Armchair Warlord@ArmchairW
General Gerasimov recently announced the village of Borovaya had been taken by the Russian Army. This set off a storm of accusations that he was lying, because no mapper had Russian troops anywhere near the town in force.
Today the MoD posted proof they seized it weeks ago.⬇️
You can watch the video for yourself, it's attached. Notice that the leaves are off the trees, indicating that the assault went in and the Russians cleared the town during the March-April timeframe. Thus as far as the Russian Army was concerned, their holding Borovaya was old news and they were presumably quite surprised to see frenzied Telegram blowback on the announcement.
No "serious" mapper as of yesterday had Russian troops anywhere near the town - most had their front line approximately five kilometers to the north. And as I pointed out earlier, this seizure was actually old news to the point the Russians felt comfortable announcing it officially. By now the true Russian front line is likely some ways south of the town and the area is secure.
There's an old saying in America, "The people who know aren't talking, and the people who talk don't know." The Russians have always had good operational security in general, and earlier this year one of the only side-channels that voenkor commentators used to communicate with their few actual front-line sources - pirated Starlink terminals - were bricked.* Cut off from the front line, Russian civilian commentators fell back on analyzing Ukrainian propaganda (something they've always heavily relied upon) at the exact moment the Ukrainians also seem to have tightened their own OPSEC and become institutionally aware of the role their own propaganda was playing in mapping Russian advances for the public and refuting their narrative of constant success.
* This is why broenkors have been screaming and rending their garments about Starlink access. It's their leak vector. The Russian Army never officially used pirated terminals to any significant extent and may have in fact intentionally triggered the crackdown to choke off an OPSEC risk by putting a couple pirated terminals on cruise drones.
I specifically believe that the Ukrainians have imposed media and even propaganda blackouts in two sectors - Kupyansk and Zaporozhie - in which they attempted to launch counteroffensives in the last six months. Both of those attacks failed, but the blackouts seemingly remain to avoid embarrassment - and given the Russians only post front updates sporadically and in accordance with their own OPSEC requirements, this means that the front lines in both sectors probably bear little resemblance to the war mappers' current traces.
Given that all of this also happened in the February-April timeframe this further suggests that the Russian "pause" in March of this year was simply a reporting artifact and that they're sitting on significant unrecognized gains. Which the Russian MoD has in fact reported on two occasions now during high-level updates, but the mappers refused to believe them!
