The Ukraine war thread
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As bad as the damage looked from the Kerch Strait Bridge explosion, Russia is still using the bridge:
- The rail bridge has two tracks going each way, and they ran a test 15-car train on the other span. I have a civil engineer/bridge inspector friend who thinks it’s probably unwise to use the rail bridge at all, as the fire has almost certainly weakened the structure through spalling. But Russia doesn’t have a lot of options.
- The destroyed train hasn’t been cleared yet.
- They’ve opened up the surviving lane for traffic. “It’s been said that the road span can handle 20 cars an hour and has a weight capacity of 3.5 tons.” That’s rural mail route capacity, not “support a major front in a war” capacity.
- Russia is trying to repair the bridge.
- They’re using passenger-only ferries to cross, but the run rate is so low they may only have one ferry in service.
Peter Zeihan says it’s potentially a turning point in the war:
- “By far the most significant development of the war to date.” I would say that the failure to take Hostomel Airport in the opening phases of the war was bigger, as that meant Russia’s high risk/high reward decapitation strike had failed.
- “The Kerch bridge is the only large-scale rail connection between mainland Russia and the Crimean peninsula, which is home to about two and a half million people.”
- All other rail lines are under threat of Ukrainian artillery.
- He reiterates that everything in Russia runs on rail, as they never built a modern road network in most of the country.
- “With Kerch being the only real connection, it is the primary primary way that the Russians Supply Crimea in the southwestern front with not just troops and equipment, but with food and fuel.”
- He estimates the bridge spans couldn’t be repaired without several months of work.
- “Now that the Ukrainians know it can be done, you can bet they’re going to try to hit other parts of it to make sure the thing stays offline.”
- “For the first time we have a path forward for the Ukrainians here to win that is not long and windy.”
- Russia finally has a problem it can’t just shove bodies at. “You don’t throw a half a million people at logistics. This is something where either you have the connections or you don’t.”
- Russian troops in Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Crimea are “suddenly on their own.”
- They can now only supply those regions in two ways. “One is by truck, and we know that because of all the Javelins that have been put into Ukraine, and all the RPGs, that the Russians are almost out of their entire military tactical truck fleet, and they’ve started using city buses and Scooby-Doo vans, and those just can’t take the volume of stuff that an active frontline needs.”
- The second way is by ship, and if they can’t supply anti-ship missiles, then Ukrainians can Muscova “every single cargo ship that the Russians try to bring in.”
- “Losing cargo ships in that volume, losing trucks and buses in that volume, is hollowing out the entirety of the Russian internal transport system. This is the sort of thing that if you bleed this fast, it takes a decade to recover from, and in a war zone that is not going to happen.”
- And sanctions make everything harder.
There still seems to be some confusion over just what blew up the bridge. While truck bomb is still the most widely accepted theory, supposedly Russia scans all trucks before the enter the bridge. And Suchomimus has a video up showing something in the water just before the blast (what isn’t clear).
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Funny you should say that. A close friend of mine from undergrad years worked on the Russia and East European desk and embassies for 25 years with Min. Foreign Affairs in Ottawa. His comment to me when this war started last February was that Putin’s actions were irrational and absent even the distorted logic of his Soviet predecessors when they invaded Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.
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I'm wondering how long Russia will be able to escalate short of nukes. They have to be running short of long-range precision missiles. Maybe they have a lot of non-precision missiles they can launch at civilian targets, much like the Palestinians do. I really don't know.
"My pronouns are FA/FO." - Mik, 2024
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@Mik said in The Ukraine war thread:
They have to be running short of long-range precision missiles.
Indeed they are. A lot of the chatter is how these recent strikes by cruise missiles and other precision weapons serve no strategic purpose. Their goal is to wither the Ukrainian people. Good luck with that.
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Russian joke for today:
Иван, что значит частичный запуск мобилизация?
Федя, это значит, что тебя заберут из дома целым и вернут по частям.
