Looks like the 'greatest counter-offensive' has become the 'most humiliating counter-offensive'. In most places what's left of the Ukrainians didn't get through the forward lines and not even close to the actual defensive belts. And they lost another huge crop of soldiers and a bunch of the Western weapons to boot. Thankfully the DU contamination of the farmlands will be more contained to a relatively narrow strip.
The Russians set a lot of traps some of which got tripped as I've come to expect, and the effects were impressive. Have the Russians done the same amongst the more fortified defensive belts farther back? I would expect so. I would expect that Russia would fall back to the first defensive belt for no other reason than to not let the work on their various traps go to waste. At least if they are confident that they can mostly pick off the NATO systems which are spreading DU contamination early.
Seems like it is effective technique to send high ranking generals, including Grasimov himself, to the operational areas. Working with the higher level staff is a good way for the more junior officers to get noticed so I'm guessing that everyone is really trying as hard as they can. Plus it has a good effect on morale of the whole military. The down-side is that one can get killed as happened to a high ranking general recently.
I am highly confident that if I were a conscripted Ukrainian I would immediately recognize that the cause of my grief was a flood of NATO gear and I would be at least passively trying to get rid of the 30% or so which got through the corruption and on to the front lines. I sometimes get the feeling like that may be what we are seeing at the present time.
Also we are seeing more mass surrenders which is also a good sign and long overdue. We saw it early on, then not so much for a year or so. I don't have a real strong hypothesis about why, but a few include: 1) Even when the Nazi's had free reign before the SMO, there were serving soldiers who were dis-satisfied. They left the ranks, and 2) the ZioNazi SS commissars and so-called 'nationalists' upped their game and became even more brutal. Although I've not heard of it, I would expect that they are exacting retribution against the family members of POW's back home since that a common tactic of these classes of scumbags.
More and more Ukraine's options shrink until pure terrorism is the only option left to them. We'll just have to see how far NATO can push them in this direction. Alas, it could be quite a ways farther since they have broad support in such methods from the entire 'Collective West' not the least of which being the financial and media power-houses.
It is already clear that the first stage of the Ukrainian counter-offensive has completely failed, but let's not jump to conclusions. Plan A and even plan B did not work, but what if the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine still has a trump card up its sleeve in the form of plan C? After all, we have not yet seen a single British Challenger 2 tank on the battlefield and at least three-quarters of the Western-trained Offensive Guards have not been involved. What if my assumptions about the inherent defect in the training of NATO instructors are not true and the lack of coordination is primarily due to the effective work of Russian electronic warfare? In addition to Bradley, to compensate for losses, the US emergency aid package presented by Blinken also includes secure communications. Let's see.