I really did not realize how bad Ukraines geographic position actually is with Belarus taken into account, so used to thinking in terms of a Donbass region fight.
You only really have one major town to the left and right between Kiev and the Belarusian boarder, and both paths are less than 200 km from Belarus to Kiev. And since Belarus lets you attack on both sides of the river, it turns Kiev from a potential strong point difficult to flank thanks to the river, to potentially making it easier to be encircled and cut off.
And encircling Kiev does not look like it might be all that difficult, with Kiev just not physically being all that large looking at it: A full box of the urban area is about 100 km long front for complete encirclement of an area about 500 square km. A fairly strong perimeter could be maintained with about 10,000 men (100 per km), though of course you'd want more/a reserve to respond to major breakout points/troop rotations.
If they can keep of their current suggested rate of advance according to Livemap they could be encircling Kiev today or tomorrow, and if they need to encircle and move on, bottling up the garrison in Kiev (depending on the garrison size) could require a relatively small force proportional to the Russian/Belarus forces available.
And if Kiev is captured or even falls, the Ukrainian logistical situation looks like it would implode, at least from the bird eye view: anything moved by rail that has to move West to East, such as more supplies to from Europe, looks like it would have to be routed through Odesa, which seems like it might be venerable as well. This is before any softer aspects, like where depots and goverment offices are, all things that are immensely disruptive and difficult to move and get operational at a new location.
If the main realm of conflict has shifted to the North, rather than the West, I'm not sure Ukraine really has any ability to give ground: its two biggest cities, Kiev and kharkiv, are right on the boarder, with Kharkiv already in the process of being encircled and Kiev looks like it might start that process tomorrow or the day after.
If both of those fall, I'm not sure how much capability Ukraine has to maintain organized resistance, along with the morale hit of losing the capital the two largest cities. It just so divides up the remaining zones the Ukrainian forces could be in and hinders their ability to put up united resistance, rather than being eliminated peacemeal.
If Kiev is as logistically, morally, and strategically critical as my initial looking suggests, perhaps we see a slowing down and very hard fighting for that last 50 km of advance Russia needs to make to encircle Kiev, then a couple of hard counter attacks to try and break encirclement, but if Kiev does fall the rest of the resistance collapses fairly quickly.
And if taking Kiev effectively ends the war, the advances made are much more dangerous to the Ukrainian war effort than I initially suspected.
www.newsweek.com
