Sarjen

The name of this thread is "How hot is the Ukraine gonna get?", so everything concerning the war in Ukraine isn't off topic. For me the combination of tactical, political and strategical posts are more attractive, than just numbers and technicalities. You expressed your preference (more than once), so okay, now we know.

Biggest mistake western analyst make regarding Ru artillery is counting number of Russians tubes thinking they produce the same firepower per tube as western ones. It is not the tubes you need to count but round expenditure per gun. Soviet/Russian arty love to exaggerate the firepower by inflating number of tubes while decreasing available rounds per gun for engagement.
They love to say we have ****load of tubes per km of front or we just engaged enemy target with ****load of tubes, go, there is nobody alive there (RU infantry goes, UKR infantry climb out of dugouts and shoots RU infantry to pieces - rinse and repeat until some parts of RU artillery finally zeroes on actual UKR firing points then UKR infantry retreats to the next defensive line). But if you look at actual expenditure per gun the picture is different.
For example, during Goose Green battle UK 3 tubes expended 900 rounds. That is 300 rounds per gun per engagement. Battle was bloody but it was won.
On other hand during the battle for hill 776 the VDV 10 SPGs expended 800-1200 round (depending on the period you take). That is 120 rounds per gun per engagement. The result - two pieces got broken, at least 40% of own troops got hit by friendly arty fire, defense collapsed, and company was overrun and destroyed. 
On paper 3 UK tubes vs 10 RU tubes in support look bad. In reality though...
According to reports small drones like quadcopters are not that useful against artillery - range, time and wind issues. What is needed is a bigger one (akin to airplane not copter) comparable to Orlan. 

Jomini gives the big picture.... (but you'll need to read the fine print in that big red box.  Grab a coffee, or another drink, depending on your point on the globe)
Brother Jomini definitely ain't in the Collapse school.
Note 900 artillery pieces, which tracks with that 7:1 Ukrainian intel estimate.  Mainly pointed at Sieverdonetsk.
....Now, about that bit where the RAF completes the capture of Sieverdonetsk in the next 24 - 72 hours.....

In spite of his SOF pedigree, Chuck Pf is a lot on the rah rah 🇺🇦 side, so bread and salt here, but nice map.
He also approvingly reposted this clip from the street fighting.
****
EDIT:  So I would humbly pronounce the entire Jomini thread essential reading for anyone following this board.  Like his namesake, he tends to be on the conservative side, but he is making sense here in light of the current facts on the ground.
BUT, I will ask a fairly obvious question:
1.   If the Russian effort rides pretty much entirely on heavy artillery right now, to the tune of about 900 tubes or launchers in the key sector; and
2.  If drones are a real pain in the arse to shoot down right now, and can roam with near impunity, day and night, limited only by their time aloft.....
Where is that swarm of several thousand drones of all shapes and sizes, kamikaze and other, that will sniff out and neutralise these tubes, as well as their LOCs? 
Or does the West need China in order to manufacture anything in bulk now?
.... And along those same lines, what's happened to the Bayraktars?  They haven't all been shot down, that's definitely not the case.  And aren't there some Gray Eagles quietly floating around?  Hmm....
I mentioned earlier General Giap snookering the French master artillerists (and they were really good!) at Dien Bien Phu by bunkering in his guns on forward slopes, refusing to play the traditional game. By the same token, conventional tube on tube counterbattery work remains important, but it may not be the only game in town any more.
So could Sieverdonetsk be a giant trap, like DBP, luring all the first line RA artillery into massing so it can be whacked by some kind of massively scaled up Aerorozvidka (with a secure line to Nellis AFB)?  Because that would be simply awesome!
As our @The_Capt hath taught us, the offence / defence equation is seriously out of balance right now -- a convergence of disruptive innovations, in Clayton Christiansen's sense -- and more Big Surprises are likely in store before this ball stops ricocheting around. 
But the waaaaiting is the hardest part.

I've just passed to this page and read THIS. Guys, I though this was just a joke, but now my heart is melted down and I can't reject this gift. Though, I feel myself awkward... and also huge gratitude to all of you and Kinophile personally for idea     

Now finally Sumlenny posted something fresh and worth of reading.
Best is Russian Specnaz boarding HMS Victory. Or this one:  "Novorossiya pilot" awakes in a body of Josef Stalin's son Vassily, a war pilot, and wins the war, revealing a Western agent Khrushchov, saving Stalinism".
It's funny, but if you analyze society through its popculture it is really scarry what it can do to collective mentality. Movies like "Stalingrad", "Orda", "1612" were all so bloody, dumb, naive and sadistic that to Western viewers looked like American Pulp Fiction genre. But in retrospect, they were mainstream that builded this damn mythos.
Not to do offtopic- it illustrates that state of collective Russian psyche is one of the reasons why this war may be longer and bloodier than some people in the West suggest, drawing on military situation alone.

