Still mud season
Plus we see quite a bit of equipment still arriving. Seems weeks away from a counteroffensive if they incorporate the leopards into the initial attack formations.
Ukraine is getting a lot of wheeled vehicles which are a two edged sword. In a breakthrough battle on dry ground, having wheeled combat vehicles is an advantage. Wheeled vehicles have fewer breakdowns (they don't have tracks to throw) and they move quicker than tracked vehicles. In the situation that could happen where the Russians break and run in panic, wheeled AFVs can overrun the enemy before they can get away.
However the downside to wheeled vehicles is they handle mud a lot worse than tracked vehicles.
Ukraine needs dry ground to conduct the offensive.
Waiting has trade offs too. Western equipment is flowing in. By May Ukraine may be able to field another corps with western equipment, which would be a big help in the offensive. However, time also gives the Russians the ability to dig in more.
Even if the numbers are off by a factor of 10, Russia is wasting a tremendous amount of money and time fortifying things that don't need fortifying
There is no scenario where Russia is going to be facing the USN's amphibious forces of 1945, which is what it would take to successfully storm lightly defended beaches in Crimea.
But I saw let the Russians build the equivalent of Rommel's defenses at Normandy and Calais in 1944. Burn resources they can't spare on useless projects rather than where the actual attack is coming from.
Regarding Prigozhin promoting the declaration of the "special military operation" over and to "firmly consolidate and cling to the territories that it already has". This is just Russia continuing to move the goal posts.
First they hoped for taking over Ukraine, but that turned out to be a pipe dream and Russia was repelled far back from their maximal territorial gains. Later the plan was to take over all of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, but that too turned out not promising. Now plan is - let’s call where we are a victory and dig in for long game. If the Ukrainian counteroffensive is successful but Russia still holds some territory, they will re-define the goals again.
Some in Russia who see the handwriting on the wall are trying to get the war over with the current boundaries. They have an idea how depleted the army is and know it won't be able to stand up to the Ukrainians equipped with good western equipment.
The Russians are making progress in Bakhmut because they are now committing their best units to the operation. These units are probably not as well trained as the units that started the war, and their equipment has degraded somewhat, but they are much better equipped than the human waves of mobiks they were using a few months ago.
They may be doing this because they have already burned up their mobik units. Ultimately its another bad decision. The units they are committing now are the mobile units that will be needed to plug gaps in the line during the Ukrainian offensive. In farming terms, they are eating their seed corn.
By committing these units to Bakhmut, they are burning them out. Even if the Ukrainians don't inflict high losses on these units, their equipment is getting wear and tear and a lot of it will be down for maintenance when the offensive comes. They are also taking units that are in less than ideal condition after a year of combat and putting those troops under weeks of more stress fighting an urban battle. By the time the offensive comes they will be all the more tired and less able to respond.
I would think these classified files would all be encrypted so IT staff etc would be of less concern. On the other hand if an IT person was being used in other ways such as prepping docs for local staff access/review then it's a problem. Especially these days, I would argue no single location or person, especially IT level, should have access to a wide range of highly classified unencrypted files.
And I'm having trouble imagining a reason for an IT specialist to have access to classified documents from the locked safe let alone access to the safe itself unless again they were using him in areas other than IT which again is bad practice.
It sounds like there was a few layers of incompetence given the apparent ease of access as well as lax enforcement of policies and procedures.
A year or so back a number of people who had worked in the intelligence community were talking about the sheer volume of classified material the US has. There is a lot of stuff that is classified that could be declassified because it's public knowledge, but nobody bothers, so the volume of stuff just piles up.
Managing a small handful of stuff that requires special handling is easy, but the more there is, the more difficult it becomes to manage. As the pile grows the number of people who have to be employed to manage it grows too. As more people know a secret, the higher the likelihood something is going to leak either inadvertently or deliberately.
This isn't unique to the US either. The west has been getting a lot of classified Russian intel from Russians leaking information to western governments. The Russians have been trying to catch the leakers, but have only had limited success.
Sloppy material handling on the Russian side is a boon to the west and let's hope they don't get their act together.
The US needs to tighten up handling security. We've seen a lot of problems in the last year alone. But the US also needs to put some effort into draining the swamp. From what I've heard, there is a lot of stuff classified that doesn't need to be. It's information that either became public knowledge through OSINT or it should never have been classified to begin with.
