Remember Kursk?

On April 12, I commented on the conventional wisdom of the time that there would be an upcoming battle in Donbas that would be, in one opinion, the "biggest tank battle in Europe since 1943 Battle of Kursk". It would be a "knife fight", a grand contest of maneuver in which the Russians would try to cut off the Ukrainian army in pockets.

. . . After their recent defeat in the north, Russia has made some significant changes. . . . . the Russians will have a single command staff to co-ordinate and attempt to achieve a single focused and ostensibly realistic operational objective[.]

. . . the force the Russians will amass will be formidable, and with shorter and better established supply lines into Russia they may be able to avoid some of the appalling foul ups which have characterised their war so far.

As of mid-April, this decisive battle of maneuver was going to take place "within the next two weeks". It didn't happen. Instead, the daily assessments at the Institute for the Study of War basically continued along the line of the one from yesterday, May 4:

Ukrainian defenses have largely stalled Russian advances in Eastern Ukraine. Russian troops conducted a number of unsuccessful attacks in Eastern Ukraine on May 4 and were unable to make any confirmed advances. Russian forces attacking south of Izyum appear increasingly unlikely to successfully encircle Ukrainian forces in the Rubizhne area. Ukrainian forces have so far prevented Russian forces from merging their offensives to the southeast of Izyum and the west of Lyman, Slovyansk, and Kramatorsk, as Russian forces likely intended.

It appears that the "unsuccessful attacks" by the Russians were met yet again with the Ukrainian rope-a-dope strategy, wiping out enough tanks and infantry from individual BTGs to take them out of action in detail.

This utterly contradicts predictions elsewhere from mid-April of what the fighting in Donbas would be like:

It should be said right upfront, however, that the task for Kyiv isn’t wholly impossible, but it is exceedingly difficult. There is a chance that the Ukrainian troops and civilian defenders could exact such a high price in blood and iron on Russia’s Donbas attack that after some extended amount of time, Russian troops withdraw on their own.

To support that path, however, requires Ukraine to understand two key realities: 1) for that strategy to successfully result in an eventual Russian withdrawal, it would take a year or more of fighting that will leave tens of thousands of additional Ukrainians dead – possibly more – and 2) there is a much greater probability that UAF troops won’t win the Battle of Donbas and will be forced to submit to a negotiated settlement on worse terms than are presently available.

. . . The primary reasons Russia’s advance into Kyiv failed are that, first, they had too few troops devoted to that axis, their logistics were spread out over hundreds of kilometers from bases in Russia, and the Ukrainian defenders were able to make expert use of the urban terrain. Ukrainians could approach Russia’s armored vehicles undetected from around buildings and often attack at point-blank range.

. . . For the Kyiv axis in February, Russia’s supply lines were dangerously stretched, requiring trips of hundreds of kilometers to keep the frontline troops supplied with sufficient food, fuel, and ammunition. For the Donbas fight, Russia has very short logistics lines, as nearly all the resupply comes directly from Russia and through friendly territory.

But it's increasingly plain that the outcome for Russia has been precisely the same in Donbas as it was around Kyiv. The normative battle has continued to be a skirmish, a Ukrainian ambush on a Russian column in generally open territory:

This continues to be a strategy of defeat in detail. For every such ambush I see each day on YouTube, I shake my head and ask how long Russia can sustain such losses, and I have to keep reminding myselt that with defeat in detail, that's the whole point. The strategy is a series of individual ambushes. What the Russians woulda-coulda-shoulda done to avoid them is beside the point, they happened.

It's beginning to look like what happened around Kyiv is repeating itself around Kharkiv and Izyum: in the end stage around Kyiv, the talking heads were speaking of "culmination", with the Russian advances stalled and tentative Ukrainian counterattacks beginning -- but within days, the Russians retreated completely. At this stage in Donbas, the same conditions exist, although nobody seems to mention "culmination", even though it's just as accurate there. I think there will be an equivalent retreat from Kharkiv and Izyum.

As of yesterday, President Zelensky's appraisal of the war was reported below:

President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has named three stages of the war with Russia.

The statement came in a video address to the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

The first of them is to stop Russia's advance, which, according to the president, Ukrainians have already done. The second phase is to push Russia out of Ukrainian territory. Work to this end is now ongoing. And the third is to restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine as much as possible.

Now the priority for Ukraine is to push Russian troops back to the positions they were in as of February 24 and to restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity.

Zelensky has in other words stated that Ukraine has completely stopped the Russian advances on all axes, with which commentators like the ISW are in general agreement. The statements on restoring Ukraine's territorial inmtegrity have also been interpreted as an abandonment of any negotiating strategy short of that to end the war.

All this contravenes the defeatist conventional wisdom we'd been hearing just weeks ago suggesting, as above, that a fight in Donbas would represent "a much greater probability that UAF troops won’t win the Battle of Donbas and will be forced to submit to a negotiated settlement on worse terms than are presently available."

Overtaken by events.