Russian employee smoking/unsafe handling or ukranian missile strike, place your bets.
Disgruntled employee that couldn't get an Adidas track suit due to the sanctions?
Or, you know, redeployment as they themselves said their "phase 2" objective is Eastern Ukraine. I suspect they frame it as a "step towards peace" to make themselves look good, then redeploy their troops into Eastern Ukraine as they don't consider that to be Ukraine and say "See, we did what we said".
Would be much easier to retain control of eastern Ukraine and even make more progress in eastern Ukraine with all of their troops at the eastern/souther border, rather than split between south/east/north.
All in all, it's a smoke show. They'll likely claim that eastern Ukraine doesn't below to Ukraine anymore and they kept true to their word of stepping towards peace with Ukraine and "only" demand that eastern Ukraine becomes its own country that they can install a puppet regime in. They'll try to get Kharkiv down to Mykolaiv/Odesa to be part of the new Eastern Ukraine state to give them better control of the Black Sea and unite Crimea with the Russian Empire via a land route. They likely realised they won't make their goals by May 9 with their forces spread thin.
Even IF that's not true, it's really not a good faith gesture. They're likely out of resources there anyway and are forced to fall back.
No fucking wai
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ukraine...ry-misled-him/U.S. intelligence officials have determined that Russian President Vladimir Putin is being misinformed by his advisers about the poor performance of Kremlin troops in Ukraine, the Associated Press reported and CBS News confirmed.
A U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss recently declassified intelligence, said Wednesday the intelligence finding indicates that Putin is aware of the situation on information coming to him and there is now persistent tension between him and senior Russian military officials. President Biden, in an exchange with reporters, would not comment. Later Wednesday, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield also would not say whether the president approved the release of the intelligence.
Good. Fuck Belarus. Goddam shithead of a simp of a leader.
Man, the idea that Putin is being lied to is pretty wild given all the propping up of him being some kind of ex-KGB genius that's gone on over the years. As if the fucker would never think to look into external media to see what "the enemy" is saying about him. I'm practically getting info on the conflict without even trying through here, the occasional twitter scroll, and if I catch TV news.
Mind, I can totally understand people being afraid to give him bad news, but I think even he would understand that he can't disappear those both loyal and fearful of him as eventually the needed replacements would think to do the same to him after enough start asking, "What happened to the last guy?"
guy should pop on the interwebs and check out the institute of the study of war and critical threats like the rest of us