YazataMay 18, 2022 02:28 AM (This post was last modified: May 18, 2022 07:22 PM by Yazata.)
(May 17, 2022 12:02 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Satire aside, I guess Mariupol is a victory for the Russians. Up until then, detaining an American female basketball star was their biggest prize.
I guess that they can boast the semi-circle of occupied territory around the eastern end of Ukraine. And they now have a land bridge between Russia and Crimea.
But that's pretty thin gruel when you put it up against their failure to take Kyiv almost effortlessly in the war's first hours and quickly replace the Ukrainian government with people more friendly to Russia. And while Russia wanted the war to be a demonstration that Russia is back as a superpower, what's become apparent is that the Russian army has been humiliated and exposed in its ineptitude.
As somebody said, before the war the Russians were supposed to have the second strongest army in the world. But now it's clear that the Russian army is only the second strongest army in Ukraine.
It isn't clear how many Russian soldiers have died or how many hundreds of trucks and armored vehicles have been blown up, but it's pretty clear that it will take the Russian army years to recover from this debacle. Their formidable reputation that they've had since defeating Germany in 1945 is probably gone for good.
Quote:Sounds as if Putin never considered losing the war.
He probably didn't. It seemed like a sure thing. It wasn't just Putin, here in the US the Pentagon also thought that the Russians would win a quick victory. They out-numbered the Ukrainians by a big margin, they had more modern high tech equipment. It was hard to see how the Russians could possibly lose.
You know, this is a war that military scholars in war colleges around the world are going to be studying for years to come. How did Ukraine pull off what was seemingly impossible?
I'm certainly no expert, but it seems to me that Ukraine's biggest advantage might have been their Territorial Defense Forces. Local reservists called up to defend their own communities. Since they were fighting for their homes and families, they were far more motivated than the Russian conscripts they were facing. They were familiar with their home areas and knew all the back roads, while the Russians were often lost.
Another big lesson seems to be the big advantage that modern anti-tank guided weapons have opened up over even the most modern tanks. In the last few years the US Marine Corps has retired all of its heavy tanks. Many critics said that was crazy, but it turns out that maybe they knew something.
But a lot of it is just Russian ineptitude. Their lack of logistics that had columns of tanks running out of gas and being abandoned along the roads. Troops looting Ukrainian supermarkets because they weren't being fed. Armored vehicles driving down roads in long columns so that a few plucky Ukrainians with anti-tank rockets in the woodline maybe a kilometer away could easily pick off at their leisure.
The original air and missile assault on the first day of the war was much too small. It was anything but an American style "shock and awe" opening salvo. The Russians never put all the Ukrainian air bases out of commission and the Ukrainian air force is still in the air and is still effective, 80 days later. Getting control of the sky should have been the Russians' first priority.
And US military observers have remarked on the lack of large combined arms maneuvers. The Russians seem unable to combine multiple units into a single attack and instead have each small battalion sized unit fighting independently. That's probably why nothing has come of the many tens of thousands of soldiers the Russians gathered in the Izium area. They are just unable to coordinate that many soldiers in one World War II style offensive campaign with sufficient mass to punch through the Ukrainian defenders. Coordination of ground forces with air support from the air force has also been very poor. Just bad command and leadership all around.
Quote:Does a guy like Putin take advice or does he enlist the aid of close advisors, people too afraid to tell him the war won’t be easily won and that bordering countries will eventually join NATO out of fear of being next Ukraine? Surely there had to be some head shakers who knew better. How much of this war is the dictator’s personality?
You would think that somebody knew that the Russian army wasn't nearly as fearsome as it appeared on paper. But the generals (whose responsibility it was) probably didn't want to admit it to the boss.
Since it's been exposed so obviously to the watching world, I expect heads to roll when this is over. I'd expect the entire military command to be replaced.
YazataMay 19, 2022 08:50 PM (This post was last modified: May 19, 2022 08:54 PM by Yazata.)
