The initial hysteria over Ukraine’s lightening advance into Russia’s Kursk region has begun to wane. While many in the West, some in Russia itself, thought the Kursk operation would be the beginning of the end, the end has come for some but not for others. In Donetsk, for instance, the end has come.

in terms of saving Pokrovsk, which in the Soviet Union carried the Red Army’s namesake as ‘Krasnoarmeysk, Kursk has not resulted in the type of ‘alleviation,’ ‘relief,’ or ‘saving graces, the Ukrainians had hoped the incursion would cause.

Early Friday morning, Kyiv began to evacuate the southeastern Donetsk city, as Russia recently expanded its advances from Avdiivka in February throughout the area to seize village after village in a grinding, non-positional, maneuver warfare that included double envelopments, flying tank assaults, or WWI style tunneling.

Ukraine’s inability to launch a counteroffensive into the thicket of Russia’s TRSC in the Donbas, choosing to bypass enemy centers of resistance in Kursk, where nothing shined except grandma’s cellar of vodka on roots, demonstrated the futility of the ‘drunken’ incursion for the Donbas, if not the war. Why didn’t the Ukrainians stop the Russians at Pokrovsk’s doorstep to the Dnipro? With the похмелье beginning to fade, the hysteria over the seizure of 1,000 kilometers of barren fields in the Kursk region is beginning to wane.

The Ukrainians waking up with a headache after seven days of driving through the Ardennes without even so much as an eyeshot of the great Eiffel towers in the Red Square are watching compatriots flee the Donbas, as comrades in arms, with whom the new Kursk commandos once shared silverware, ammo or the dirty walls of a bloody trench, cry for help, like the ones from Ukraine’s 110th Mechanized Brigade, which is currently deployed in the Pokrovsk direction.

”Since Ukraine launched the Kursk offensive, ‘I would say things have become worse in our part of the front,’ said Ivan Sekach, spokesperson of Ukraine’s 110th Mechanized Brigade. ‘We have been getting even less ammo than before and the Russians are pushing.,’ he told Politico.”

”While the success of the surprise Kursk operation have boosted Kyiv’s morale, Russian forces are striking back, capturing [even] more territory around Ukraine’s Donetsk region.” Politico, whose editorial board permitted the publication of an article predicting Ukraine’s defeat before the end of summer, published these words, emphasizing the impact the futile operation had on the Donbas.