dan/california

Source was from inside Gazprom. Multiple EU countries have denied this and referred to united response and line in this matter.

I was just reading an account of what was happening in Rubizhne from the Russian perspective. The comments about the fatigue related to manpower drain are of particular interest. The ability of the Ukrainian forces to utilize the local terrain with expertise when the enemy can't coordinate attacks effectively is nicely illustrated here:
 

I am reading an awful lot of vicious slander against the glorious wunderwaffe that is the Gavin. 🤪
But tell me, is there any other IFV  that if it gets holed by gunfire or shrapnel you can restore, nay, improve its armouring by duck-taping a flattened soda can over the hole? No, there isn't! The end of tanks IS neigh, our prophet has foretold it!
 
Anyway, I hope the Ukrainians weren't counting on the Dutch PzH2000s.
The Dutch army's (or rather, the various associations that surround it) response to the offer was: "You are going to do what now?". The feeling is that the Dutch defence has been cut to the bone and that what is needed is not for us to send the warehoused PzHs to Ukraine but to fund the re-activation of those things by the Dutch army itself. A fair point, sadly. Our artillery assets are currently pitiful.
And apparently there was no plan to send the support vehicles for comms and planning fire missions. So the Ukrainians would've just gotten the tubes, not the fancy abilities of the whole platform.
 
And to really top it off, the whole thing is still in a preliminary planning phase. Knowing the Dutch MoD, they are going to come to a definite decision any year now. And it'll probably be the wrong decision that does no-one any good, here or in Ukraine.
I think the one good outcome so far is that it was one of the first offers of modern heavy material and got others to commit their stuff. But **** me, what a shambles.
 
 

That is a suicidal place to cross a river, even against an opponent that isn't nearly as well armed as the Ukrainians, Perfect places for the NLAW class missiles, perfect places for Javelins, perfect places for armor to hide and seek. and beautiful spots for mortars to completely hidden. Didn't someone say the Soviets try to push back against the Germans here in ~42 and got there heads handed to them?

Real economic support for Ukraine.

Shouldn't all you guys be over on an "Eastern Front" / A3R gaming channel or something? You are all SOOOO macro.  China real estate, FFS??? This thread is a bloody bag of cats.
....Am I the only guy here still studying this thing at CM scale, where this war is actually being decided? The realtime analysis is out there, go find it.
I have a day job I'm neglecting. 🤪
[/peptalk]

This seems like excellent news, since the UA has time to pin out a nice deep killing zone in that open country in front of Kryva Luka.
...But let's make no mistake, the 79th lads in Yampil are buying that time with their blood.

I'll defer to those who do this for a living, but
1. my CM sense tells me the Russians are hemmed in by the Dibrova forest (there's a golf course lol!) on their right and the river (boggy ground) on their left. There's really just that *one road.* Nice bottleneck, with another fortified village (Kryva Luka) to fight through at the end of it.  Write off 1-1/2 more BTGs to get that done?
2. And then Ivan needs to cross the river.... on their current pattern, it could take them a week to even attempt it?
A quick look at the ground [loc. unconfirmed]. Note there are some elevation changes here (Seviersky Donets river valley?), in case anyone had mental pictures of featureless undulating steppelands....
 

Perhaps a day when we're discussing housing bubbles on the 'Ukraine thread' is not such a bad day 😉?

https://static.rusi.org/special-report-202204-operation-z-web.pdf
There is NEW stuff in this, especially about Russian EW, military procurement, and details about the Kyiv campaign I have seen anywhere else. Worth your time.
 
Edit
They stacked stuff in those endless convoys heading towards Kyiv in the wrong order, and it COST them.

UKR MiG-29 takes off under artillery fire. Data and location unknown. There is some information our jets use highways as runways
 

https://www.defensenews.com/land/2022/04/07/us-army-initiates-plan-to-replace-stingers-with-next-gen-interceptor/
Found the article, army has been in the early stage for at least a year. Is hoping for test/demo launches 2023-2024. And delivery 2027. I am sure they are scrambling to see if they can move that up, since it looks like they will have to scramble fairly hard anyway to build more stingers. They are doing a LOT of work on drone defense, too. It seems like they get that the low altitude battle has changed completely.

It will untenable to keep Ukrainian grain off the world market, period. Indeed getting Ukraines crop in this year is one the strongest reasons for NATO to get in now, today. The secondary casualties from hunger in the third world are going to surpass the casualties from the fighting.

What about authorizing some 'privateers' - your young, smart, and willing to hack from your mothers basement, - western govts can say 'no worries, if you hack anything in Russia, we will totally ignore it' we don't authorize it but good luck to you. I think Russia has condoned hacking from its shores for years without fear of repercussions as long as it was against the west so why not just give every 4th year comp sci grad a new summer project. 

