Russian Ukraine Invasion

Today's Bakhmut news is focused north of town and comes in at least three versions.

1. The official Ukrainian version is that they still holld Krasna Hora, are reinforcing nearby Paraskoviivka, and hold Berkhivka.

2. Russian claims and unofficial off-the-record rumors and talk from within the Ukrainian army say that Krasna Hora has fallen, Ukraine is pulling out of Paraskoviivka, and forward Wagner elements  are already in Berkhivka where fighting is happening.

3. Kind of interpolating between those versions produces something like this map from Rybar (an independent Russian channel that has good sources and is often critical of the failings of the Russian war effort). It shows Russia in possession of or in the process of taking Krasna Hora, the Ukrainians rushing forces to Paraskoviivka to stop the advance (but getting flanked from out of Blahodatne) and Ukraine still in possession of Berkhivka.

I guess the next few days will clear up the fog of war. 

But a consensus seems to be forming that Ukraine needs to start extracting its troops (thousands of them) from Bakhmut and its surroundings. Russia would no doubt call it a victory in a major battle, but there's an argument to be made for living to fight another day.

On a more strategic scale, there's lots and lots of talk that a big new Russian offensive is set to start in the next week or so. Perhaps as large as hundreds of thousands of men and thousands of armored vehicles, on the scale of the original invasion. The Ukrainians are reinforcing their whole northern border from Kharkiv to the Polish border. But most of the Ukrainian army is in the stretch of Donetsk oblast from Kreminna to Donetsk, centered on Bakhmut.

And speculation/rumor is that much of this Bakhmut fighting and movements in Belarus are intended to lure Ukrainian forces away from where Russia really intends to attack. This, so the speculation goes, is in Luhansk oblast east of the Oskil river, where the equivalent of several nato divisions have supposedly gathered. If there's truth to this, it's the reverse of the Kharkiv rout, where the Ukrainians unexpectedly attacked a weakly held stretch of the Russian front and attacked the main Russian forces from the rear as they scrambled to escape in disorder.

It sounds hard to pull off in this age of spy satellite imagery. But the Ukrainians managed to do it and maybe the Russians think they can too. There are certainly lots of Russian army convoys driving around and it can be hard to tell where they are going or whether the ones on today's satellite photos are the same as the ones on yesterdays.

what will russia do if it takes bakhmut ?
fill it with conscripts
which will make it easier for ukraine to hit them with artillery
giving ukraine a far better kill ratio in theory

Great News

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/3uEZXUcmnZo

---

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/HnPJKoTNNlY

Belgerod
i would land a few artillery rounds on that Z as a show of force if i was ukrainian.
so the people of Belgerod know if its marked with a Z it becomes a target.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64543618

(Feb 10, 2023 06:02 AM)Yazata Wrote: 3. Kind of interpolating between those versions produces something like this map from Rybar (an independent Russian channel that has good sources and is often critical of the failings of the Russian war effort). It shows Russia in possession of or in the process of taking Krasna Hora, the Ukrainians rushing forces to Paraskoviivka to stop the advance (but getting flanked from out of Blahodatne) and Ukraine still in possession of Berkhivka.

I guess the next few days will clear up the fog of war.

My intuition seems to have been good and most of the maps now resemble Rybar's.

It appears that a group of Ukrainian troops were surrounded and trapped in Krasna Hora and the Ukrainian forces in Paraskoviivka were there in part to punch through and extract them, which was done successfully. The Russians now hold Krasna Hora and there are photos of Wagner fighters there. The Russians have entered Paraskoviivka and fighting is taking place there.

A short distance south in Bakhmut still has Russians trying hard to advance while the Ukrainians fight furiously to stop them. To the extent the map has changed in Bakhmut, it's just a building here and a building there.

The bigger picture in Bakhmut is that there are three roads to the west that the Ukrainians have been using. The Russians have succeeded in rendering two of the three impassible. So the whole Ukrainian defense is dependent on keeping that one lifeline open.

Wagner fighters in Krasna Hora

excellent report about the massive losses in the Orc attempted advance possibly up to 50 armored IFV and tanks destroyed unknown number of orcs killed.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/yn1w7GJKMbA

---

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1tzSax6_wLc

---

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/U01pFce_C0Q

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/KwfGeVra5kk

did elon really pull some access to star link from Ukraine military ?

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/pZwbgF7H4EI

I don't think that Putin has destroyed Russia. But there's a stronger argument that he's badly damaged Russia's conventional military war-fighting ability, or at least displayed its already existing weakness for the whole world to see.

The question now is whether they learn from those deficiencies and address their many problems so as to grow stronger in the future.

Actually, the whole world can learn from this war, really the first between two technologically advanced peer-adversaries since World War II. What works better than expected? (ATGMs, long range precision artillery, drones) and what works worse (Russian command and control, Russian logistics, Russian training and motivation, conventional armor against modern ATGMs) I expect that lots of countries will be changing how their own armies look and operate after this instructive demonstration war.