The head of the Russian private army Wagner has said his fighters have completed the capture of Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, but Kyiv immediately rejected the claim and said fighting was still going on.
Yevgeny Prigozhin made the claim in a video on Saturday in which he appeared in combat fatigues in front of a line of fighters holding Russian flags and Wagner banners.
“Today, at 12 noon, Bakhmut was completely taken,” Prigozhin said. “We completely took the whole city, from house to house.
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Just drink some warm milk, turn on some country music, and keep whispering "Russian Propaganda" to yourself over and over again until you can fall asleep.
Everything is actually fine. The Good Guys always stay winning. Liberalism is triumphant and we're definitely not pissing away a generation's worth of blood and treasure over another twenty year delusion of empire.
Personally, I'm going to grab some popcorn and watch the NAFOids cope and seethe.
One urban battle lost doesn't really mean that western imperialism has lost its military supremacy. They're just getting the Ukrainians to bleed for them.
That's been the western (attempted) strategy since Korea. We don't fight wars so much as we "Stand them up so we can stand down". Every conflict from Vietnam to Chile to Syria has involved an enormous number of proxies. Bush 43's Iraq/Afghanistan invasion was more the exception than the rule, and Obama's strategy in both regions was to return us to the old proxy war standard.
Past that, I'm not seeing anything in the Ukraine conflict that would suggest anyone has "supremacy". That's a sharp turn from the Iraq era, when the US curb-stomped the fifth largest active military in the world inside two months. The theory that Americans can just hand Zelensky a big red "You Win" button and let him press it isn't panning out. Ukraine-Russia is looking a lot more like Iraq-Iran than Panama or Grenada.