Translation:
Ivan, what does partial mobilization mean?
Fedya, it means that they take you from home in one piece and return you [from Ukraine] in pieces.
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Lawrence Freedman analysis. Worth the read.
Excerpt:
It no longer seems preposterous to suggest that Russia can lose this war. The images of late February, of Ukrainians making Molotov cocktails, have been replaced by those of highly professional forces on the move. The Russian army is a shadow of its former self, and its former self was less than it claimed. Well over seven months into the war its best units have been torn apart. Their replacements are often cobbled together using whoever happens to be available. Years of defence production have been lost, with valuable equipment captured by the enemy. Many senior commanders have been killed while the officer corps has been shredded. Troops at the front are having a harrowing experience and are consequently demoralised. The race is now on to establish defensive lines that can be held and cope with an enemy that has superior intelligence, equipment, and morale. Moscow now faces the prospect of the attrition of its armed forces continuing apace as its occupation becomes increasingly untenable..
https://samf.substack.com/p/retribution-and-regime-change?utm_source=email
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@Mik said in The Ukraine war thread:
Uh oh.
Not certain it is that big a deal. The terrain along that border -extensive marshlands and thick forest - is conducive to a defending force and less than desirable for an advancing force. That leaves the existing road system and we know what happened to Russian forces on those roads last February and March.
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"My pronouns are FA/FO." - Mik, 2024
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In another thread, someone here mentioned a meddlesome priest. As of late, Elon Musk is turning out to be just that:
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Russia makes arrests in the Crimea bridge attack. Five are Russians. Some of the add on articles are interesting as well.
I particularly like the last one about the G7 using frozen Russian assets to rebuild Ukraine. The Russian response?
"A Group of Seven (G-7) proposal to use frozen Russian assets to finance the rebuilding of Ukraine drew sharp criticism from Moscow.
"It’s just pure international racketeering," Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Wednesday. "
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The irretrievable losses of the Russian army in Ukraine can be more than 90 thousand people. Two sources told Important Stories about this: one is a former officer of the Russian special services, the second is a current FSB officer.
The irretrievable losses include those killed, missing, those who died of wounds in hospitals, as well as the wounded who cannot return to military service.
The figure voiced by our interlocutors is close to the data that the UK Secretary of Defense announced in early September . According to Ben Wallace, over 25,000 Russian soldiers were killed in Ukraine. The British Ministry of Defense estimated the total number of losses of the Russian army at more than 80 thousand people.
Recall that the last time the Russian Ministry of Defense reported on losses was in September. Then Sergei Shoigu said that 5,937 Russian servicemen were killed in Ukraine.
At the end of September, Important Stories wrote about the state of the Russian army seven months after the start of the invasion.
Comments from the RWEC:
ust two weeks ago I would have told you that 90,000 KIA/WIA was crazy, but with Russian forces actively digging in for the worst in most places that they aren’t retreating, I have to give today’s report serious credence.
Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Readers
know I’ve been erring on the cautious side since the beginning of this stupid war, discounting Kyiv’s claims, like that “63,380 dead” in the infographic above. Last week, I was willing to concede that as many as 20,000 Russians might be KIA.The real number could indeed be much higher, so bear with me while I do some back-of-the-envelope math for you.
Typically, the ratio of wounded to killed (WIA to KIA) in modern war is about three to one. Three wounded soldiers, many lightly enough to be returned to action, for every one soldier killed.
The United States is notorious — in the very best possible way — for going to extraordinary lengths to keep our wounded alive. That’s allowed us to enjoy, as it were, a WIA to KIA ratio as high as 8.5 to one in Afghanistan and 7.2 to 1 in Iraq.
Speaking frankly, Russian field medicine sucks.
Supplies are so short, particularly for Russia’s recently drafted “mobiks,” that the UK’s Ministry of Defense released video last month that “appears to show a staffer instructing soldiers to use tampons to plug wounds.”
