Comparing what Ukraine has done in the past 2 years to what they did in 2023, the Ukrainian counterattacks are now much more intelligent and goal oriented. In 2023 there was this misguided idea that Ukraine could repeat what happened in Kharkiv, this cringe "lessons learned from Kharkiv" line that I have heard spouted off by people who should really know better. What lesson? That if the Russians withdraw 90% of their forces Ukraine can break through the rearguard? This isn't to minimize the success of that Kharkiv counterattack, but thinking it could be repeated anywhere else was and remains ludicrous. The lesson we learned from the Kharkiv counterattack is that 99% of the leadership didn't understand what happened in the Kharkiv counterattack. But moving on from that, I have always felt, and I wrote back then in real time, that Ukraine's path to success laid with careful, deliberate defense that hinged on keeping national morale high (to maintain recruitment), strong defensive engineering (to minimize casualties), and strong leadership (to maintain morale). Deliberate defense means counterattacking only when you have a limited objective, timing, and means. The goal should be to recapture critically important defensive positions, clearing out Russians from areas you deem too dangerous, or destroying critically important structures (buildings, basements, bridges). Instead, Ukraine opted for counterattacks. It is easy to only blame the large scale attacks, which were disastrous, but the smaller attacks may be even worse. Where small scale suicidal attacks burn through limited infantry and crush morale and end up weaking the overall situation by running out of manpower. These sorts of attacks I think had a large impact on national morale and recruitment figures. People lost faith in leadership, because leaders viewed them as expendable. And now you have to expend resources winning back trust from the populace. Sadly, some of the leaders who did not fall into this category, and actually preserved the lives of their men, were rewarded with fewer reinforcements, which, after several years, degraded their defensive capabilities to the point of collapse. Which might be an oversimplification, but is more or less what happened east of Siversk and lead to the fall of that entire defensive line. Which then created this critically bad situation around Slovyansk and Kramatorsk where Russians are too close for comfort. More recently, rather than large scale counterattacks like in 2023 and to a lesser extent 2024, we see Ukraine doing more focused attacks to achieve specific goals. We saw the attacks into Kupyansk, which are more or less ongoing to be honest. We saw the attacks in south Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia. First the attack to break the northern flank of the grouping that was assaulting Orikhiv, which has set back their attack on Orikhiv by at least a full year if not longer. Then the second attack in Zaporizhzhia/South Donetsk that pushed towards Komar and weakened the area even further for the Russians. We see the ongoing attack north of Lyman, which has stabilized the northern flank of Slovyansk and eliminated Russia's northern attack from the conversation entirely. In 2023, Ukraine had similar goals that should have taken priority over their YOLO push south. Around Avdiivka, and I wrote this at the time so it is not hindsight, Ukraine had a very real chance to recapture Anthill, Cuckoo, Slab, and Pisky. To the north they had the very real chance to push Russians out of Yasnohorivka. These could have been modest, localized attacks on the same scale as what you saw in south Donetsk earlier this year. It would have fortified the defensive line in an area of utmost importance, and in my opinion could have stopped the line from collapsing in the (hugely predictable) manner in which it did. Similarly, Ukriane had the opportunity to perform a similar level attack into the Lysychansk Oil Refinery. Which would have been difficult, and likely costly for Ukraine, but would have fundamentally changed the entire defensive situation in a manner I think Russia would have struggled to reverse. I think if Ukraine were acting the entire time the way they are acting now, everything would be vastly better today than it is.