LongLeftFlank

Finished the copypaste now.

Dang, the guy wrote a book in Tweet form. Well worth reading though, many thanks.

Nice map, agreed, cheers. To show the content (assuming you want to), simply hit return after you paste the link. Hmm, where to attack? where to mass for attack (forcing the Russians to blow a gasket redeploying their own forces there)? Hmm, hmm, such a quandary....

Veteran war correspondent Aris Roussinos spent some time with the 'Right Sector' forces in the Horlivka sector, Donetsk front. https://unherd.com/2022/06/on-the-frontline-with-the-right-sector-militia/ There's a lot of worthy political ('no, we aren't nazis') discussion and human interest which I won't summarize here, but also some military bits: The steppe landscape of the Donbas region is rippled with folds and gullies; the copses of tall oaks that have taken root in these shallow nooks provide perfect cover for guerrilla war, an archipelago in the endless sea of grass and ripening wheat. The mortar team have been concealed here for two days, in a tiny salient almost fully encircled by the Russian advance..... “Our Intelligence found a location with Russian mortar positions and an ammunition dump.... With a quadcopter you can find a position to hit in 20 minutes — but once we fire, it will only take the Russians a couple of minutes to find our position and return fire.” ...the 120mm mortar belches out a dozen rounds in bursts of flame, as the quadcopter operator sits cross-legged in the grass, ordering them to adjust their elevation.... Then it’s time to go: we race to the SUV and drive off at high speed.... The following day, Pedro, who has an ongoing social media feud with mercenaries from the far-Right Russian Wagner Group on the other side of the frontline, in which they threaten to kill each other, would show drone footage of the Russian soldiers in their trenches getting obliterated by his mortar fire on his phone, overlaid with a death metal soundtrack and cry-laughter emojis. Welcome to war in 2022. "Athena" Brought up in a Russian-speaking Catholic family in Vinnytsia, the daughter of a surgeon, Athena was a poet and English translator before the war, with a sideline writing essays for American college students. She first volunteered for frontline service at age 18, straight from university....A child prodigy, she was a contestant on the Russian version of Britain’s Brainiest Kid aged 11. Walking through the long grass and undergrowth of the semi-abandoned village to the local shops with the heavily armed soldiers, to buy energy drinks and ice creams from a pointedly unfriendly shopkeeper, Athena highlighted the eerie atmosphere of dereliction. “It’s weird out here, it’s almost as bad as Detroit,” she said with wonder — Athena had spent a year in a Michigan high school as an exchange student. All from elsewhere in Ukraine, they were fighting among a local population whose loyalty to the nation was not guaranteed, and found it a strange and frustrating experience.

I followed him for a bit on the strength of his artillery analysis but then started to gag on his advanced TDS, so I stopped. Aside: I am also going to be posting a lot less for the duration, cuz work. I'm sure some folks here will be just fine with that lol, but I do have a client base as well. Ah, my adoring public! The Russians escaped while we weren't watching them (from Washington) -- Jackson Browne

This is my shocked face. My other shocked face. And while I'm getting close to straying OT....

Yeah, watching these guys arm a tiny USD200 drone with a 30mm gave me the same queasy feeling.

To requote some (T)wit from back in April: "welp, good thing we all quit using plastic straws!" 2. Apocalypse Now (update) Q. "Кто здесь главный?" A. "Разве ты не???? " 3. What number Battle of Kharkov are we up to again?

Kamil Galeev's long awaited piece on the Russian 'National Divorce'. Fairly short, a little too short frankly for those who are not regular readers of his, although he has been discussing the ways and means of that divorce for some time. I expect he'll either finally get a proper blog or issue some elaborations. I'll go straight to the punch line: Yes, even the 'orcs'.

Perhaps. But making your enemy crap his pants when he enters a building is a fairly straightforward part of modern industrial scale warfare. Once the tide turns, expect the Russians to wire up all this, and more. So may as well play the same brutal game whilst on defence.... If AQIZ or the Talibs had been able to pull off such things, they would have in a heartbeat. Their main thing of course was VBIEDs, some of them quite large. ISIS did some fairly monster IEDs in Mosul. Also, not to be too flippant, but river assault crossings and airborne desants were reputed to be Russian specialities as well, and yet....

That would be interesting; mine the hell out of the Azot complex, then withdraw and let the Russian pioneers come in to clear it, and the Tiktok Imam to come in with Wargonzo et al. for some nice Mission Accomplished PR photo ops. ....And then detonate a daisy chain of daisy cutters, or ammonium nitrate, or whatever's handy, sending the whole complex into orbit. An aerosol cloud would be ideal, but tougher to engineer. Keep it simple. Talk about your mass casualty event....

