Slaying the Dragon’s Teeth

How Is the Ukrainian Counter-Offensive Going?

I’m leaving for a week’s vacation soon, and—well, there’s a certain history that whenever I try to take time off, some major event happens: Somebody starts a war, there’s a financial crisis, a presidential candidate with a 15-point lead blows the second debate and the election becomes a nail-biter. And so on.

The big thing that might happen while I’m away is that the slow-grinding Ukrainian counteroffensive looks like it might finally break through the main Russian lines. I wanted to do a quick overview so you are prepared if something big happens in the next few weeks.

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Fighting the Last War

First, a little context. The past year and a half have shown us a lot of things that the Russian army is not good at. But it has also shown us a few things the Russians are still good at. One is the deployment of massive amount of artillery. The other is building deep defensive lines on a massive scale.