Unfortunately the guy who does Militaryland (the best single source on the Ukraine war) is ill and out of action until he recovers. A big loss to the informal Osint community.
Interesting article from Forbes that makes many of the same points I made in the last post.
YazataMay 20, 2022 04:49 AM (This post was last modified: May 20, 2022 05:21 AM by Yazata.)
Here's video, of uncertain provenance but probably filmed by Russians since the Russians still occupy this area, from a pro-Ukrainian youtube channel. It purports to show the aftermath of the debacle at the pontoon bridge over the Siverskyi Donets river east of Izium, where Russian forces were grouped up waiting to cross when Ukrainian artillery somewhere on the other side targeted them and massacred hundreds of soldiers and scores of vehicles.
It's interesting that Russian websites and bloggers have been talking openly about this disaster, which leads some to believe that Russian public opinion might be starting to move towards being more critical. They still support their country against Ukraine but they are critical of their army's performance and the war's cost in young lives (like theirs). The opinion is spreading among ordinary Russians that the war has been botched.
KorneeMay 21, 2022 03:55 PM (This post was last modified: May 21, 2022 03:59 PM by Kornee.)
(May 18, 2022 02:28 AM)Yazata Wrote:
(May 17, 2022 12:02 PM)Zinjanthropos Wrote: Satire aside, I guess Mariupol is a victory for the Russians. Up until then, detaining an American female basketball star was their biggest prize.
I guess that they can boast the semi-circle of occupied territory around the eastern end of Ukraine. And they now have a land bridge between Russia and Crimea.
But that's pretty thin gruel when you put it up against their failure to take Kyiv almost effortlessly in the war's first hours and quickly replace the Ukrainian government with people more friendly to Russia. And while Russia wanted the war to be a demonstration that Russia is back as a superpower, what's become apparent is that the Russian army has been humiliated and exposed in its ineptitude.
As somebody said, before the war the Russians were supposed to have the second strongest army in the world. But now it's clear that the Russian army is only the second strongest army in Ukraine.
It isn't clear how many Russian soldiers have died or how many hundreds of trucks and armored vehicles have been blown up, but it's pretty clear that it will take the Russian army years to recover from this debacle. Their formidable reputation that they've had since defeating Germany in 1945 is probably gone for good. .....
Not imo in reality anywhere near so formidable when one considers the huge odds facing their German opponents from the very start of (actually well before) Operation Barbarossa.
An incomplete and admittedly somewhat ad hoc checklist:
1: German military operations against the USSR were likely (though not proven) undermined severely owing to the cracking of the (almost universally accepted as) 'unbreakable' Enigma cypher codes by late 1940 - well ahead of June 22 1941 Operation Barbarossa invasion. Intelligence gathering and foreign spy operations in general were weighted heavily in favor of the 'Allies': https://www.histclo.com/essay/war/ww2/code/ww2-int.html
In no small part such weighting owed to the tolerance and/or covert promotion of highly motivated and politically active communist parties/cells in all 'Western Democracies'. In apparent irony and apparent contradiction, 'super-rich capitalists' were the prime enablers of this - detailed in Antony Sutton's 'Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution'. (He also produced a seeming parallel: 'Wall Street and the rise of Hitler' - though the Big Banker's long-term goals were very different one to the other.)
Germany only became aware of late 1940 Bletchly Park breakthrough decades after WWII had ended. Knowing their (assumed 'secure') operational plans ahead of time - the 'Western Allied partners' almost certainly made it an urgent priority to share cracked Enigma intercepts with their Soviet 'gallant ally' ASAP. (fore)Knowledge is power!
Top ranking German military personnel secretly worked for the other side, leaking vital intel to the allies particularly the USSR. Very little flowed the other way.
