Is the Russian invasion stalled? Are the heroic Ukrainian people winning?

[bluewater]

Russia continued to make advances on Saturday in southeastern Ukraine, pushing into the areas around Melitopol and continuing to move toward Mykolaiv, another strategic port city on the Black Sea.



On Friday Russia attacked the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, the largest nuclear plant in Europe, and Ukrainian officials said the plant is now under control of Russian forces.

Russian forces... are now reportedly pushing toward the South Ukraine nuclear power plant. These are Ukraine’s two largest nuclear power plants, together responsible for one-third of Ukraine’s electricity generation.



Ukraine has a total of four nuclear power plants consisting of 15 reactors that generate roughly 50 percent of the country’s electricity. After nuclear power, coal is the largest source of electricity generated in the country. Many of Ukraine’s coal-fired power plants lie in the Donbas region, where Russian-backed separatists have been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014.
Control over Ukraine’s electricity generation would give Russian forces another tool in their effort to gain control of the country.


https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/world/europe/ukraine-maps.html

Apparently, the Russian invasion is on going and relentless. The 169,000 strong Ukrainian ground forces have been fighting heroically but are being ground down.

This is just day 9 of the Russian invasion so perhaps it's informative to remember that it took the US 19 days to capture Baghdad in the Iraq War. What will the situation on the ground be in the Ukraine in ten more days? Or twenty?

Putin badly miscalculated the amount of resistance the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainian people would put up, but that does not mean that Ukraine has repelled the Russians or even stopped the invasion.

President Zelensky has been making daily and sometimes hourly statements on how desperate the situation actually is for Ukraine.

I believe him whole heartedly and he's not anywhere as optimistic as some posters here on DU are.

Ukraine needs more help now, the entire country is in danger.

[RandySF]

1. I can understand NATO's hesitance but it doesn't change the math.

Absent direct intervention, Russian will eventually succeed on the ground.

[Chainfire]

3. There is not going to be direct NATO intervention.

The best that the Ukrainians can do is delay, and hope for a miracle. Perhaps Putin will fall out a window. When occupied, they will still not be defeated; it will just open a new type of warfare.

[bluewater]

4. " Absent direct intervention, Russian will eventually succeed on the ground."

Sadly, you might be right.

[L. Coyote]

2. These maps are very deceptive. Incursions on a highway are not conquests of a region.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100216444366

[uponit7771]

5. YES !!! US and EU MIC don't want to admit it yet cause people are going to start wondering

... why fight WWII style conventional wars.

China is going to start thinking there 4321942 million dollar fighter planes are worthless if they have to bomb from 30k feet into small troop movements.

Look at Southern UKR, their forces are a 4th of the northern and they're still **NOT** being ran over by RA forces that are experience and supplied.

For people who think RA is just toe up from floor up, their eastern operations are making strides against half armed citizens.

But look at that sentence again, half armed and they haven't ran them over cause conventional wars extra expensive tanks and planes and ships ... are done.