Andrei Raevsky Wrote A Superb Piece...

 ... on defense and, especially, mobile defense by Russian forces in Ukraine. Here is a single paragraph which both describes the SMO on the ground and shows Saker's professional aptitude when speaking on such matters:

The next thing which I need to bring up is force concentrations.  The war in the Ukraine is more similar to soccer in which attackers and defenders fight each other all over the field than to US football in which there is a clear line of scrimmage and where everything is about “conquering” more terrain or advancing downfield.   This means that there are always temporarily unoccupied “grey zones” (think of them as parts of the soccer field which happen to be empty but which could quickly become a “combat area” if a pass is made there and two players will fight each other for control of the ball). Just these two facts very strongly suggest that a mobile defense is the way to go on such terrain.  These are generalizations, of course, but by and large they apply.

Saker's analogy to naval warfare is also very apt and fully applies, because SMO is primarily a maneuverable affair on Russian side. So when Andrei concludes with this: 

Having said all that, if the next time the Russians retreat for a few kilometers you want to either freak out and declare that “all is lost” or proclaim with great gravitas that “Russia is losing the war”, by all means, feel free to do so.  I will just ignore these claims simply because, frankly, I am sick and tired of repeating the same truisms over and over and over again, especially when plenty of “commentators” don’t even bother reading what I wrote, they just want to flood the comments section with their talking points! If you rather trust Girkin-Strelkov or Arestovich that is fine by me as long as you don’t have to parrot their nonsense in the comments section which I consider as “deliberate pollution of the comments section”.  That will get you banned and, once we have the “comments for signed-up commentators only” thing ready, I will simply remove you from the approved list.

I can only subscribe to every word here, with the exception of banning people unless they are into you face IPSO trolls or manifest ass-holes, other than that, it is OK. Read the whole thing at Saker's blog. In related news, the volume of squealing and BS emanating from NATO swamps is a very good indicator of a scale of catastrophe, both military and economic, which combined West is facing and many begin to grasp what is going on and what SMO is all about:

The European metals industry has called on the EU for emergency action to prevent a collapse of the sector which faces an existential threat from surging power and gas prices.  In a letter to the top EU officials, including European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, the European metals industry association Eurometaux wrote that “the business leaders of Europe’s non-ferrous metals industry are writing together to raise the alarm about Europe’s worsening energy crisis and its existential threat to our future.” As much as 50% of the EU’s aluminum and zinc capacity has already been forced offline due to the power crisis, Eurometaux said in the letter. Significant curtailments have also been made in silicon and ferroalloys production, and further impacts felt across the copper and nickel sectors, the association added. 

As many of us continued to stress for years--Russia's conflict is NOT just with Nazi regime in Ukraine, it is with combined West and its leader, the United States, and that Ukraine, while extremely important, is but one of theaters of operations in this cataclysmic struggle between emerging new world order, more just and predictable, and forces of utter destruction which Pax Americana came to embody. This Neo-colonial regime is not just doomed, it already lost and the world is in the stage of mopping operations, with Europe being driven back to her western-most peninsula and with the United States being cut down to its proper size. Economic reality of the combined West is such that it is being dwarfed now by the emerging Eurasian economies, while remaining militarily impotent in a serious peer-to-peer conflict.  They don't like it and they feel the existential threat to themselves--they are correct. Their rule is over.