Russia may have beat the counteroffensive to create an illusion of beating the counteroffensive

lmfao this is literally the joke about Stanley Kubrick being tasked with faking the moon landing only to insist it be filmed on location.

same energy

the well known enormous strategic blunder of being too good at holding your lines
"you idiots. you absolute fucking morons. we've throw people at your defensive lines for three months and spent a puny 60,000 Ukrainian casualties just to waste your engineers' time building trenches and minefields and dragon's teeth! who's owned now, motherfucker!?"
Ok this one I can kind of see it, like squint far enough to see a microbe with a naked eye.

So massive copium here but in a vaccuum it is barely logical that if you build a fort, it would be better to fight inside it rather than outside yeah?

But like this isn't a kid building sand castles putting toy soldiers around it you know worst case scenario this still only makes Ukraine look bad regardless, its a child's tale retold as a meme but unironicaly.

"And the King built a castle and ordered his troops to stand outside defying all logic and strategic reasoning, but unfortunately for his majesty's troops were so bad that *checks notes* they huh defeated the enemy anyway."
- The multiple layered defence is valuable just by existing because it prevents deep attacks and maneuver warfare.
  
  When you have just one super fortified line, you can break that line by creating a threat behind it that makes the soldiers want to fall back to a safer position (they all want to live at the end of the day). By having multiple lines like this just existing you prevent the ability to drop troops behind the enemy lines, such as with paratroopers or helicopters. You prevent the ability to set up a pressure coming from another direction that causes a redeployment pressure on the first line.
  
  In WW2 a major part of the operations was paratroopers landing behind enemy lines in order to threaten the enemy defensive lines preventing landings from another direction, causing those lines to fall back to other positions.
  
  It's not actually about killing people and "winning" the fights, it's about creating pressures that cause people to move their lines.
  
  The way these defensive lines are all set up, their existence prevents deep warfare like this. They don't have to do anything at all other than exist to force the enemy out of using that tactic. Crude drawing of this pressure, the blue triangle being the deep-offensive attacker and the red line being the natural line of redeployment sought by the defenders if they're under these kinds of pressures:
  
  You can't do this shit if there's multiple lines of defence that would then function applying exactly the same kind of pressure on your deep attacker.
I posted this exact thing as a joke right around when the offensive began and it became clear that Ukraine wasn't able to break through.

Beyond parody.

Edit: Found it: https://hexbear.net/comment/3542974

Even on the worst days of the war for Russia, even in the depths of the Kharkov/Kherson offensive/retreat, even watching Russia try and fail to take a tiny village (Ugledar) for over a year, the level of cope on those days on the Russian side is dwarfed by the sheer volumes of pure, distilled cope that the Ukrainian side has had on every single day of this counteroffensive so far. Unironically getting second hand embarrassment from these people.

Counteroffensives tend to be the most successful when there’s an element of surprise to it; an army on the offensive suddenly finds the enemy has done an unexpected feint or redirection, has gone on the offensive, they’ve now got to switch to a defensive position, the enemy gains a tactical and strategic advantage in the chaos. The Ukrainian counteroffensive was being hyped up in the press for weeks, maybe months, the Russians knew it was coming from miles away. Zelensky is putting selling the war to the West over what makes sense tactically.

Zelensky is putting selling the war to the West over what makes sense tactically.

He has to. There is no war otherwise. They are fighting this war by the grace of NATO, he has to feed the news with the same "You're all doing great, you don't need to change a thing, just give us more stuff and we'll take care of the rest" line because the libs love a go-getter they can patronize.
- "Doing a heckuva job, Right Sector!"
- I get that, but there’s no reason his selling it to NATO has to be done via the press; he’s meeting with their leaders all the time in private. I think it’s the NATO leadership that wants this sold in the press to keep their demos juiced on the rah rah, fight the evil ruskies, don’t question us or you’re with the enemy propaganda.