Obvs I did - the clue's in the username 😉.  I must say I am surprised that Dovhenke brought things pretty much to a juddering halt.  I seem to recall saying that it would consume at least a BTG but there are plenty of images and videos of the place getting malleted or having been malleted by assorted gunnery which should have got the Russians over the line.  That said, that is also when the shenanigans started on AAs 3 and 4 on my original schematic and manoeuvre stopped on AAs 1 and 2 ... well to be honest not a whole lot happened on AA 1.
I am disappointed that I haven't been able to track this as closely as I was in April but unfortunately the day job has intervened ... it is an interesting summer in Afghanistan.  Regrettably I now only have time to check in and keep up with stuff on this thread.  Your coverage and links are particularly helpful in that regard.

You are only telling half the story to match your narrative.  The UNSC passed 3 resolutions to get Serbia to stop killing people (a fourth after the bombings)  and then passed 1244 which authorized a direct ground intervention by NATO (KFOR).  Further, NATO nations tried to get a resolution but were blocked by China and Russia as you note above...why?  Because Serbians were ethnic cleansing again which everyone still remembered from 1995.  This followed the precedent set in 1995 of NATO airstrikes to protect UNPROFOR, which led to UNSCR 1031 and the NATO ground intervention of IFOR.
Making a link back to US politics and "expansion" in Kosovo makes zero sense - just as it does for Libya frankly.  For Libya, UNSCR 1973 was put forward by France, Lebanon and the UK...what in the hell does this have to do with "Congressional approval"?  1973 was a classic Chapter VII, and again, Russia and China were on the SC and let it go.  Kosovo and Libya were interventions to try and stop repeat humanitarian offenders and dictators from doing worse - not some Rub Goldberg attempt by NATO to rule the world as a puppet of the US.
France intervening without the US - you have heard about Mali (Op Serval)?  In fact there were more: https://www.okayafrica.com/french-military-in-africa/
I can say NATO is a defensive alliance - the history of the Alliance has been defensive from the beginning.  NATO has done interventions on behalf of the UN and failing that, with the support from the international community.  To  make all this some self-centered US political issue is frankly insulting to all the nations and its military members who participated on those missions.
Finally, we know NATO is not a US puppet because it stayed out of Iraq in '03 (which did not have UN cover) and only went into Afghanistan when it did.  This is not the behaviour of a "puppet alliance doing the bidding of a US president who can't rule the planet based on domestic political landscape".  Russia is paranoid...because they are Russia, and no one likes/trust them because of history.  And Putin just took out a big red marker and underlined that dislike/trust for the next 50 years by unilaterally invading a neighbor.  And attempts to play "pick-and-chose" history to create a justification for Russian behaviour is just wrong.   
 

At this point, I want to ask for a moment of silence (looking at you, Eurosquabblers!) for the heroic defenders of Dovehnke.
And yet another kudos to our own @Combatintman who flagged this innocuous looking (to we lesser mortals) bit of ground as a key barrier to the RA advance from their hard won Izyum bridgehead to Sloviansk.
....On that same note, I'd like to revisit another astute post of CIMan in mid April, where he ID'ed various attack axes for the Russian 'pincer, and then predicted the Russians would end up getting forced onto the hardest, bloodiest paths.

Nailed it, mate.
1.  AA1 promptly bogged down in the open country, and that sector now seems increasingly dominated by UA artillery. No blitzkrieg for you, Popov!
2. AA3 worked ok at first, up until it hit Lyman and then it took 3-4 further weeks of costly fighting to clear that town and the forests behind it, and secure the S-D River line.
3. AA2 hit a dead stop at Dovhenke, as noted and has had to take the hard way around.
4.  AA4? has basically stopped on the start line at Sieverodonetsk.  Ivan is beating his head against a stone wall and getting counterpunched.

