tl;dr
But sending in the Kara-Dag Brigade hasn’t halted the Russian advance.
The Ukrainians seem to be pulling brigades even from Kursk to halt the Pokrovsk collapse.
It is likely they realized that the ongoing Kursk offensive or the planned Zaporozhie offensive will not work, especially since their Western masters have not unlocked their ATACMS and other long-range weapons to be able to strike deep into Russian territory.
It is also likely the Russians will hold off advancing further (at least so rapidly) in the Pokrovsk-Konstantinovka line in the near future, and instead will push exactly where the Ukrainians are pulling troops from.
Kursk adventure is likely to be the catalyst for the Ukrainian collapse.
I would love for this to be true, but after years of this conflict going on and there being multiple points where “this is finally the end” in sight, I remain skeptical. I’ll believe it when I see it. The UkraNazis are worse than cockroaches. Resilient, numerous, hard to kill pests.
And that’s an insult to cockroaches. Cockroaches actually do contribute to the biosphere.
This is how wars of attrition tend to go historically. For a long time nothing much visible happens, and then the collapse comes all at once. Incidentally, this is how nazi collapse went during WW2 as well, and it started with Kursk.
I’d not been following the war that closely until the Kursk invasion. I strongly believed it to be the beginning of the end. It makes absolutely zero strategic sense. Zelensky himself has waffled on what the point of it is. At this point it seems to be just a terrorist attack/PR stunt aimed at harming Russian civilians. That’s not really a good use of your best troops if you want to win a war. As we can see with the collapse of the Ukrainian fronts, which Ukraine is still not doing much about. This just isn’t sustainable.
Indeed, Ukrainian resistance has collapsed to the point where Russia now taking multiple towns basically intact on daily basis. If Ukraine wasn’t able to defend well dug in positions they’ve been preparing for years, then there’s no hope of them holding territory where fortifications haven’t even been prepared.
It’s basically the whole concept with the Soviet deep battle theory. You push all across the front until you find a weak spot and achieve a breakthrough, then you push through it and attack behind enemy lines. At that point the whole line starts collapsing.