Their dreams of empire?

In the artillery system I'm used to (towed guns, computer fire control system, voice comms, manual survey transitioning to semi-automated survey) there are a range of jobs from simple to hard to complex to artisanal.
Being a forward observer is physically demanding, takes a lot of training. The process of adjusting rounds onto a target to get to FFE is fairly straightforward and can be rote learnt for most mission types and conditions with a few weeks of intensive training and a large ammo budget. But integrating the effects of fires with the maneuver arms commander's intent (ie, the whole point of having an FO at all) is more art and black magic than it is science, and takes a lot of time, experience, reflection, and mutual trust to develop. But, the good news is that all of this paragraph is largely independent of the gun used - a well trained FO party will be able to adapt to an entirely new gun with a just a few key pieces of info specific to the gun.
Command post procedures for turning orders from the FO into orders for the guns are similar; the drills don't really change just because the gun has changed. But, that does assumes that the technical data for the particular gun is loaded into the fire control system. It also assumes that the fire discipline that informed the design of the gun is compatible with the fire control system (FCS) that's being used. With modern FCSs the role of the CP has largely transitioned from a place were a bunch of smart people do a lot of maths under pressure in a poor working conditions, into a place where gross error checks are conducted to make sure some numpty hasn't fat fingered a number on the data entry keyboard. Knowing the steps and process is still important, but again the good news is that all of that is largely independent of the specific gun being used.
It's on the gun line and along the log chain that the differences really start to become apparent. Can the ammunition movement and handling system be utilised with the 'new' gun's ammo - if not, how long will it take to train personnel to employ the specific kit? How is survey for the new gun achieved, and is the output of that compatible with the FCS being used? And, finally, how many personnel are required to man each gun, what are their roles, and how do they execute them. Someone above also pointed out seemingly simple things like making sure that instruments are annotated in the language being used. Also to be considered is whether the vehicle fleet will be changing with the guns - can the old tractor tow the new gun? If not, you'll also have to factor in driver courses. The gun and vehicle maintainers will also need to be trained and equipped to service the new fleet.
All of this trainable, but training does take time. The time taken also depends on who and what you're training - if it is a fully ready battery transitioning to a new gun with a partially new vehicle fleet, but retaining their old FCS, you could probably get up to speed in 2-4 weeks, with most effort allocated to the maintainers, then to ensuring that the gun crews get the new drills really squared away. But if they also have to learn an entirely new FCS, you'll probably need to add at least another month to get the command post up to speed. All of this has the underlying assumption that the battery has no other tasks during this time, and is fully and completely oriented to learning the new gun and systems. If you're just grabbing folks off the street, with no prior knowledge ... yeesh ... then you're probably talking about 6 months before they're ready to go, since you're effectively creating an entirely new unit from scratch and while for them the specific gun doesn't matter (learning one gun is much the same as pretty much the same as any other if you're doing it all from scratch) there are a whole bunch of other soldier skills that can't be taken as given.
Preceding that training - or re-training - is the courses required to get the trainers up to speed; training the trainers. We've already seen hints of what seems to be a lot of that going on in various parts of Europe and the US.

It does, but since the Russians have made it ABSOLUTELY clear, that their plan is to shoot every man of vaguely military age, rape any woman or child the they feel like, and then turn the whole country into something worse than a gulag, the Ukrainians are pretty much going to fight to the last twelve year old. The Russians can quit and go home any time, they just need proper encouragement. Watching their #^%^%##hole buddies die in burning AFVs is an EXCELLENT encouragement. ALL of them dying in burning AFVs is ok, too.

The minimum loss rate of a battle group a day is holding up.
 

It does, but since the Russians have made it ABSOLUTELY clear, that their plan is to shoot every man of vaguely military age, rape any woman or child the they feel like, and then turn the whole country into something worse than a gulag, the Ukrainians are pretty much going to fight to the last twelve year old. The Russians can quit and go home any time, they just need proper encouragement. Watching their #^%^%##hole buddies die in burning AFVs is an EXCELLENT encouragement. ALL of them dying in burning AFVs is ok, too.

That is heartbreaking to read really. But there is hope. Help is on the way, I really hope there's more going on that we are allowed to see at the moment. You guys will get the new capabilities and then beat the **** out of the orcs. Sun will shine again.

