This is an important point that people like to ignore, Whilst both sides exaggerate ukraine tells you there are 30 cows in a field when you can only see 28, Russia tells you there is an elephant and three dragons in the same field then tells you you’re falling for ukraines propaganda when you tell them you can only see cows.

Well that’s the thing, Donkeys are good for rough terrain like the mountains of Afghanistan NOT the flat open plains of ukraine, In ukraine they are just sitting unarmoured ducks.

Eh I don’t think they are fucked. I feel like the perception that A. They REQUIRE US support to win (Which the US should be providing them ffs, you made them give up their nukes) and B. Russia is able to keep fighting long enough to win this way, are both false and largely influenced by a coordinated kremlin effort to portray russian victory as inevitable in order to strangle support for Ukraine.

For context, the Ukrainian people are fighting a defensive war and inflicting far higher casualties then they take for every metre of ground they lose and still have a hell of alot of ground to lose, whilst russia is not only at the disadvantage of being the aggressor (Which makes it harder to motivate your forces to fight),being a regime heavily dependent on the perception of their superiority (Making any attack like this a major blow to their “We are easily winning” internal narrative) and have burnt through almost their entire Cold War era stockpiles of materiel (This one is easy to check as a they were kind enough to store it outside in easy view of commercial satellites).

Tldr: Yes Ukraine is losing ground but they are losing it at a price russia can’t afford to pay so russia is desperate for the EU and US to stop supporting ukraine before the russian public wake up.

Russia’s apparent war plan involves lots of slow attritional fighting, which isn’t flashy and rarely results in a “Win”. Not to mention we kind of do see the russian equivalent of this attack (Bombing hospitals, shopping malls and power infrastructure) reported on, it’s just not considered a win to kill civilians in the west.

A view I agree with not only on the basis of valuing peace, life and the safety of noncombatants but also on the basis of it not being an effective way to win a war, e.g Korean war, Vietnam war, or the near leveling of London and large swaths of europe in Ww2. Strategic bombing of civilian assets just makes the people being bombed more likely to fight back and willing to endure higher casualties on the front lines.

Fun tidbit, this depot explosion was initially claimed to be “Negligence and mishandling of munitions” by the kremlin, which along with “Smoking accident” is basically shorthand for “Was hit by a drone but we don’t want to let our people know that we aren’t able to keep the war away from them”.