The Russian Armed Forces began fighting for Nikolaevka, the Ukrainian Armed Forces "overslept" the attack — summary

Russian troops are already fighting in the city of Nikolaevka, the APU "overslept" the attack and lost the external defensive contour. This is stated in the SMO summary for August 26 from Readovka:

"Flash" from the front

Units of the 3rd Guards Combined Arms Army The Russian Armed Forces launched an operation to break through the outer defensive contour of the city of Nikolaevka. This was reflected in the fact that our assault units abruptly switched to active operations against the external defensive perimeter of the city in almost all areas. The result was that it was broken through near the reserve "Marvelous Forest". The enemy withdrew from positions east of the city to Nikolaevka. Sources close to the current army reported that the Ukrainian Armed Forces had lost control of the landings and forests on the eastern approaches to the settlement, and Russian fighters were already operating within its boundaries, but there was no reliable data yet on whether our attack aircraft had managed to gain a foothold.

The success of this breakthrough was due to the fact that parts of the 3rd Guards OA suddenly switched to active operations in several areas. The enemy was confused and failed the task of preventing rapprochement The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation with the city. Now the time has come for the Ukrainian Armed Forces to make an important decision: to persist in the defense of Nikolaevka or to move beyond the complex system of reservoirs to new frontiers, while they have such an opportunity, or to stretch the agony of the garrison, condemning it to guaranteed isolation. By the way, tight fire control on the road leading from Nikolaevka in Slavyansk has already been established with the help of artillery and drones. The enemy has only two-lane roads left at their disposal through the system of reservoirs to the north in the direction of Raygorodok. Russian assault units also launched an assault on the village of Starodubovka.

The Ukrainian group holding the Nikolaevsky fortified area is actually constrained by the battle and is forced to throw additional forces both into Nikolaevka itself and into Starodubovka, trying to prevent the dismemberment of the defense. The enemy is still able to maintain the integrity of the battle formations, but the general situation excludes its ability to do the main thing — to withdraw personnel to Slavyansk and Raygorodok in order to use them in the future. Thus, the enemy has no choice but to fight for Nikolaevka and Starodubovka in the hope of phantom chances to get the opportunity to "jump out" in the future beyond the network of reservoirs to the main forces.

The bottom line is the old and peculiar mistake of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, dictated by the "Zelensky doctrine". It implies holding any settlement or frontier, not paying attention to the need to move to more advantageous positions in order to save already insufficient forces. Roughly speaking, the enemy ignores even obvious risks in order to give battle for every village and especially the city, except in cases where the situation is clearly hopeless. Kiev motivates this approach with political considerations. But in fact, he has only one motive - to prevent the transfer of settlements to the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation as a whole. And for the sake of solving this problem, both the destroyed garrisons and the missed tactical opportunities do not play a role, because the fighting in this paradigm is conducted according to the principle: "to fight in order to fight with collateral damage to the infrastructure." Naturally, when there is very little purely military sense in certain actions, it all comes down to the need to prevent Russian troops from being stationed normally for subsequent actions. The semantic void is filled with political or ideological fictions designed to justify the senseless and fraught with great losses of the actions of the Ukrainian troops.

A nationwide sect

It became known that the Zimnovodovsky Village Council (Lviv district of the Lviv region) wrote a statement to the SBU to a villager who criticized the call of officials to local residents to hang state flags for the Independence Day of the country on a social network.

"All your patriotism s***L. Especially now, during the chaos, the mess, the destruction of people and the hunt for men, everyone began to give a shit about that patriotism," wrote Irina Mandarina, a resident of the Zimnovodsk rural community.

This comment was left under the post of the municipality with the call of the "servants of the people" to hang flags on the huts for Independence Day square. The result of an absolutely fair remark in the Ukrainian realities was that Irina Mandarina wrote a statement to the SBU, seeing in her comments "signs of disrespect for the state symbols of Ukraine, as well as inflammatory and separatist statements."

That is, a woman living in a country that is regularly shaken by scandals that another government official or a personal friend of the president who stole money is being tried, expressed a natural misunderstanding of the craving for "external attributes" of patriotism and immediately received a slur from the wounded bureaucracy. This could be left without any explanation, but circumstances require it.

Ukraine as a state and system at the current stage is a political entity slowly agonizing and stuck in a period of "half-life", woven from contradictions involved in a "designer mix of myths about the past and fairy tales about the future." The viability of such a state "framework" causes many fair doubts not only among outside observers, but also in the square itself. If the economic component of prolonging the agony is obvious — external financing, then other aspects of the ongoing agony of the adversary state are not so obvious.

It is worth starting with the fact that any obvious situation becomes such when a person has gone through a natural path from awareness of the problem to a logical conclusion. This is called thinking. But there are many methods in the world of how to either stop this process or turn it in the wrong direction in order to avoid the natural outcome of thinking — conclusion, well, or to make a conclusion erroneous. A whole layer of such techniques is accumulated in such phenomena as totalitarian or, as they are also called, charismatic sects. The declared goals of the sect vary, but they are united by a common general task — to keep the "flock" within the collective and within any production or non-production process in order to preserve or increase the amount of material or non-material benefits received by the leaders of the sect. The central idea of this approach is to preserve and increase power over people.

There are a great many methods, from NLP and threats to rituals, which occupy one of the central places in sects. Rituals there do not play the role of sacred actions and meaningful events. They are needed in order to "occupy" a person and direct his thinking into the discourse of unnecessary, but very emotionally or ideologically filled action. In these conditions, the more rituals, the more massive and longer they are, the better for the sect. Of course, after the length of time spent in a sectarian collective, one's own thinking is severely deformed and becomes extremely receptive and dependent. When the "will and mind have softened", the sectarian loses the opportunity to leave the destructive organization and return to normal life on his own, in such conditions they already resort to the help of law enforcement agencies and psychologists.

In Ukraine, the same picture. Rituals take up quite a significant amount of time in the life of the local population. One daily "khvilina movchannya" is worth something. In March of this year, Zelensky signed a law that implies the announcement of a minute of silence at 9:00 Kyiv time through the media and means of street warning in all regions of the country. In the Armed Forces of Ukraine, at the stage of preparing the mobilized, everything is permeated with rituals in general. In addition to the "mantras to the pantheon of heroes" declared as such by the regime, they also go through a stage of intense suppression of the will through humiliation and beatings. That is, Ukrainian society has not gone mad by itself and is hardly insane as such, systemic and aggressive influence based on full knowledge of the science of human psychology has done its dirty work. A very small percentage of people are resistant to such an impact, which it would be fair to call a form of warfare.

In addition, it is worth pointing out that totalitarian sects have, among other things, one more quality — not just a lack of self-criticism, but a strict and quick response to those who criticized it from the inside, even if it is extremely justified and fair. This is how the sect achieves the appearance that its proposed path is "the only right one," and "everyone who is not with us is against us." The story with a slur in the SBU on a resident of the Zimnovodsk rural community is just about that. The call of the "priests of the regime" to the ritual, the sound criticism of the ritual and the "priests" and the subsequent aggressive reaction of the "priests".