It’s becoming clearer to me what happened in Ukraine recently.
Apparently, the Ukrops tried to have an end-summer offensive they kept harping about for months in order to milk NATO for resources, and now they had to show something. Initially, they attacked Kherson, but that ended poorly because the Russians treated this as a priority because it defends Crimea, so the Ukrops were either killed or repelled. Furthermore, the Russians intentionally set the situation up in such a way as to lure them into holding indefensible areas and slaughter them there.
Then, and this is quite important, the Americans and the British told the Ukrops that they have a better idea – they shared intelligence showing that the Russians only have token forces in Kharkov area, and they even sent their own men and equipment alongside Ukrops. The Russians also have intelligence so they found out about this and started to withdraw forces from this area in order not to sustain losses, and ceded quite a bit of ground in the process, including, and that is also important, some cities that are to become the sites of Ukrop purges of “collaborators”.
Apparently, this was a red line for Russia, and they decided they had enough of fucking around and it’s time to increase the pain dial to 2. Also, they decided that they had enough pretending that golden rain is falling every time America and Britain decide to piss on their heads, and this might result in Ramstein and some other locales being turned into smoking holes in the ground. Also, they stopped giving a fuck about the “international community”, and in the future they might just do whatever and tell the enemies to go pound sand.
The Russians stopped a centimeter short of declaring war on NATO, but I have a hunch they might give zero amount of fuck for anything related to chapter 5, and if something participates in war against them, it will fragment into tiny burning particles.
We are facing escallation of war in the immediate future, and all should assume this to be a fact and plan accordingly.