2: Just like it was for Napoleon's 1812 ill-fated French expedition against Russia: https://www.theknowledgebase.academy/201...in-russia/
, Mother Nature in the form of a particularly severe winter intervened in Stalin's favor. Hitler had gambled on a quick victory but when that stalled, winter conditions led to severe attrition of German forces not equipped for even 'normal' winter conditions. Partly miscalculation on Hitler's part, but also a lot to do with 'the gods are agin us!'
3: Oil! Like the USA, and unlike Germany, the USSR was awash with natural resources vital for an extended mechanized war. This historian makes a good argument - the Wehrmacht war machine virtually ground to a halt owing to fuel shortages, in turn owing to lack of easily and economically processable petroleum reserves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVo5I0xNRhg
4: Raw manpower. The traditional rule of thumb for an invader is to have at least a 3:1 manpower numerical advantage over their opponents. In the case of the Germans vs the USSR, it was about the other way around! Again this reflected Hitler's inflated sense of German superiority at all levels. While the allies did generally reckon on needing a 3:1 battlefield troop numerical advantage to obtain parity, the actual odds were still much worse for the Germans, tied down as they were with having to simultaneously fight on both Eastern and Western fronts, as well as maintain control over the already conquered European territories. The USSR had no such issues - even Poland had largely been subjugated at Germany's not russia's military expenditure.
5: The very large American and British campaign to prioritize supplying the USSR with vital strategic materials and technologies and equipment. This has been well covered recently in another thread.
By contrast, Japan and in particular Mussolini's Italy, were of minimal help to Germany's needs. Actually, arrogant Mussolini's foolish military misadventures were a significant if not actually major contributor to Germany's eventual loss, and Italy would have been a far better 'asset' if following Franco's Spanish position of official neutrality. But such is history.
6: Last but not least - Hitler himself became Stalin's greatest asset towards the later stages of WWII. Owing to his absolutist overruling of wiser military minds (increasing paranoid 'always attack - never retreat!' strategically disastrous mentality). Fueled at least in part by a parallel increasing dependence on narcotics. In that last matter he was not alone. Another case of 'the gods are agin us!'
In short, the Soviet victory was in fact very much a joint allied victory that had required numerous elements to fortuitously come together when and how they did. Russia's current performance then not really such a surprise or contrast to their over-hyped 'great patriotic war' victory over Nazism.
Russians are counterattacking on a small scale north of Kharkiv. These are mostly little infantry actions of no more than a few hundred men. The goal seems to be to perserve a buffer zone along the Russian border and to hold positions within artillery range of Kharkiv.
To the east of Kharkiv, the Russian offensive south out of Izium remains stalled. But just to the east of Izium and west of Lyman the situation around an important dam has been confused. The Russians claimed a week ago that they captured it, but that proved to be untrue. Then the Russians clamed that the Ukrainians had blown up the dam. But today video of Russians at the dam seem to verify that they have finally captured it and that it is intact apart from damage perhaps due to air strikes. There seems to be some embarassment on the Russian side that a little force of Ukrainians held off a much larger Russian force attacking them from three sides for a week, and then managed to escape through the woods to their own lines.
To the south of Kharkiv, a small city (~50k pop) called Lozova had its recently renovated community center blown up by a Russian cruise missile. The Russians claim that it was being used by the Territorial Defense Forces, which may or may not be true.
Further east in the direction of Severodonetsk the Russians seem to have been making some advances that might prove to be important. They are squeezing in on the city from the east, but don't seem to be interested in Mariupol style street fighting if they can avoid it. The Russians have succeeded in blowing up a major bridge spanning the Severskyi Donets river between Severodonetsk and Lychansk.
Instead, the Russians hope to encircle Severodonetsk avd its neighbors. so as to cut off the Ukrainian forces there. The original plan seems to have originally been to bite off the entire east of Ukraine by advancing south from Izium and north from Around Mariupol. (The Ukrainian general staff still believes that Russia is planning this, but aren't ready yet.)
