Russian- Ukraine War Flash Report - June 29, 2023 16:00 PDT - No, It's Not as Quiet as it Appears (Patreon)

I'm really enjoying the increasing number of comments and questions being asked on Patreon. We need more of it! I can't promise we can get to all of your questions, but we try.

A couple of people are asking publicly and privately why things appeared to quiet down yesterday.

First, the weather section was taken out to speed up getting the report out, we were focused on explaining how we got to the insurrection based on information in our previous coverage, and second, it didn't change much. The weather will be back today and we may start doing it every other day through the summer because Ukraine is falling into a typical summer pattern, slightly wetter, historically speaking.

There is a lot of Russian chatter in the four areas where Ukraine is executing offensive operations.

• Bakhmut/Soledar
• Lyubymivka/Staromlynivka
• Orikhiv
• Kherson - Dnipro River Left (east) Bank

According to Russian chatter, things are not going well on any of these axes. According to Ukrainian chatter, a lot of "big news is coming." The thing is, we don't report on chatter. We want to be right over first. Just after hitting [ENTER] on the SITREP, there were numerous claims, including from very reliable Ukrainian sources, that Ukrainian troops were fighting in or had even taken control of Klishchiivka. 

There is much more going on than we are reporting, and we have a strong belief based on chatter that Ukraine is making steady and accelerating advances in some places. Especially north and south of Bakhmut, where the situation in Klishchiivka for Russian forces is becoming critical, and just north of Robotyne, where even Russian propagandists are now reporting what our map already shows, Ukrainian forces are to the last tree line before the settlement. Without pictures or videos that we can geolocate, multiple independent reports that don't lead back to the same source, or solid NASA FIRMS data backed up by Sentinel Hub, other incoming reports don't meet our journalistic standards. Chatter informs us on where to look closer and may inform our analysis.

Ukraine is maintaining very tight operational security, and Russian sources have been, rightly so, very focused on the failed insurrection. Additionally, most of the larger Russian voices in the information space are very reluctant to bring up failures on the battlefield right now due to the paranoia sweeping through the Kremlin and its supporters.

There is more going on than what is being reported.