chrisl

This gives the RA less time to try to get reorganized before the mud arrives. Anybody the UA doesn't get in the offensive will probably have a very poorly supplied autumn.

I was going to ask about whether the UA is rolling over Russians and killing them vs. capturing them, and apparently Arestovych has started to answer that:

The thing that was really keeping RU afloat was massive amounts of artillery so they could just indiscriminately flatten anything within range. The UA has taken care of that with a very thorough campaign of blowing up ammunition dumps, so that RU can't unload ammo into a pile anywhere without it getting HIMARSed in short order. That leaves them with having to do just-in-time delivery to the guns from hundreds of km away, and they just don't have the trucks, comms, or coordination to do that. Given that they're buying artillery ammo from NK, they may not even have the ammo, even if they could deliver it. They have a huge line to defend with mostly inexperienced, poor morale troops, so their concentrations on defense have to be either low or very localized, with no depth if there's a breakthrough. The UA has enough forces, and can actually do combined arms, so they're punching through where it's weak and bypassing the concentrations and then isolating them with later echelons so the RU troops need to attack to get out of their holes and UA doesn't have to attack into prepared defenses.

So has anybody seen direct evidence of the 10,000-15,000 guys in the 3AC? As in pictures of bunches of guys setting up camps, or in barracks or something? The way they were plopped in far from any action is a little suspicious, as in they might be all the vehicles for the 3AC, but only a BTG worth of guys to drive them off the trains and park them. I hadn't come back and found the thread when all this started, but back in Feb I didn't think that RU was actually going to attack because it looked like they had just parked bunches of vehicles and it wasn't clear if there were enough troops for them. Right up to the attack, the vehicles were parked like someone was just trying to pack them in, not like crews were prepping them for a bunch of action. Satellite pictures of camps didn't show enough paths stomped down in the snow for the number of guys that should have been in them. Some of that certainly could have been bias in the pics that were given to the press, but what did get shown didn't look like there was enough activity. Russia did attack, and it turned out many of their units were way undermanned, with recruiting getting harder and harder as things have progressed. Is the 3AC going to show up in action, or is it just a decoy that will be a vehicle/scrap metal donation to Ukraine?

Two things: 1) Non-proliferation. Ukraine gave up its position with the third largest nuclear arsenal on earth in return for security promises. If Ukraine had kept their nukes, this wouldn't have happened, and if RU uses nukes without a devastating response then every country on earth with sketch neighbors will be trying to build, buy, or steal their own nukes. 2) Russia's nukes are currently doing exactly what they were designed to do: keep NATO forces from directly attacking RU and and RU forces for fear that RU will use nukes. If RU actually blows someone up with them, that fear is realized and there's no reason not to respond with overwhelming force to keep them from using more. Nukes work best when you don't try to blow anybody up with them.

Why would RU want him back? He’s just going to throw himself out a window in despair of his failure.

The big mole and the earlobe look like a good match. Chin looks consistent but harder to tell from the angle.

Trying to figure out what’s going on in an army with bad comms after the LtCol got blown up in a smoking related incident?

So they’re actually doing the kind of fast attack that RU thought they were doing on Feb 24.

They're basically bashing themselves back to the stone age - Russia already had problems retaining STEM types when it was just about better jobs abroad. For a while they had a budding security software industry that was born from the depth in math education you get when you have a lot of smart people to educate but don't have the resources for them to work with hardware. That's sort of degenerated into troll farms, which do have some interesting technology and take some cleverness. But when you can't afford to pay the trolls (and there does seem to have been a dropoff in outside trolling -not sure if it's because they're all focused on RU or not getting paid), even they'll go work outside the country. And maybe even get straight jobs because the money is good. You can see it in the equipment Russia is fielding - there really hasn't been much advancement since 1991, and they just don't have the engineering depth to develop new stuff, or the manufacturing depth to make it. And probably won't have the resources to even build more copies of the old stuff when this is over - anything developed after 1991 is full of foreign parts that will be embargoed for a long time. So it doesn't matter so much that they're burning through 20 years of skilled specialists with their military equipment - they're burning through 60 years of accumulated equipment that they'll mostly never be able to replace. In reading random pages about the death of Gorbachev I think I came across something that discussed the politics that basically froze their technology in the early 70s - I'll have to see if I can find it again. Meanwhile, as you point out, Ukrainians are getting trained on modern NATO stuff, and rapidly developing drone tech, among other things. And they seem to have Uber-for-artillery down to an art form. And spent 8 years developing NCOs and small unit independence. And more.

And just to add one more stake to the heart of the secret pipelines... Even if you could secretly do all of what's been described (or just drag a fire hose across on one of the ferry trips) and hide the endpoints and the trucks coming to fill from it, once you start pushing oil through it it's going to get warm from the friction and show up on thermal imaging.

I've seen exactly one video that I'll probably never find again that showed a barrage of nearly all airbursts. You could see the puffs of smoke from the shells and shadows on the ground, then the smoke drifting. managed to find it:

Written in Russian.

Missing link? And when does the Fall mud season start? With the Russian GLOC stretched way out by their ammo dumps exploding for 100's of km and UA precision (and partisans) that can shut down rail lines, RU will be stuck trying to move tons of ammo just-in-time through hundreds of km of mud. That may effectively silence their artillery within range of UA lines. And given that ammo dumps on the Russian side of the border seem to be fair game, it could even silence the arty from the Donbas.

