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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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.