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Recently, I found that for raw facts, the Youtuber going by "Military Summary Channel" is quite good. The flaws with it are that he has a very obvious pro-Russian bias that he tries to mask but that usually manifests itself in the form of calling absolutely every Russian advance very important and every problem experienced by Ukraine catastrophic, and picking video captions that exaggerate Russian gains that disagree with what he actually winds up saying in the video. This, along with the extremely formulaic script that may be due to bad command of English but still wanting to sound "professional", makes him useless as a source of opinion and prognosis. However, I found him unusually well-calibrated when it comes to integrating the various sources to determine who actually controls what piece of land at a given time and colouring the map, with many instances of him being correctly skeptical against both all the pro-Russian mappers and the doomer contingent of pro-Ukrainian ones, while not just being unidirectionally slow to accept changes in control that are eventually confirmed.
The next best pro-Russian "daily updates and maps" sort of source is still the Telegram user @rybar (you'll need to autotranslate for most of it), whose emotional calibration on importance of developments and future prospects actually seems more on point than the above - however, the crackdown on independent milbloggers a few months into a war coupled with his high profile really did a number on him, making him cease giving candid long-form assessments so you need to read between the lines a bit to get his actual opinion. He does jump the gun on map colouring sometimes. Also, being very pro-Russian and having been partnered into the semi-official propaganda apparatus, the ethically rather than militarily relevant parts of the assessment (which civilian deaths are evil vs. which ones are justified etc.) will still have a directionality that a pro-Western reader is likely to find grating.
Military Summary Channel will always make me smile when I remember him, just because of his "Mongolian Tactics" cope when talking about the loss of Kherson by the Russians, and similar setbacks in that period. I stopped following him as he became both less balanced and less amusing.
Kherson obviously wasn't defensible because it was a bridgehead. If you aren't in a situation to exploit it, and Russia wasn't because they thought it'd be just a quick regime change op, giving it up is the obvious move.
So Russia gives up, Ukraine then spends 1.5 years trying to cross the Dniepr in the opposite direction and getting their small bridgehead constantly shelled and boats sunk.
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I've only started watching him about a month ago, what was the story there? My sense is, as I said, that right now his representation of the situation on the ground is better than most other sources, but it's possible that he does much worse when Russia is on the retreat.
Mongolian tactics is the argument that a withdrawal is not a defeat, but a lure to pull an enemy into a position for a much greater counterattack than can envelop them, i.e. getting the fortifiers to leave their fortifications and come into the fields where the mongol cavalry destroy them.
In Kherson, it was one of the cope arguments that the Russians weren't in an untenable position, but that the Ukrainians were over-extending their offensive and the Russian counterattack would evicerate them.
(The Russians claimed to have stopped the Kherson offensive multiple times in the months leading up to its completion. It wasn't hard to find plenty of arguments that the Ukrainians were making a obvious and debilitating error by pursuing the offensive.)
Every russian retreat is a glorious trap about to be sprung on the unsuspecting ukrops, every Ukrainian failure is proof of their impending failure cascade, every Russian long range strike onto civilians is magically hitting a hidden HIMARs located behind a baby crib, every Russian asset lost is just proof of how resilient the Russian manufacturing machine is, every Russian field 'improvisation' is proof of superior Russian ingenuity. Bias exists in all parties/observers within this conflict, but pro Russian cope is the finest fermented diarrhea to be injected into every vatniks urethrae.
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Excellent summary.
Back then, he still had a tendency towards drama and hyping Russian progress, but the war was more dramatic and Russian progress was more worth hyping, so he was still very much worth watching. Sure, his forecasts of Russian advances were almost always wrong (for those of us who grew up reading about the Great Patriotic War, this war is amazingly static) but they provided a rare insight into pro-Russian expectations. Every time I look at his video titles now, it feels a little embarassing.
The magic and charm of the pro-Russia blogosphere really died after the Wagner uprising. The Russians were already cracking down on the wrong forms of pro-Russian support, but it really cemented afterwards, even though it was the divergences between pro-MoD and pro-Wagern ultranationalists that provided the occasional illuminating insight. Then, both sides had an incentive to point out errors / flaws of the other's positions, which translated into some more sober assessments and concessions to reality. Now they're not much more than retreads of official talking points, lacking both the dynamism and the willingness to go off script.
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