But with the seeming failure of that idea, at least for the time being, they are attempting a smaller encirclement of Severodonetsk itself. This involves a push towards the north from Popasna and southwards from around Bilohorivka. The northern half of that pincer movement currently appears stalled. But the advance from the south is getting lots of talk on the Russian internet, claiming the the Russians have broken through the Ukrainian lines and that the Ukrainians are scrambling to regroup. If it's accurate information then the Russians might be close to cutting the main road link between Severodonetsk and the rest of Ukraine at a place called Soledar. This highway isn't the only road connection to Severodonetsk, but it is the shortest and most direct route.
The situation in Azovstal is confused. It appears (unconfirmed) that not all the Ukrainians have surrendered and some are proposing to fight to the death. Or something. Unclear if this is accurate or how many fighters are involved if it is true. There's also the fact that Russia says that they have received more than a thousand POWs but the Red Cross says that the number registered with them is in the hundreds. There's been demands in the Russian parliament that members of the Azov Regiment not be given POW status and instead be executed for being "nazis". So maybe prisoners from Azov aren't being registered with the Red Cross and will just... disappear. Which might explain why some of the Ukrainian fighters are refusing to surrender. (Assuming that's what's happening.) Lots of Fog of War in Mariupol.
In southern Ukraine, the Russians seem to have abandoned their plans to hold a referendum of creating a Kherson People's Republic, probably because they knew that more than 90% would vote 'no'. So there's now talk of just annexing the region to Russia. Russian reinforcements in the area seem to be digging into defensive positions. The Ukrainian general staff is still worried about further Russian offensives in southern Ukraine, but the Russians may just be hoping to hang onto what they have already grabbed.
Right now, the Ukraine war seems to have four broad zones in an arc around eastern Ukraine. The northwest, around Kharkiv. The northeast, from Izium east around partially encircled Severodonetsk. The southeast, from around Donetsk city to around Melitopol. And the southwest north of the Crimea around Kherson.
Just about the only part of Ukraine where the situation has changed in the last couple of days is in the northeast. The Russians are having what might be significant successes there. The Russians have indeed broken through the Ukrainian line at Popasna, but have been finding the going difficult from there. But they have been making advances south of Popasna as well, as Ukrainian forces make tactical retreats from that area. It's possible that those troops are moving to combat the Russian breakthrough at Popasna. So the Russians seem to be having success simply through superior force of numbers. But they are still a long way from encircling Severodonetsk. The main road from Severodonetsk to the rest of Ukraine is under artillery fire though, making road passage difficult.
There's also some kind of significant Russian offensive underway against Ukrainian-held Lyman. The town (pop ~ 20k, but most of the civilian population has been evacuated) has been shelled for days, and yesterday Russian troops entered it and fighting was ongoing. I've seen no word since. Since most of the available information is coming from the Ukrainians, their silence suggests to me that Lyman might have fallen. For several weeks the Russians have been moving the focus of their attention eastwards from Izium to Lyman. They have been bottled up in Izium for weeks by stout Ukrainian opposition and may hope to make Lyman the new launching pad for their broader Donbas offensive.
And that's about it, there's little movement on the ground in the other sectors.
Around Kharkiv the Russians appear to want to hang on to a strip of land along the border and repelled a Ukrainian attack eastwards that threatened the road from Belgorod to Izium. But the Russians seem to be making no efforts to advance towards Kharkiv again.
Mariupol has indeed surrendered and fighting has stopped there.
A partisan resistance has appeared in Melitopol (not to be confused with Mariupol) and recently in Enthodar where the huge nuclear power plant is. In that Russian occupied town, unknown individuals placed an improvised explosive device (IED) in a mail box and exploded it when the Russian-appointed mayor was walking by. He was severely injured and airlifted to hospital in Melitopol where he is in intensive care.
In the southwest additional Russian reinforcements have continued to arrive but seem to be taking defensive positions. The Russians really seem to want to annex Kherson which is immediately north of the Crimea.