Noted re Geraschenko; the 'Truth and Freedom and Rock and Roll' site is also very rah rah, which is why I flagged it with a health warning. @sburke has confirmed, what, 400 Russian senior officers KIA to date?120 days of combat x 1 'bump or bang' per day that yields an average of 6 KIA (plus additional wounded) = 720 KIA in mass casualty events. Most of the other bangs that hit something with people in or by it *may* average 1 hapless grunt or driver killed outright at a time, even with demonstraby sh*te rear services that mean there's rarely a 'golden hour' for medevac. And Bog knows how you count or even guesstimate those. So it is clear you need quite a lot of them to sum up to 35,000 dead, although a deaths figure in the mid 20ks, including militias, would not entirely astonish me. Humans are strangely hard to kill outright. (as we have observed, CM tends to be far bloodier than the real deal, although we can rationalise that a lot of the pixeltruppen 'down' are not in fact badly hit but simply no longer available for any military purpose within the scenario timeframe) ...Which is why destruction of enemy formations -- whole companies or battalions casualties AND captured -- is crucial for either side to make headway in this war. But as @The_Capt notes, fortune seems to firmly favour the defence at this particular moment. To hark back to Steve's prior analogy, nobody has 'Busted the Bocage' yet; but the proper analogy may well be Verdun.

That seems to be the case already for some time, but maybe I'm wrong.

Thinking like a SEAL, Chuck seems to see the Sieverdonetsk position as fully played out and time to pull back. But he ain't running things. As @The_Capt showed us a while back, hanging out in those bare flatlands and treatment ponds down by the river could get pretty grim for the 'surrounding' forces. Not just big guns, this is prime mortar country. Expect intruders to sow mines though to hinder infiltration.

I'm sure nobody here minds seeing more of this warrior goddess. Or these troops,

Hmm.... I'd want corroboration before taking this one to the bank, but still... But the sword is cutting both ways, deeply...

UA tank street fighting in Sieverdonetsk, good CM Level 3 style drone clip. Poland's tax dollars hard at work. For the future CM: Slava Ukraine! scenario design files:

Quality photojournalism: life in the trenches.

NOTE: these latter numbers remain heavily disputed.

Worthwhile long thread, lotsa maps, by DefMon3 on Russian prospects for tackling -- six weeks late! -- Sloviansk-Kramatorsk. Taking this area would definitely unhinge UA defences in the Donbass, at long last. He also examines the UKR advance into the forests towards Izium.

Suyi

1. I actually make my living in the energy business, so please believe me when I say there are still a boatload of perfectly functional coal plants in Europe (google RWE) which can keep the lights on there if need be for some years, in spite of the CO2 consequences (which, indeed, we humans must all live with collectively. Especially tundra and taiga dwelling Russians, who get to experience them long before the river-valley-dwelling fellow Slavs whose lands they feel entitled to colonise). TL:DR Europeans have many choices about freezing in the dark, and those choices are NOT made in Moscow. Extending remarks: 2. I went to MBA school in the 1990s with a GAZPROM egghead who was a flat out genius. And he was quite firm on one point: ever since fur trading days, in spite of throwing its best brains at the question, Russia has always been a piker at the global resource and commodities game, with at best 'swing supplier' leverage. Even tiny overregulated Canada kicks their arse. 3. Deciding which key resources go where on the planet, and for how much, has been an exhorbitant privilege of the Anglo-Saxon maritime civilisations since before 1500. I backdate that to include the Dutch Republic and pre-union Portugal. When Bajazet took full control of the old Silk Route from the Mamluks c.1480, it forced Henry the Navigator and his backers to explore beyond the Mediterranean basin. Raise your hands, nation states whose seafarers can deal with the Atlantic (or North Sea). The rest is history.... 4. More broadly yet, ever since it was codified by guilds of cloth merchants in Flanders in the post Black Death 1380s, and then further refined by Baltic traders, market capitalism (even when harnessed, for a time, by ambitious kings and republics) consistently chews and spits out authoritarianism/despotism + kleptocracy (those invariably come as a package) in the event of conflict. Kapital siegt on allen fronten. [Note that none of this sidebar pontificating negates my worry about the ruinous consequences of a long drawn out war for the dear Ukrainians, as expressed above. Capital can be a heartless, faithless sh*t as well, seeking low lying ground like water]

Dude, you have four posts on here? and to dignify your track record with the term 'drive by spamming/trolling' is a severe insult to spammers/trolls. Articulate actual arguments here, or just bugger off.

But retaking the north bank of the Dnipr is a long way away from retaking the land bridge. And it's not about what we think, it's what Putin can get away with forcing Russia to think. .... So restating my prior case, if the liberation of Kherson (north bank of Dnipr) does not come with the effective destruction of the Russian armies currently occupying it, it is tragically NOT decisive, at least not by metrics that matter in terms of Russian regime change (and reinvention of Russia on more constructive terms for its own people, not to mention its neighbours and human civilisation in general). ....While if it does include decisive defeats of the Russian armies, then by definition the door is open to the restoration of the 2014, and perhaps the 2002 frontiers. In effect, the UA has cracked the code, as the Americans did in Normandy and elsewhere. But nobody has shown me a convincing path to that yet.

And Steve, I agree 110% with that one liner! If there's a single 'bullet' that describes this entire thread, that is it! But if they are going roughly 1 to 1 for an extended duration, and without defeating the army in open battle, of a country 2.5 times their size, that does NOT work. Like all historical comparisons, the Normandy analogy is imperfect.