The Ukraine war thread
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Not sure I buy all this, but an interesting take.
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After the Russian military failed to take Kyiv in the opening weeks of their full-scale invasion of Ukraine and refocused, at least for now, on eastern Ukraine, they have made modest gains, while reports of Ukrainian casualties and alleged poor morale proliferated. Some even concluded that the Russians finally had momentum. Ten weeks later, it is again obvious that momentum favors the Ukrainians—and the Russians’ desperate attempts to mitigate the problem will only exacerbate it.
Case in point: British intelligence believes that Russia has lost over 50,000 men, more than a quarter of its original invading force, and the Russian military (or, more precisely, its mercenaries, the Wagner Group) is reportedly enlisting prisoners for reinforcement. This is not an original gambit, which is why the Russian high command should know that it will backfire...
If Putin were willing to mobilize the Russian economy fully, Russia could conquer Ukraine, at least on paper. But to do so would require acknowledging that he has started a “war,” a word he continues to imprison people for using, instead of “special military operation,” which is a polite little euphemism for something going on a very long way away and don’t you worry about it. But this technical euphemism has real world effects. A declaration of war, under Russian law, would unleash enormous resources, from people (non-convicts) subject to conscription to industrial mobilization. Those resources could be sufficient to win the war. But unlocking those assets would require the government to come clean about the scale of the war. A legal declaration of war would also give extraordinary wartime power to the security ministries in Russia, which could be used against Putin in a coup. Unlike Volodymyr, Vladimir is not too confident about where he stands domestically. He’s signaling that, if he doesn’t end this war soon, the war will end him. So, at least politically speaking, time is not on his side.
Which brings us to the last Ukrainian advantage: judgment. Rushed and panicked leaders, like anyone else, make mistakes. Out of fear, desperation, or impatience, they make bad decisions. After the disaster in Russia, a desperate Napoleon made every wrong decision, violating his own military maxims. In a crunch and fearing he’d lose his moment, Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union too early. Even cruel tyrants are still human, made of flesh and blood, susceptible to all human flaws like the rest of us, prone to bad judgment under duress and stress. If it is true that Putin is under treatment for cancer and has survived an assassination attempt, then how much energy and focus must he have to focus on turning around a military calamity? Even if he is healthy, Putin turns 70 this October and lacks the physical stamina of his 44-year-old Ukrainian counterpart to be a wartime leader the Russian military needs.
President Zelensky has pledged that his country will fight until the full territorial integrity of Ukraine is restored. Getting Crimea back might be too ambitious. But as for the rest, why not? Everything is in his favor.
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HIMARS Destroy More Than 100 'High Value' Russian Targets
Ukraine has successfully used High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to take out more than 100 "high value" Russian targets including ammunition depots, long-range artillery positions, command posts, air-defense sites and radar and communications nodes, a senior U.S. defense official told reporters.
The U.S. provided Ukraine with HIMARS as part of billions of dollars in military assistance to support the Eastern European nation as it defends itself against Moscow's invasion. Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the internationally condemned war nearly five months ago on February 24, bizarrely claiming that Kyiv's government is led by Nazis. In reality, Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish and had family members killed in the Holocaust.
Speaking to journalists on Friday, a senior U.S. defense official cited by reporters with Reuters, PBS, CNN and Fox News said that the HIMARS were having a significant impact in Ukraine's fight against Russia. The official said that more than a hundred "high value" targets had already been taken out by Ukraine's military with the weapons system.
Additionally, the official said that Ukraine has managed to take out "hundreds" of colonels, "many" generals and "thousands" of lieutenants and captains.
"They can't keep it up forever," the official said of Russia's aggression against Ukraine. "They have expended a lot of their smarter munitions....Their capabilities are getting dumber."
On Wednesday, General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that Ukraine's use of the HIMARS was "degrading" Russia's capabilities.
