Now 16 days after the outbreak of the war between Russia and Ukraine, the initial Western consensus was that the resistance of the Ukrainian army would not exceed 96 hours, but the degree of unprofessionalism shown by the Russian army in the war and the heroic resistance of the Ukrainian army were far beyond the imagination of the outside world.
However, there is a fundamental gap in the strength of the two sides, according to the US intelligence agency, the 150,000 troops prepared by the Russian military for the first attack on Ukraine have now been 100% into the battlefield. Moreover, the main forces of the Ukrainian army were basically fixed in several large cities east of the Dnieper River, and the periphery was blocked by the regiments of Russian troops, and they did not dare to break through at all, because they had lost their air superiority and faced being slaughtered once they left the city.
The Russian offensive was divided into three directions, namely the attack on Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, in the north, the attack on Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city, in the east, and the attack on the coast of the Sea of Azov in the south. The russian army in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, is most concerned about. Due to the very poor condition of the northern roads in Ukraine, and the fact that the area itself is home to the largest Pripyat swamp in Europe, the movement of russian troops in the local area was very slow for some time, such as the previous news claiming that the Russian army had a mechanized convoy of more than 40 miles in the local area, which was the result of the Russian army's inability to expand at all.
However, since March 11, local time, the main offensive spearhead of this Russian army has been dispersed to various small strongholds and cities around Kiev, and then they can exert their maximum combat effectiveness. Although the EU has vowed to continue to strengthen its assistance to Ukraine, it is currently facing a situation in which all kinds of weapons and equipment can only be transported to the western Ukrainian city of Lviv, and it is very difficult to transport them to Kiev, let alone to Kharkiv and Mariupol, which are surrounded by Russian troops.
It is also worth mentioning that in the face of the ukrainian army's most needed air supremacy, Western countries have chosen to be indifferent, not only NATO has repeatedly and explicitly rejected the request of Ukrainian President Zelenskiy and refused to set up a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Moreover, Poland and the United States actually pushed each other for assisting some MiG-29 fighters in Ukraine, and in order to avoid risks to the greatest extent, the Polish side was willing to transport all the remaining MiG-29 fighters in its hands to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany, and after handing over these fighters to the United States, the Americans came forward to send them into Ukraine, but they did not expect that the Americans directly said that Poland's idea was unrealistic, so that Ukraine completely lost hope.
Although Russia's initial attempt to turn the war into a blitzkrieg failed, even in the case of a war of attrition, it was only a matter of time before Ukraine faced a complete defeat to Russia. At present, the situation on the battlefield has increasingly shifted in favor of Russia. In northwestern Kiev, for example, the 200th Motorized Infantry Brigade of the Russian Northern Fleet and a regimental combat team of the Army's 76th Division have secured local defenses. The 138th Mobu Brigade, the Mobu 37th Brigade, and the Cossack Cover 69 Brigade are attacking Brovary and other places in the east of Kiev, and the attack is relatively smooth, and Kiev will inevitably become an isolated city in the future.
In other directions, the Russian army also made progress to varying degrees, the 752nd Regiment of the 3rd Mobu Division and the pro-Russian militants of Luhansk took all the territory of the Luhansk Oblast except Severodontsk and Lisichansk, and the 136th Mobu Brigade was attacking Nikolayev from Kherson, and if Nikolayev fell, then the Ukrainian army would lose almost all of its shipbuilding industry capacity. The Western countries, led by the United States, have made it clear that they will never intervene, and if the Ukrainian army has enough will to resist, it will only cause as much loss as possible and then be annihilated.