IMO, there is a difference between asking s.o. to be grateful and expecting it. If I help someone I don't say: "I helped you, now say thank you!". But like most human beings I do expect some form of gratitude even if it's just a nod or a smile. We work like that. What I don't expect to happen is being instulted for not having helped more or faster even if that was true. Doesn't mean that can't be brought up as constructive criticism in a polite way and in addition. You may like it or not and an insult might help your ego but it will not further your cause, period.
And to turn your point around, who cares for what reason someone helps as long as the result is the same? Do you honestly think the US and UK are sending all those weapons just because it is the right thing to do? Of course, geopolitical and economical reason play a roll, too, not to mention upcoming elections. Leaves a mildly bitter taste but in the end what counts here is the result.
As @Aragorn2002 said, it also doesn't sound too unrealistic. You rightly criticised Scholz more than once but the Polish government also didn't play entirely fair during the last months. Whatever, as I said above, we all have ulterior motives, that's a (sad) fact of life. Maybe we should stop bickering about it, in the long run only the populists and Putin profit from that.

Apart from that Poland recieves by far the most money from the EU and has in the past been quite shameless in demanding and obtaining subsidies. I don't mean to insult individual Polish people, but for me Poland is one of the biggest threats of the future for the unity of the EU.

You are reiterating my point: The problem isn't with NATO and Turkey; it's with Erdoğan and Islamism.
Ever since Erdoğan was elected out of obscurity to become the mayor of Istanbul with the promise of converting the Hagia Sophia into a mosque [competing votes were split between two centre-right and two centre-left parties that squabbled among each other] and stated on record: "Democracy is like a tram. You get on where you need to, and you get off where you need to," it was obvious that him and the Islamists had to be nipped in the bud. Instead, both within Turkey and internationally, various factions thought they could draw him to their side, until he became all-powerful. When I stated that Erdoğan was bad news at a leading US university in 2008, I was called an 'elitist' and accused of opposing 'democratization'. Everyone was talking about 'Liberal Islam', and telling me Erdoğan's Islamists were just an Islamic counterpart to Europe's Christian Democrats. If we have made any progress at all, I hope that discourse has now died, and there will be zero tolerance should Islamism rear its ugly head anywhere else. Some Russian (Solzhenitsyn?) said "Russia was crucified on the cross to show the world the evil of Communism;" Turkey was impaled on the stake to show the world the evil of Islamism.
RE: Tensions in the Aegean
The danger is that Erdoğan has every reason to start a phony war, and then use it as an excuse to declare martial law and cancel elections. He does not even need the Turkish military to engineer a provocation since, like a certain someone, he now has his own military organization, who swear allegiance personally to him.
Now, facing Erdoğan's machinations, we have the Greek military who, along with a certain segment of Greece's ruling elite that they are close with, would also love to see Erdoğan start a phony war with Greece. When Erdoğan tried to get cozy with Russia, they responded by killing 37 Turkish soldiers; when he then tried to switch to China, they demanded Turkey extradite all Uyghurs. Therefore, should Turkey lose its ties with the West as well, it would end up more isolated than North Korea. With this reasoning, even if the Greek military does not engineer the first provocation, it would gladly reply to any provocation by Erdoğan with an escalatory provocation, and Erdoğan knows this as well. Thus, you have two actors who would both benefit from a phony war, but these actors aren't nation-states.

So Kosovo and Libya have been brought up a couple times now as examples of “NATO aggression” and some weird theories on the US somehow “using NATO” to do its bidding.  This is not how things worked, nor how things work.  Both Kosovo and Libya were conducted under UNSC resolutions as Chapter VII missions, not by an edict from the White House. In fact every NATO intervention over the last 30 years has had the backing of the UN Security Council, of which both Russia and China are permanent members.  (the only exception may be immediately after 9/11 when the US invoked article 5).  
In fact NATO as an alliance is not supporting the Ukraine (technically) it’s member states are bilaterally.
NATO is a massive military alliance, trying to make it to do anything is very hard and the idea that the US can “order NATO” is laughable.  NATO having a history of unilaterally invading nations and so Russia is somehow justifiably pushing back is nonsense.  As to NATO expansion, it has been 1) bureaucratic and 2) driven by Russian aggressiveness to its neighbours.  Narratives to the contrary are misinformed at best.

