They have managed to pull out of Kherson and Lyman without the losses predicted. Stories of 12k soldiers will be backed up by thousands of captured soldiers such as happened at the initial Kharkiv counter-offense where they did actually capture a couple of thousand. I don't see it. What I saw was a video of the soldiers walking out on the pontoon bridge at a very measured interval and that interval would require 7 or 8 hours to move all 12k troops. They had that time and more. They gathered in two points and simply walked across. Maybe some died in a bridge explosion when a HIMARS attack hit the two bridges, small losses compared to capturing 12k.
The soldiers that were captured in civilian clothes seemed more likely to be run of the mill deserters than anything else.
Pulling off that retreat, Kherson, takes a huge amount of planning combined with huge amounts of misdirection and the execution. That is a general staff effort across a 100km front. It requires very precise command and control and great opsec. They did all of that. They left almost no good armor or heavy equipment. Almost nothing. Munitions are sparse too. It wasn't a case of Kharkiv II. This was a careful designed withdrawal with excellent planning and execution. Pulling all the heavy equipment across the dam only at night and keeping it all dispersed so there were no concentration points. On and on. The russian army may be a shadow of itself but any army would have been proud of that disengagement. Textbook stuff. Disengaging is far easier than an offense but still...fraught with risks.
