They've held the line stead at 20% for well over a year. Outside of the few territories that were lost in the fall offensive, most of those have been recovered (except near Kharkiv) and they have made gains in other areas in the south.
3 things:
1. As we learned over the weekend, the Russians pulled out of Kyiv and Chernihiv last March when they thought they had a breakthrough in negotiations. The pull out was a sign of good faith. Then Boris Johnson came in and wrecked the deal.
2. Also, no one (if they are serious) really believes that the Russians were planning on sieging and taking Kyiv with on 40k men. The entire point of that was to have the Ukrainians have to commit resources to Kyiv instead of having them be able to move those extra resources to the Donbas.
3. Russia isn't worried about taking Kyiv, their focus was liberating Donbas and destroying the Kyiv army. Phase one of the conflict was to press the Ukrainians to the negotiating table. That would have worked had it not been for Boris Johnson. Phase two became a battle to destroy the Ukrainian army. Phase three is where we are at now after the mobilization in September where they are now destroying the NATO army. Notice, all of these videos of wrecked equipment isn't the Soviet era equipment that the Ukrainians had at the start of this. Since September, all you are seeing being destroyed now are Western supplied weapons. You need to ask yourself what happened to all of their Soviet era equipment.
I don't mind disagreement... when it is reasonable. But some of these people simply are either ideologically driven (baby boomers that carryover their Cold War biases) or I'm starting to see that they are simply racists that hate Slavs (particularly Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs and Poles), Chinese, etc outside of NATO countries. As Josep Borrel said, the "garden" vs the "jungle".
All the time, I post reasonable facts and conclusions (because in the fog of war, we know truth is the first casualty on both sides) that help me arrive at where I stand. But all these guys come back with is ad hominem attacks, "pootin puppet" or just plain delusions such as "Ukraine is winning", "Russia's economy is tanking" and what not, meanwhile they ignore the fact that it is the Ukrainians and NATO that is begging for weapons and have economies that are on the decline.
