Actually, it’s been a little more than 200 days now, but still, 6 months of fighting (on top of the previous 8 years of a “frozen” conflict). Oddly, to my mind, “6 months” sounds longer than “200 days,” but it doesn’t matter. It’s still a long time, and there’s been a lot of suffering, damage and death during that time.

You’ve probably heard by now, though, that six months proved to be about as patient as Ukraine was going to be, and they started a so-far very successful counter-attack: President: AFU have liberated more than 1,000 sq km of Ukraine’s territory since beginning of September (ukrinform.net), Ukrainian forces have retaken more than 3,000 sq km since early Sep – army chief (ukrinform.net), Ukraine’s Armed Forces liberate over 300 settlements in Kharkiv region (ukrinform.net). Russian forces have more or less abandoned all the territory they’d been squatting on in the Kharkiv oblast (region or county), in the northeast corner of Ukraine.

They were able to get the upper hand because of some rather good strategy and planning. For weeks they’d be talking up a planned counter-offensive in the Kherson area (south-central Ukraine, just north of the Crimean peninsula), and using some highly accurate rocket attacks (HIMARS) to “prove” their intent. Because of this the Russians pulled forces out of the northeast area and sent them south in anticipation of a pending Ukrainian attack. But Kherson was mostly for show. I saw mostly because even though the big gains were up north, there were some advances and improvements in the Ukrainian position down south as well.

All in all, Ukraine has been doing a masterful job these past few weeks — which should have Russia really worried. And it does, apparently (Invaders urgently evacuating families from Crimea and southern Ukraine — intelligence (ukrinform.net)), but that’s not what I mean. Russia has over the past months (and years) done a lot of sabre-rattling about how, if they wanted, they could both take on and take down NATO. A lot of the propaganda surrounding the war on Russian media has stated that events in Ukraine are a proxy war of them against NATO (with Russia being superior and victorious in every way, of course). But Russia just got hammered by Ukrainian troops with less than six months of NATO-led training. These forces are essentially “NATO-Lite” and Russia had to back down and run away when they (the Ukrainians) took the field. If this is how they do against “NATO-Lite,” they would be utterly decimated in a full-blown NATO conflict.

(I’m not saying that could or should happen, of course. None of the past six months has been good for anyone. But it really seems like Russia wouldn’t stand a chance if they when up against “real” NATO forces, militaries that have spent years training together and aren’t having to rely on donor nations to give them some upgraded weaponry.)

One last comment about the rout from Kharkiv: on their way out of the region, Russia continued rocket attacks and shelling of assorted locations, and one such bombardment took out the electricity for the city of Kharkiv and much of the oblast (Kharkiv region left without electricity due to enemy shelling (ukrinform.net)). It seemed to be a fairly targeted strike on the power plant, which means that Russia has the coordinates of such critical infrastructure and the ability to accurately target those locations. Which puts something of a light on the places they’ve been hitting before now — schools, hospitals, apartment buildings and other civilian structures. While some such places could collateral damage during the confusion of war, it really looks more like those were the targets all along. Which pretty much makes everything that Russia has done this year a massive collection of war crimes.

(Oh, and speaking of which, as locations in the Kharkiv oblast get liberated, it’s becoming more and more apparent that Bucha, Irpin and other locations that were in the news because of the torturing, executions and mass graves done and found in those locations were not anomalies. They were part and parcel of Russian occupation practices. A massive collection of war crimes indeed.)