It is not corruption -  its incompetence and an over boarding bureaucracy (even by German standards, "Falle, klapp für Kleintier, grau" - who remembers that gem? (*)) created by years of mismanagement.
We got a new government last fall. The position of minister of defence was so low status that no one wanted it. This is a 3-party coalition and there was of course some shuffling for positions but that one went to our former minister of law who actually wanted to resign after her term. Can you imagine that in your country nobody wants to be the head of the national forces?
The purpose of the Bundeswehr was to defend Western Germany in the cold war. After that there was no perceived use for that thing. That is 30 years of neglection. The Bundeswehr is not the Wehrmacht.
 
(*) that is Bundeswehr speech for mouse trap
 

Until someone figures out how to annul Russia's ability to nuke any invading force...as is their stated doctrine...then any idea that Russia is legitimately under military threat is absurd. This is about a oligopoly/fascist system that is under *political* threat because it isn't able to produce an attractive governing model. That is *not* NATO or Ukraine's fault or problem.

To say "so far no nuclear escalation has happened, so to think it can happen in the future is stupid" is unreasonable. That's just like the proverbial guy who jumps from a skyscraper and 2 floors before impact says: "Ha, so far nothing bad has happend!" Whether there is a threshold for escalation, and, if so, which, is something that probably only Putin himself knows. If at all because that implies some semblance of reasonable behaviour right up to the end.

I, for one, don't think we should let fear of that dictate what we do but it would be remiss to not at least keep in mind that the threat is real.

Re German tanks: Now you force me to defend Scholz again, I really don't like to do that. 😉 But did I miss US Abrams tanks or British Challengers being in Ukraine? At least in that regard, Germany is not the only country being on the catious side.

Like what?  Say China quietly backs another side in a US led western intervention, how exactly are they going to be in trouble?  Russia already did this with bounties in Afghanistan and all we did was make quacking noises.  If China decides to supply and support their freedom fighters, our options beyond starting WW3 are limited.  Our options against Russia are non-existent. 
Supplying the other side is a long held tradition in "short of war" space.  Russians did it in Vietnam, we did it in Afghanistan (Round 1).  
That would be the plan, but regional containment has now raised the bill significantly.  Imagine Iraq in '03 as a proxy war.  We now have to make Jordan, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia airtight to prevent flow of outside support to the other team.  The intervention bill before casualties just went up by an order of magnitude.
Not many countries can field next-gen ATGMs and MANPADs, however primary competitors all can, and in Chinas case we already know they have been working very hard at knock offs. 
We would definitely try and establish operational pre-conditions first; however, I am not sure what that looks like.  We lost air dominance below 2000 feet in Iraq against ISIL and they were basically using commercial off the shelf stuff. Information warfare is even more tricky, hell we can't even agree as to what a legitimate military target is or is not in the information space...and that kind of thing can cripple a coalition.
In the opening phase of this war, based on what we have seen and heard, yes, very much.  In the first month of this war the UA did not have enough artillery to cover a 1000km+ frontage, so ATGMs were likely doing a lot of the heavy lifting.  We are definitely in an arty-duel phase now.  Regardless, next gen man portable ATGMs with ridiculous ranges and kill ratios have arrived there is enough video evidence of this in this war to prove it.
In Iraq in '05, the insurgents brought logistical resupply along the main MSR for the US to a grinding halt.  They cut the secondary routes and then IED'd US logistics until it damned near broke - it actually had to pause for a week to re-tool, which is nuts.  This war points to a whole other level of projection of friction onto an operational system.
This has been brought up before.  What we are seeing in Ukraine is consistent with trends we saw back in the Donbas in 2014, in Iraq against ISIL, and in the Nagorno-Karbakh.  I am sure some phenomenon are unique to this war and we will be spending some time trying to figure that one out.  However, there has been a weird noise coming out of conventional warfare for some time now and this war has just underlined in bold some of that.  
This week I got some capstone doctrine to review and provide feedback, and right up front "we are a manoeuvre warfare, mission command based military"...and I am think..."are we now?"  "Should we be?"

Stop lying - NATO has no military strength to occupy and pacify Russia. Full stop.
NATO has no interest in fighting, occupying and pacifying Russia. Full stop.
If Russians are paranoid about NATO they should attend psychology sessions.
Bingo. You just admitted that NATO cannot win conventional war with Russia because Russia will escalate it to all out Nuclear war. NATO threat is just Russian paranoid imagination.
Grabbing somebody else land while killing people living there to create buffer state is a Hitler style war crime.  
Size of Russian land and size of forces required to occupy and pacify it will not change. 
Let me remind you that USSR was founded on idea of total western destruction. FYI that what Russians still want to do.

