The Ukraine war thread
-
Abandoned Russian base holds secrets of retreat in Ukraine
In all, the bunker yielded thousands of pages of documents. Reuters reviewed more than a thousand of them. They detail the inner workings of the Russian military and shed new light on events leading up to one of President Vladimir Putin's most stinging battlefield defeats: Russia’s chaotic retreat from Ukraine’s northeast in September.
In the weeks before that defeat, Russian forces were struggling with surveillance and electronic warfare. They were using off-the-shelf drones flown by barely trained soldiers. Their equipment for jamming Ukrainian communications was often out of action. By the end of August, the documents show, the force was depleted, hit by death, desertions and combat stress. Two units – accounting for about a sixth of the total force – were operating at 20% of their full strength.
The documents also reveal the increasing effectiveness of Ukraine’s forces and offer clues to how the eight-month-old war might unfold, with Russia now under intense pressure on the southern front around the Black Sea coast. In the weeks before their retreat, Russian forces around Balakliia, a town 90 kilometres south of Kharkiv, came under heavy bombardment from HIMARS rocket launchers, recently supplied by the United States. The precision missiles repeatedly hit command posts.
A Russian officer who served in the Balakliia force for three months, described to Reuters a sense of menace hanging over the occupiers. One of his friends bled to death in early September after a Ukrainian strike on a command post in a nearby village.
“It’s a game of roulette,” said the officer, who asked to be identified by his military call sign Plakat Junior 888. “You either get lucky, or you are unlucky. The strikes can land anywhere.”
-
Insightful interview with Mykola Bielieskov, Ukrainian military analyst, on fighting an asymmetrical war.
Excerpt:
I am inclined to think that the nuclear strike option is actually very, very risky for Putin and his regime. If it happens, then all the states which adopted favourable or neutral positions toward Russia will revise them. The strike will also be the point of no return for the West. Up to now, the Biden Administration has regularly emphasized that the US policy endgame is not regime change in Russia but a change of Russian foreign policy. However, if the nuclear taboo gets violated, then I think regime change will become a primary goal of US policy. Global security should not be dependent on one person who is, I would say, out of touch with reality.
Complete interview:
-
The Wagner Group, also known as PMC Wagner, ChVK Wagner, or CHVK Vagner, is a Russian paramilitary organization. It is variously described as a private military company, a network of mercenaries, or a de facto private army of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Wikipedia
-
I don’t think naming it The Tchaikovsky Group would have quite the same connotation as Wagner among Russian men.
Know what I mean?