"These strikes are steadily degrading the Russian ability to supply their troops, command and control of their forces, and carry out their illegal war of aggression," Milley said. He also said that Moscow had thus far failed to destroy any of the rocket systems. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced that more HIMARS would be sent to Ukraine as well.
Serhiy Haidai, the governor of Ukraine's Luhansk region, told Newsweek last week that Russia's forces have been in "panic mode" since the HIMARS arrived in Ukraine.
Despite Russia's substantially larger military and its apparently more advanced stockpile of weapons, Ukraine successfully repelled Moscow's initial invasion. Putin and other Kremlin officials reportedly incorrectly believed that their military could quickly take control of the Eastern European nation and topple Zelensky's government.
Russia was forced to walk back its ambitions and focus on the east of the country. Putin's troops have made more significant progress there. But military analysts have said that Russia continues to make blunders and is taking heavy losses for such relatively minimal success.
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Very quietly, the Ukrainians are tightening the noose on Kherson and the 2000 Russian troops in the pocket. Other reports say that the two bridges can no longer support heavy armor.
Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
"Now look here, you Baltic gas passer... " - Mik, 6/14/08
The saying, "Lite is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.
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@George-K said in The Ukraine war thread:
@Jolly said in The Ukraine war thread:
Very quietly, the Ukrainians are tightening the noose on Kherson and the 2000 Russian troops in the pocket
Russia: How about an exit corridor?
Ukraine: FUCK you.
It's a war. That's SOP.
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This is from the [RWEC](link url), so take it with a grain of salt.
Nevertheless, an interesting read about "the inflection point."
Mark Hertling’s logic is straightforward. The Ukrainians have used their new toy from the U.S. shrewdly over the past month, targeting ammo depots and logistical support to slow Russia’s roll. It’s working too, with one Ukrainian commander in the east telling WaPo that “the number of killed and injured has fallen dramatically compared with when his soldiers moved to this part of the front line three months ago.” Russian armaments are going up in smoke due to HIMARS strikes. They can’t keep up the pace of the shelling that they maintained in June.
It’s not just ammunition that’s being targeted, though. Command posts are also in the crosshairs, again for strategic reasons. “We know from the way that the Russians fight that they need someone to tell them what to do. When you are able to kill the people that tell them what to do, you’re able to stop those folks from moving forward. And we continue to see that,” one senior U.S. official recently told reporters.
If the battle were still being fought exclusively in the Donbas, all of that would be a temporary setback for Russia. They need to figure out a way to keep men and munitions out of range of HIMARS attacks; once they do that, they might try to resume their advance. The “dilemma” described by Hertling in the clip below has to do with the fact that the battle isn’t being fought solely in the Donbas anymore. The Ukrainians have begun to advance in the south, their long-awaited counteroffensive to try to liberate occupied Kherson province. The dilemma Hertling sees is a logistical dilemma: How does Russia defend Kherson when its supplies are now under artillery threat even in the eastern territory they’ve successfully conquered? Watch, then read on.
Link to videoThe wave of HIMARS strikes on Russian positions in the east isn’t just about destroying their munitions, it’s an attempt to force them to move their existing stockpiles deeper into Russian-controlled territory, making it harder to supply Kherson during the fight to come. HIMARS is also being used to cut arteries for those supplies, most notably the Antonovsky Bridge over the Dnieper that connects Russian Crimea to Kherson.
““The Russians have nothing equivalent because these systems were developed by the Americans as a sort of sniper artillery for use in difficult environments like Fallujah [in Iraq], where you had to hit the target exactly because it was surrounded by civilians,” one expert told Al Jazeera of HIMARS. HIMARS strikes are so precise that they can punch holes in the bridge — hopefully — that will render it unusable by heavy Russian weaponry without destroying it completely. One Ukrainian journalist described them as a message to the Russians from Ukrainian forces: “We can cut you off supplies and you’ll be done.”