The problem w the Russian forces was that they were never expected to actually fight a war in Ukraine.  The multi-pronged attack was supposed to cut the head off the national and oblast governments leading to collapse of Ukrainian resistance.  Putin had assassination squads, paid-off traitors, airborne attack, seaborne attack, and the big armored columns.  It all failed.  It's like asking why Hitler didn't have enough resources to take both Stalingrad and the caucasus oil fields -- because he never thought he'd actually have to fight for those things -- the red army in the south was supposed to be defeated in envelopments and the army group would just drive to it's objectives and set a hard shoulder on the northern flank. 
Everything since day #3 or so of this war has been improvisation of Putin trying to salvage something from an epic, historical disaster.  -- Like Steve said the other day, there was plan 1 - failed.  Plan2 - failed.  Now we're in plan 3. 

This "Easter Offensive" is like watching an old dog eat soup right now.  Slurping and slopping, gum smacking and messy as hell but not much else. 
I do not think the Russian executed a recon-phase so this is "probe-as-you-go" and it is costing them dearly as the probing is being done by the same units that are supposed to be attacking.  Russia has not fundamentally fixed their problem of operational pre-conditions - information superiority being a big one, nor have they demonstrated any level of sophistication in this attack that would suggest some sort of overall operational design beyond "go forward and try and take some ground".  This is tactical piecemeal and largely unsynchronized.
The Russian's reportedly do have indirect fire advantage and have employed mass fires in some cases but it is again unsynchronized beyond some tactical pulses.  I am still waiting for some sort of shoe to drop (at this point a freakin sock would be a major surprise) but this is the slowest and most fumbling "mass operational offensive" I think the world has seen since the Austro-Hungarian Empire tried to invade Serbia in 1914. 
I guess the question is "is Russia just waiting for its moment, or is this it?"  The longer this takes the less likely there is a bold stroke under the hood here as it is costing the better part of a BTG daily burn rate just to do this "leg-humping" exercise.  Now we have deep strikes of some sort into Russia and some weird signals coming out of the Transnistria, while Russia continues symbolic lobbing of a diminishing stock of cruise missiles into Ukraine. 
I honestly expect Russia to announce that this entire thing was a "spoiling operation" to allow them to dig in for the defence of LNR/DNR.
All the while a western arsenal of epic proportions is being pushed into Ukraine, which at this rate will be a greater military power than Russia by the end of May.

UKR soldier tells about how changed the war, what matches with Dvorikov's conception
Translation:
Heavy fights is continuing. Occupants is jamming comms constatntly. Exactly because of this there are no videos [means form his axis] with killed or captured Russians and even more - the situation is canged in waging of war. 
Taking huge losses, occupants moved on what they do the best - the typical Soviet f...ing matter. F...ing alot of preliminary bombardments (and 100% they have advantage in artillery and this is a fact) and after this crawling advance - the village by village. Now we will have more losses, and some more of our captured.
Because having continuous front, somewhere we retreat, somewhere we beat up them. But now in whole the objective of AFU is to hold itself about two months. Because during this time many heavy wepons will come to us. And our light motorized infantry brigades will turn out to mech.brigades.
You get the gist. Bad news will  be, it will be mixed with good. In addition, it plays a role, that we can't  conduct rotations, alas, it is so. One roatation = one months of battleworthy, fresh and extremaly motivated unit. The situation in such, that guys can't be rotated so far from the autumn. They have to be rotated in March, but by fact they are on positions to this time. 
About stupidity of Russians. Yes, they stupid, in strategic layer they fight worse, but on tactical layer we have almost parity. A partity, because we fight for our families, our land, our country, our freedom. I'l clarify, because of morale of our troops we are in winning position. Not to mention that to defend on own land always easier, than advancing. But that doesn't mean that is's too easy for our lads.

It does, but since the Russians have made it ABSOLUTELY clear, that their plan is to shoot every man of vaguely military age, rape any woman or child the they feel like, and then turn the whole country into something worse than a gulag, the Ukrainians are pretty much going to fight to the last twelve year old. The Russians can quit and go home any time, they just need proper encouragement. Watching their #^%^%##hole buddies die in burning AFVs is an EXCELLENT encouragement. ALL of them dying in burning AFVs is ok, too.

A friend of mine who's in a position to know tells me over a thousand British specialists have embedded with UA since March. A lot of them passed through previously as advisers post 2014 and have volunteered to 'retire' and contract in because they believe in 🇺🇦. Only the Kurds command a comparable degree of respect.
A fair number of French SOFers there as well.

My understanding of the AU Abrams is that the ones they have in AU are pretty great, but basically Koalas. I.e, they are not to be shot at, and not to be taken out of the country. The intent is that if/when push comes to shove, AU Army will send a brigades worth of personnel - including trained, disciplined and motivated tank crews who really know how to squeeze the juice out of an M1 - and US will provide a bdes-worth of you-beaut kit.
For training purposes, in AU, DU inserts and silver bullets are largely irrelevant.