Edit Russians celebrating at Lyman's city hall. The three flags are Russia's, the separatist Donetsk People's Republic, and the Soviet Union (!!!). The Russian soldiers really do seem to think that they are fighting to restore the superpower glory of the Soviet Union.
Map of the current situation in the east from the excellent Ukraine War Mapper twitter page here. It should allow readers to locate all the unfamiliar towns mentioned here.
The Ukrainian defenders from Lyman (pop.20k) are presumably falling back to Sloviansk (pop. 107k). Russians from Izium have wanted to attack Sloviansk for weeks, but have been stopped by the Ukrainians. I guess that the Russians are hoping to make that attack from out of Lyman now.
And Russians who broke out of Popasna had cut the road from Lysychansk to Bakhmut a couple of days ago but the Ukrainians have regained control of the road. But the Russians are located not far off the road and are firing on all vehicles that pass, whether civilian or military.
The threat of Russian encirclement of the Ukrainians in Severodonetsk and Lysychansk is obvious from the map. That small encirclement seems to be the Russians' main objective now that they have given up their plan for a grand encirclement of all of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in eastern Ukraine. Most foreign military observers think the Russians lack the capacity to successfully do the bigger one, which would cut off much of the Ukrainian army concentrated in the east.
YazataMay 29, 2022 06:25 PM (This post was last modified: May 29, 2022 07:12 PM by Yazata.)
Latest Polish arms deliveries to Ukraine include 18 Polish-manufactured 'Krab' self-propelled howitzers. These are British-designed artillery pieces on a tracked tank chassis, capable firing a round every 10 seconds with a range of up to 40 km (24 miles)! The Poles say that 100 Ukrainians have trained to operate them.
Poland says that it has delivered as many as 250 Russian T-72 tanks (presumably dating from the 1980s when Poland was part of the Warsaw Pact), 'Gozdzik' self-propelled howitzers (a Soviet era weapon the Poles are replacing with the 'Krabs'), and Grad rocket launchers (also a Soviet-era Russian weapon). The Poles have also provided air-to-air missiles compatible for Ukrainian jets, plus Polish-made drones. These include reconaissance drones plus the Polish 'Warmate' drone, which is a 'loitering munition' similar to the American 'Switchblade', essentially a kamikaze drone that can fly above a battlefield for some time until it is commanded to dive and strike some target. (Ukraine has received some 700 Switchblades from the US.)
YazataMay 29, 2022 07:38 PM (This post was last modified: May 30, 2022 05:05 AM by Yazata.)
In today's news, the Russians appear to have entered Severodonetsk and fighting is happening there. Given that the Ukrainian defenders are outnumbered and are facing the threat of encirclement from the Russian breakthrough at Popasna, there's talk that the Ukrainian general staff is weighing the possibility of withdrawing them westwards towards Sloviansk. But there's no sign of that yet and in fact the Ukrainians have been counterattacking south of Severodonetsk.
edit - The mayor of Severodonetsk says that there is fighting around the bus station and that both electricity and cell service are down.
KorneeMay 30, 2022 12:40 AM (This post was last modified: May 30, 2022 01:29 AM by Kornee.)
I know full well this will ignite a full-on hate-filled tirade against me from one member here in particular. Nevertheless, anyone who wants to understand what's really at stake, what's really led to the current Russia-Ukraine war, and who is actually laughing their heads off at the 'whity' goy-on-goy mutual slaughter that is unfolding: https://englishnews.org/2020/04/10/the-j...prisoners/
And an interesting, though obviously 'controversial' and highly debatable twist according to an Islamic scholar: https://www.jpost.com/international/article-703061
And....here's how the Russia-Ukraine conflict is 'great news' as seen from one not-so-insignificant religious Jew faction's claim: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/14585501/r...-prophecy/
Oh vey!
May 18, 2022 02:28 AM
(This post was last modified: May 18, 2022 07:22 PM by Yazata.)
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