Kherson could eventually end up as Mariupol in reverse, with the occupiers trapped inside lacking any way to get food or ammunition. In fact, according to Newsweek, “After the HIMARS struck three bridges outside the city, Russia is struggling to get extra troops back in time to defend the strategically important region in the south.”
Let’s hope so, because the Kherson counteroffensive isn’t just an inflection point for Russia. If the Ukrainians push forward and stall out, Zelensky’s western patrons will conclude that there’s no prospect for total Ukrainian victory in this war and therefore it’s time to talk settlement.
Any effort to retake significant territory would nevertheless be a huge undertaking. Russian forces have now occupied the Kherson region for nearly five months and have been largely unmolested in their efforts to harden military positions and prepare for an assault. They have installed new leaders in the city itself as well as in major towns and villages.
A counterattack would require a huge number of troops and many more offensive weapons systems than Ukraine has available at the moment, some Western and Ukrainian officials say. Ukraine is expending about 6,000 to 8,000 shells a day overall. If it were to begin an active attack on Kherson it would need three to four times as many.
Aleksei Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, has spoken of the need to raise a million-man army to take back the lands Ukraine has lost in the war. The Kherson region is largely rural, but the city of Kherson is a sprawling metropolis straddling the Dnipro River. Taking it back could involve vicious urban fighting with enormous losses in soldiers and property.
A spokesman for the local Ukrainian governor predicted that the province will be in Ukrainian hands by September. Uh, we’ll see. Meanwhile, Russia is looking to cement its gains in Kherson by holding its own little sham Anschluss referendum there sometime that same month. From Putin’s perspective, that’s a win/win. If Russian troops repel the Ukrainian counteroffensive and Kiev sues for peace, he’ll cite the annexation of the province and demand that Ukraine forfeit it to Russia as part of a deal. If the Ukrainian counteroffensive succeeds, Putin can use the annexation as grounds for future offensives against Ukraine. (“We must liberate our land in Kherson!”)
Although whether he’ll have the manpower to do that anytime soon, before he croaks, is in question. Much has been written about the coming morale problem in the west, as Europe begins to freeze this winter after going cold turkey on Russian natural gas. But the Russians will soon face a morale problem too, notes Tom Nichols:
What the Russians are going to have to do is keep cycling troops in and out of these tough forward positions in bitterly cold weather. And I think one thing that we haven’t talked about enough—I mean, we in the West haven’t talked about enough—is that a lot of these Russian troops that are being sent there [are] not Russians. They’re not ethnically Russians. They’re going out, and they’re getting kids from the boondocks and some of the non-Russian areas of the Russian Federation and sending them off to the Ukrainian border. And that’s hard enough to do under the best conditions—but when a central European winter sets in, that’s going to be a lot more difficult.
The next six months will determine whether Ukraine stands any chance of victory or not.In lieu of an exit question, read
about logistics on the Ukrainian side. Zelensky asks often for more HIMARS systems, but supplying the system itself isn’t a terrible problem. We allegedly have 500 or so across the globe and have shared just 16 so far with the Ukrainians. The problem is supplying missiles for the system. The 16 in the field might be expected to fire around 6,000 per month combined per Hertling’s calculations. The manufacturer makes around 9,000 per year. Gulp.
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Always remember, Operation Valkyrie was an act of sedition.
Warning: I post things that interest me. Read and comment at your own discretion. -
@Jolly said in The Ukraine war thread:
Also a big deal is that the Ukranians have not destroyed all the bridges, but have rendered them unusable for tanks, armored vehicles and heavy trucks.
How do you make a bridge unusable but not destroy it?
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@Klaus said in The Ukraine war thread:
@Jolly said in The Ukraine war thread:
Also a big deal is that the Ukranians have not destroyed all the bridges, but have rendered them unusable for tanks, armored vehicles and heavy trucks.
How do you make a bridge unusable but not destroy it?
Crater it, punch holes in it, weaken the structure but don't drop it. Think the Ludendorff Bridge in WW2.
