the Russian border? Well,
this happened. There were also a bunch of other pictures of dead UAF personnel, but Russian servicemen can't have phones and there is no Chechen or separatist presence, so footage from that area is very limited. You get the drift - the attack failed, and the UAF took heavy losses.
From this we can gather that "the Kharkiv offensive" (which isn't actually a thing, really, there's barely to no active attempts to attack the city or its surroundings), while it isn't going exceptionally well for the Russians, also isn't going poorly.
The forces attempting to do the pinning operation have been in consistent combat for the last two months and the Russian units around the city have finally hit their breaking point
What pinning operation? What consistent combat, given that many of the units there were rested, refitted and redeployed to Kharkiv from Kiev, weeks ago, and they can easily withdraw through the border for unit rotation? No pinning operation has been in progress from what we can gather. There is no attempted surrounding of Kharkiv; that would require far more troops than the Russians have, what you see happening around Kharkiv are skirmishes, at most. There's a reason the media isn't buzzing about the Battle of Cossack Lopan or whatever - it's not an especially active front and has never been regarded as such by sources from either side.
indicating the possiblility of a complete collapse of the Northeastern front.
You do not understand what "a complete collapse" is in military terms - we have not witnessed one in this war yet from either side. We've seen major losses that doomed a city (Volnovakha), we've seen organized retreats/withdrawals (Kyiv, Sumy, Chernihiv), we've seen failures to capture cities (Vosnesensk) and we've seen troops being slowly ground away until they can no longer resist (Izyum) but I've yet to see proof of "complete collapse" (other than in rhetoric and exaggerated terms in internet discussion, of course) in this war.
Mariople still has not fallen, which is keeping a huge number of Russian soldiers pinned down to lay siege to the Azovstahl plant
This is verifiably wrong; Mariupol fell weeks ago because no, 2,000 people trapped in a steel plant with nowhere to go, slowly rotting from infected wounds, with nothing to eat or drink and a dwindling supply of ammunition isn't resisting anymore than the Battle of Castle Itter was the German Army resisting defeat in WW2. The battle of Mariupol is over, and it has been for a while now. What we will see now is tiny skirmishes, tiny breakout attempts, and eventually, mass surrender in the face of starvation.
For your second point, the vast majority of Russian soldiers have already been removed from the city, and likewise for the separatists, for example, the DPR's Somalia battalion, probably their best and most experienced fighters next to the Sparta battalion, left a week or so ago for Adviivka, where they are already engaged in active fighting. If you have any proof of uber-elite Russian and separatist divisions stationed in Mariupol still, I'd like to see it.
This compromised the assault towards Dnipro, and the Russian forces pushing in that direction have fallen back.
This is completely wrong and unfounded, especially considering the separatists captured the villages of Rivnopil, Makarivka, and two others I can't remember in the same direction, reaching the outskirts of Velyka Novosilka and we get daily reports of heavy clashes in the direction of Huliapole and Orikhiv, as well as Vuhledar. There have been no credible, or even really any, reports of the Russian troops falling back. We've been seeing many probing attacks and as always, tons of artillery usage. There has been little change in the fighting in that front in the last few days.
In Kherson, Russian forces have been steadily pushed back almost 200 kilometers from their largest advance point near the city of Mykolaiv
This was true about a week and a half to two weeks ago, but has since been wrong. Just a week or so ago, according to Ukrainian forces, the Russians had them surrounded in Olesandridvka, where they had to stage a breakout under the cover of artillery fire, in which they took quite some losses by their own admission, and the last reports I've seen say that the AFU has been pushed back to near Mykolaiv, and their operations and counter-attacks in the Kherson Oblast and Krivoy Rog have been, essentially, stopped.
Notice the complete lack of news from the Ukrainian side coming out from there in the last week, other than the breakout I described.
Reports are that all power and communications to the city have been severed
Where are you seeing this? Because the reports I'm seeing are of internet blackouts; and they aren't the first I've seen from that area of Ukraine recently. There is no possibility of an attack on Kherson. It is, essentially, impossible to retake, unless the AFU commits tens of thousands to the city alone, and even then they would expect heavy losses, and have to conduct their own giant bombing campaigns on their own civilians, which would win them no friends both in Ukraine and in the international community in general. It's nothing more than a pipe dream and has been since the start of this war. Kherson is gone. It is physically impossible to retake as long as the Russians want to keep it, which they seem fully intent on doing. It would take a complete miracle collapse of the Russian military to even give Ukraine a chance in hell of attacking it.
The only portion of this offensive that has achieved anything has been to thrust towards Izium
There is no "thrust towards Izyum". Izyum has been taken for an entire month at this point. Russian troops have, if anything, been successfully pushing out of Izyum in the past few weeks, both in the direction of Kharkiv (not to attack the city, but to give them more breathing room and stop counter offensives and harassment of Russian units there before they begin) and in the direction of Sloviansk, where we know for sure that the fighting has been heavy and the Russians have been slowly but steadily advancing in all directions, and has been confirmed, surrounded at least 1,000 UA servicemen in Oskil.
Russian forces in this town are quite literally out on a limb and may have to pull back soon in order to stiffen the northern front. Or risk being encircled if Russian forces in the north completely collapse.
So I've already explained why "stiffening the Northern front" is a stupid and unnecessary idea, because the troops in Izyum are in no risk of anything, but to even suggest that the Russian forced there may be encircled when they're the ones attacking and encircling the UA troops in the Donbas, is absolutely and completely delusional. It shows a complete disconnect between reality and your post.
I don't think you quite understand the amount of men, tanks, IFVs and APCs that Russia has in and near Izyum right now, but I will tell you that it numbers in the tens of thousands, with air support and a giant superiority in artillery, as well as a SAM umbrella that would be very hard to penetrate (which is why the Ukrainians have been throwing Tochkas at it and mostly failing). The Ukrainians very simply have no way of currently encircling anything in Izyum; they lack all the necessary prerequisites to do so.
Understand now that war is fluid, and information changes daily and obviously may always be wrong or biased, but as of this moment, nothing causes me to believe that I have said anything untrue or that cannot be proven or deduced from observation in this post.
PS; I noticed also that you neglected to mention the taking of Kremmina and Zarichne, which, as I had theorized, sealed the deal on anyone still attempting to resist Russian encroachment on the Donbas coming from Izyum, as well as the fighting happening in the direction of Liman, which currently seems to be one of the most active fronts in the entire offensive. Also of note are the reports coming in from Rubizhne that say that Ukrainian resistance is currently small and limited to the "industrial zone of the city", and that the Chechens began basement-clearing operations a few days ago. If this taking of Rubizhne is in fact true, and not faulty reports, then it's a big step in the fighting in the Donbas.
Also of note are the reports we've been getting for the last couple of weeks of a possible UA retreat behind the Seversky Donets, but I am not yet convinced that it is true or that the UAF would be willing to give up Severodonetsk that easily.
