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Why Ukraine is Executing the Expected

They want to keep their country, not see it destroyed

Shankar Narayan
7 min readJun 10, 2023
A column of armored vehicles and tanks. (Licensed image)

The Institute for the Study of War, the leading and the most reliable source to track Russia’s invasion recently declared “Ukraine has conducted counteroffensive operations.”

I agree.

The counter-offensive has started on a small scale, and a little earlier than Ukraine would have wanted it.

The Russian armed forces are not sufficiently degraded for the counter-offensive to begin. During the last few weeks, we’ve read about attacks on logistics deep inside Russian territory, but nothing nearly as severe as what we saw last year in the Kherson region before Ukraine liberated it.

The shaping operation in the Kherson sector went on for months before Ukraine ordered its counter-offensive units to move in.

Ukraine has jumped into the fight a little early this time. There will be a cost to pay. It is going to sting a bit. But it is the best they can do under the circumstances. The Western response to the Nova Kakhovka dam explosion has completely rearranged Ukrainian battlefield calculus.

For the first time, since the war began in February 2022, Vladimir Putin has found an option to emerge victorious. He did not earn it. The West neatly packed…

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Shankar Narayan
Shankar Narayan

Written by Shankar Narayan

He didn't care what he had or what he had left, he cared only about what he must do.

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