Ukraine

No way of knowing how far we are from ending the war.

The latest update is that Russians and their private mercenaries “Wagner group” are fighting each other.

It’s one of those “the enemy of my enemy” situations but we have no clue where this is going. Russian civil war? Weakening of Russian forces? Potential for Ukraine advance? It’s hard to know.

The concern is that the longer the conflict draws the less support Ukraine will receive. Russia knows this. Ukraine knows this. Western politicians know this.

Wars are always muddy and difficult to predict. Shit, everyone was certain Ukraine would fall in a week. And here we are well over a year into the war.

Good luck Ukraine!

The initial stages of a major counteroffensive by the Ukrainians are in progress, so news has been getting sparse over the past few weeks - nobody wants to let the Russians know the details of where the attacks are actually coming, to prevent them from being able to deploy their reserves effectively. I've been doing my best to follow things, and ironically enough the best place I'm aware of is still the worldnews live thread on Reddit.

The major events of the past few weeks:

• At the beginning of the counteroffensive a couple of groups of Russian "freedom fighters" with Ukrainian support crossed the Ukrainian border to attack towns in Russia, in the Bilhorod oblast. The apparent intent was not for them to hold territory, but to go in and wreck up Russian military assets and then withdraw again, forcing the Russians to divert their military strength to reinforce the border with Ukraine instead of just holding Ukrainian territory.
• The Kakhovka dam collapsed, almost certainly as a result of deliberate sabotage by the Russians. This caused tremendous flooding along the Dnipr river, placed the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in a dangerous situation (it draws cooling water from the Kakhovka reservoir), and cut Crimea off from something like 80% of its water supply, as well as farmland in Russian-held territory to the north of Crimea. A lot of the details are still unclear but it's thought this was done to make it harder for Ukrainians to cross the Dnipr river and may indicate that the Russians don't expect to hold this territory indefinitely any more.
• The Ukrainians have been doing "probing attacks" along most of the front line, pressuring them everywhere to see where the Russians are weak. This has resulted in a few minor advances but no major breaches of Russian defences. Yet.
• Partisans have blown up a couple of important rail lines and the Ukrainians hit a key bridge connecting Crimea to the rest of Ukraine with what appears to be a British Storm Shadow cruise missile, and some really major ammunition depots have been blown up. This makes resupplying Russian lines a lot harder, and they were already having trouble with that.
• The Russians have been using more air support, apparently due in part to lack of available artillery shells. Lots of Russian helicopters have been shot down recently as a result.

And now, the Wagner mercenary group seems to have turned on the regular Russian military. If this is true then that's probably bigger than all of those developments combined and could be the start of an actual avalanche. Note that there still doesn't seem to be much confirmation that something is happening yet, just a bunch of officials saying that stuff is happening. This part is hour-by-hour news.