Still not a valid argument, because relative military capacity isn't relevant in the final analysis. NATO doesn't have, and never has had, enough military power to subjugate Russia, because Russia is freckin' Hyooge. It no more has the power to conquer Russia militarily than Russia has the power to conquer Ukraine. Strewth, "we" couldn't even manage Afghanistan or Iraq; how are we going to fare better in The Rodina? Russian fear of NATO aggression has always been a paranoid fever dream or "demonisation of the other" for propaganda purposes, to divert the proles' attention from the failings of the ruling classes.
 

Exactly. If NATO is this enduring threat that Ukraine, whom was nowhere at all close to being allowed in NATO was attacked in a full scale war upon the justification of safeguarding Russian security, than Finland, with it's borders near Russia's major cities and Northern Fleet bases, should garner some sort of escalation, even if ultimately posturing and not real force buildup for a defense/offense of the region.
That Russia's reply is a muted "shrug" or the Russian public whom Ukraine's invasion was justified as partly avoiding NATO encirclement gives no regard to Finland joining NATO as a credible threat just tells everyone worried about Russian escalation that their reasoning was a lie.
If the Russian public, supposedly very worried about NATO expanding and invading, gives no regard to Finland joining, yes Russians may be annoyed at NATO encroaching, pissed, but this betrays that Russia actually does not fear NATO and speaks instead to Russia's fear of NATO limiting Russian interference in their backyard.

If Putin's plan for this war is to wait till West loses interest in the war, this is the opposite of what they should be doing - this is the way to get Ukraine some Eurofighters.
Edit:
So this user claims that by appealing the verdict, UK would de facto recognize DLPR as a legal entity. IMO the counter to that is for UK to add them to terrorist organization lists, and recognize Russia as a terrorist supporter and rogue state. Bleep around and find out...
 

Ah, pro-Russian-troll o'clock again.  Yay.
"NATO filter bubble", you clearly know nothing about NATO.

So far Business Insider appears to be the only source. I found a few reports in other media but everyone was quoting Business Insider. I can't say too much about credibility but given how generally uninformed German mass media is w.r.t. the finer details of this war, I doubt there is much real fact checking going on.
On a personal note: Could we please reduce the general Germany-bashing a bit? As I have said here severals times, I am not much of a Scholz-fan myself and Scholz is not Germany. Moreover, as (I think) Napoleon once said, never assume ill will when you can explain something with incompetence instead... Third point: While I often share the irritation caused by German politics, we should still keep in mind (and here I have to kind of defend Scholz): Germany's democratically elected chancellor is still called Scholz, not Selenskyj or Duda or Biden. So, while it is legitimate to ask or even demand something of a country it is also legitimate for said country not to grant everything. Not meant inflammatory and, as I said, I don't like much of what Scholz & Co decided (or rather did not decide) in the past.

Wagner PMC spetsnaz-for-hire also operating up here.
https://mobile.twitter.com/AggregateOsint/status/1534771959220797441 Interestingly, all through human history, mercenaries tend *not* to be usable in high intensity / high casualty infantry combat situations like MOUT or forest combat, for the very reason that you can't spend your money if you're dead.
...If you enlist in a foreign legion type unit, a la Gurkhas or Étranger, that's different, you're a foreign enlistee in a regular armed unit, usually under local officers.
And when mercs do accept high risk taskings, these are usually one-offs requiring specialised skills (sappers, frogman, mountaineering, etc.).  And special operators tend to plan such ops so that it's other folks who do the bulk of the dying.  As my SEAL buddy once said, if you're still in active contact after the second clip, you've just become a Marine.
 

Thanks ) Just became some more of work, my wife turned back and often occupies PC because her work, also it's hard to live three months 24/7 as war news translator, so I took small vacations 

Russian TG tells the lack of infantry forced Russians to use personnel of recon companies and battalions to participate in actions like usual infantry. This causes additional losses of specialiized troops, so Russian units soon can be limited in the tactical recon. Russian command puts an ultimatum for recon units commanders - either their soldiers go to the battle like usual infantry or this commander have to retire. As the author told on this screen, his familiar recon battalion commander chose to retire. 
Members of LostArmour discussion boards also told about lack of capable infantry both in Russian troops and LDPR. All last success maintained mostly by PMC, remained motivated VDV and Spetsnaz, which more and more plays a role of VDV. Most part of "line infantry" day by day is losing own motivation.