And they're probably still mostly deliberately wrong, too. Since the USSR did that on purpose for decades to confuse attackers and probably was slow about publishing corrected versions after they admitted it.

Maybe they've been manufacturing lifeboats and vests to ship to Kherson. So with as much equipment as is going to get lined up and blown up at the ferry crossings, is that going to need its own thread?

Or maybe precision has an insidiousness about it that will beat mass without big frontal assaults. Do you need a major offensive with companies of tanks roaring across fields when you can write your name in holes on the bridge the enemy needs to supply ~20K troops? Or level neighborhoods when you can fly a drone over their BMP or stolen car when they're on the way to loot the grocery and drop a grenade through the hatch or sunroof? Why not "quietly" go about blowing up every supply cache bigger than a home depot bucket so the supply lines are stretched to 300 km to the depot and they're stuck trying to just-in-time hand grenades so they don't get blown up by some drone that's sloppy with its cigarette butts. Eventually the undertrained guys in holes who aren't getting paid or fed or even supplied with bullets and are getting shot at and blown up might just up and walk the other way.

Is there any info out yet on the actual strength of the "fresh" 3rd Corps? RU has been struggling since before day 1 to fill out its units to anything close to the full number of people. Is this going to be the same thing, but with even less training? They can send all the equipment to make it look like they're going to start an offensive in Donbas, but if nothing has more than a poorly trained driver and assistant driver, they're just going to get blown up in the parking lots.

US support will likely last at least until the next administration starts. Poland also appears to be very committed, having been on the receiving end far too often historically. The US showed decades of patience in Iraq and Afghanistan, well past the point of there being any return for the country but there still being a cost in lives and (lots of) dollars. If someone else's people are doing the fighting, the amount of money is rather small on the scale of the US military budget and the return is huge in terms of real-world lessons learned about modern equipment on a modern battlefield. And it's reducing a historic conventional threat with the cost to the US only being dollars, and not that many of them. So support will last at least to the end of the first Biden term. Can Russia last that long? Is Ukraine going to do in Donbas and Crimea the same thing Russia did in 2014? Militarily Russia is stuck and their situation is only going to get worse. Can Ukraine demoralize Russian troops and limit their supplies sufficiently that at some point the UA just start filtering in and taking surrenders? Or filtering in to find that Russian troops have just wandered off?

Much like the deployable ram turbine that commercial jets have as the backup for the backup for the backup of their electric power generation.

I think it's more that we now have evidence that Vlad doesn't do movie nights with Kim.

Yes, it does, if the tank is already there in LOS. But you can't afford to keep the tank in LOS until you're sure there aren't a couple of guys hiding with a Javelin or equivalent. So you have to keep the tank back, then roll it in, hope you didn't miss anybody hiding in a hole with an ATGM, and then get the main gun onto the target. If the tank has ballistic rounds it's probably going to take a few to get a hit, and depending on the defensive position might take quite a few to be effective. While someone just over the horizon lets loose with a Javelin++ that has longer range than the standard model puts a hole in the top of your tank.

But once I have the first two, do I really need something big, slow, expensive, and easy to destroy to bring in the HE on stubborn fixed targets? Why wouldn't one of the infantry be carrying something precision guided like a next gen switchblade or the miniature Osprey equivalent and just fly it right into the holes in the defensive position? If you need more bang, PGMs from artillery or rockets can be called in from mobile platforms further back. The problem with tanks is that Javelins can hit to the horizon for a 6' tall grunt, and it's an "if you can see it it's dead" kind of weapon that's cheap enough to distribute widely. Small (semi-)autonomous follow-along tracked weapons carriers, either with tracks or like robo-dogs or robo-ponies, will be harder to spot and less expensive, so you can have more of them, so a single Javelin isn't going to take out your heavy mobile firepower.

I don't disagree with any of that - it's a far from guaranteed way to try to manage a relationship with another country. But the alternative of invasion and long term nation-building is looking a lot worse. Post WWII superpowers have managed temporary success with it, but in the long run it falls apart. The US has tried a few times around the world, sometimes with spectacularly bad results, and Russia was successful for a while with Warsaw Pact and the various SSRs that they managed to absorb for a while, but those former states are all now former, many of them have some serious grudges, and even the not quite hostile ones like Kazakhstan have been "thanks, but no thanks" when invited to send troops to help the special operation.

Yes, what they did (and I'm sure still do) via crowdsourced ISR was pretty spectacular, but the CS-ISR fed a response with weapons that came from the enormous technology machine of the west. The Javelins, NLAWS, and TB-2s get a lot of their capability from microelectronics and sensors that aren't available to RU and whose development depends on a large and expensive technology supply chain. And the crowdsourced ISR was augmented by western remote sensing. It seems like it was a little cautious at first: "Why don't you point your Bayaktar over toward these coordinates and see what's there? And maybe make sure you have some of the anti-armor rockets", and then followed by artillery and rocket systems that almost let the UA aim for the tea cups of the BTG COs. The per-unit costs of the objects in the kill chain goes down as you make things smaller, less energy intensive, and easier to mass produce (thank Gordon Moore for that), but the NRE infrastructure you need to make those things isn't cheap, and the key bits are very export restricted. Microchips and detector arrays are only cheap if you have wafer fabs that cost billions of dollars.