I do have to say that I was just looking at Julia Davis’s most-recent selection of Russian media excerpts, and it actually is in significant part all about how Ukraine certainly couldn’t have figured out how to do an operation like this, and it must be someone else.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExPzPXW2usk

Solovyov: It’s clear that this operation wasn’t organized by Zelensky or his headquarters. This operation was developed by NATO specialists…

This was a military operation. It was well prepared and pre-planned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV45ltSbdZI

Drobnitsky: All of us are saying that NATO might have planned this…there is no NATO, it’s just the United States and Britain…There’s no one else…Just like Dima, I know from books the way the Americans and British have acted. This very much resembles a British hand, based on historic military books, including those about the participation of the British in wars of the 21st century. For example, the Royal Marines in Iraq, who were quite successful unlike the US in their first days and weeks, I’m talking about their ground forces…

It’s kind of an amusing contrast with the brief Michael Kofman analysis that I summarized the other day on !ukraine@sopuli.xyz:

https://lemmy.today/post/14660553

Very clearly not like the previous raids organized by HUR [Ukrainian military intelligence]. This is an operation clearly planned by the Ukrainian general staff.

Bottom line, in terms of operation size, it’s probably closest to the Ukrainian offensive in Kharkiv in 2022. It looks like it’s following a similar template. That’s not surprising, given that Syrskyi’s in charge.

[Syrskyi having also run the successful Kharkiv offensive and now running the whole of the Ukrainian armed forces.]

It is clear that Ukraine managed to achieve operational surprise. To be clear, folks like me didn’t know that this offensive was coming. I don’t think anybody did. I don’t think that they told the United States or others. I have my own clear-cut theory as to why: my view is that tactically, Russia has actually had ISR coverage. There are videos posted of Russian drone feeds of them watching Ukranian forces before they crossed the border and as they were crossing the border. But as these types of operations continually show, war is a human endeavor, and technology may make the battlefield a lot more transparent at the tactical level, but people make mistakes, they don’t prepare for things like this, they don’t react in time. In some ways, it’s not unlike what happened during the Kharkiv offensive, which people tried to portray as a surprise. In actuality, Russians were talking about it for two weeks during the buildup before Ukraine conducted it, and the Russian general staff just didn’t respond or appropriately prepare or whatnot. I’m glad that you mentioned this; we continue to see Russian forces continue to make some of the same types of mistakes.