Rokko

The rationale for holding on to Bakhmut continues to elude me. The only thing I might understand is to force the Russians to stay on the offensive, i.e. they can't give up the assault for political reasons and staying on the offensive forces them to continue wasting resources that won't be available for countering any UKR offensives. Had they taken Bakhmut a few months ago I would have suspected the Russians to happily start their next death grind towards Kramatorsk, but now they are probably "on edge" enough to stay on the defensive after Bakhmut falls. On another note, I've been under the impression that Ukrainian CB has been rather weak around Bakhmut basically for the entire duration of the battle, unlike in other areas like Vuhledar, Avdiivka, etc. With RU artillery being apparently particularly concentrated around Bakhmut, I would have thought this area would be a rather obvious candidate for attriting RU artillery capabilities, or am I missing something/under some wrong impression?

I like that explanation even better. So they are not only there to make the brigade look like a competent and capable military force but also to protect their colonel from said disheveled mobiks fragging him at the earliest opportunity.

I remember reading a post by this guy and was also surprised by how relatively accurate it was. One thing I noted was his extremely low estimate for the initial RU invasion force, I think he even put it below 100k, which is way less than any other estimate I've ever seen, even after it became apparent how many RU units went into Ukraine extremely under strength, partially without their conscripts, etc. I assume this is to retroactively manage expectations and explain away the lackluster performance of the initial invasion force. If I remember right, he also has the usual lalaland estimates of UKR and RU casualties, like basically all pro-RU numbnuts. I suppose this is a required feature though, or else their world view would implode. An interesting picture I saw a few days back. These exceptionally clean looking and well-equipped allegedly belong to the 155th NIB. Since they don't quite look like they belong to a unit that has been reconstituted 7 times and mostly consists of re-assigned Pacific Fleet sailors, that has been bashing itself against Vuhledar for the past weeks, I'd say I would dare to question this claim. Although I find the idea rather funny that the Russians have troupe of guys looking like RU wet dream of Speznaz for the purpose of dispelling rumors of extraordinary losses and assure people everything "is going according to the plan". Another possibility might be, that even utterly trashed units manage to maintain a core (like a recon company) of veterans that are deliberately kept out of the typical human-wave meat assaults and retain some measure of combat efficiency.

This is "puzzle solving" on a grand strategic, war covering, level, though. I am more wondering about what happens during the course of one, potentially very large attritional defensive battle over terrain that has no inherent strategic value spanning multiple months. To give an example, what happened between 1 July 1916, when the British Army suffered more casualties than on any other day in its history, and November 1916, when after the dust had settled, there was a roughly 1.4:1 casualty ratio (using Wikipedia numbers)? Perhaps the puzzle analogy is useful on that layer as well, but the solving involves finding ways to move casualty ratios more in favor of the attacker until the defender is exhausted. There were some minor tactical innovations during the Somme, as well, such as placing troops well outside of their usual trenches and inside deep shell holes out in the open, which took the British some time to figure out (=solve this part of the defensive puzzle). But overall I would assume it always comes down to some combination of the factors I had outlined earlier and potentially others as well, i.e., destruction of fortifications, risky counter-attacks, growing attacker terrain and tactical familiarity/experience, etc. This seems a bit vague, but probably points in the right direction. Although we may understand different things under non-linear, adaptive and dynamic. I would take it to e.g. include abandoning positions or parts of your defensive network once it can no longer be expected to allow you to inflict casualties to your enemy at a favorable ratio and instead move backwards into fresh fortifications and therefore "fresh puzzle territory" for the attacker, where he has to learn all the painful lessons again. This being Russia, I assume the "calming" involved the use of strong sedatives?

What would you say is the reason that loss ratios tend to become less favorable for the defender over time and what can be done to avoid or mitigate this? A few hundred pages back I brought up the example of the Somme and gave my suggestions for the reasons to be roughly a combination of the following: 1. defensive fortifications degrade/get shot up and lose their effectiveness. 2. defenders have to (big question mark) have to conduct increasingly more risky and potentially desperate counter-attacks to regain shot-up positions which are then easily lost again 3. attackers gain familiarity and experience with the positions they are attacking, the defenders behavior, etc My own - admittedly simplistic - thoughts on how to mitigate these would be to cede ground but slowly, a few kilometers at a time - unless you are fighting for some key terrain like Kyiv, of course, and not some generic part of french countryside (Somme) or some small city somewhere in Donbas. Instead of keeping on feeding reserves into an ongoing defensive battle and losing them at increasingly worse rates, use them to erect or reinforce new fortifications, a few fields/treelines/ridges to the back and force the attacker to assault fresh and unfamiliar terrain and defensive networks, thereby hopefully keeping your own advantages up. Of course, giving up Bakhmut now (or even back in December) would mean to cede some rather favorable urban terrain, but as we have seen, most of the fighting of the last weeks took place in much less favorable, smaller villages and fields around the city itself - all fortified positions themselves, but generally not as good defensive terrain as a fighting for the city itself.

Now this I found *very* interesting: If true (that this is really their assessment) it would explain why the Ukrainians keep holding on to Bakhmut despite the enormous costs and risks. I think anyone would deem a 7-1 casualty ratio favourable under such circumstances. Whether this is actually accurate remains to be seen of course. I have noted several times, though, that the Ukrainians often seem to release drone footage of flights which seem to have served no other purpose than to count mountains of dead Russians. Perhaps their baseline estimates are more accurate than we would think...

There seems to be not much that can be realistically done to counter this, no? From here on out, preventing the enemy from having small observation drones in the air is going to be impossible. So any assault is going to be spotted beforehand, more often than not. Suppressing enemy mortar positions seems more plausible, but for that you need your own observation drones and precision artillery (so at least impossible for RU in this war, for now). That may not help against this relatively new form of ultra-mobile long range artillery, though. But the mortars seem the greatest danger, simply due to their much greater availability and local response times. It looks like Russians actually did find a counter: Keep sending more waves until the enemy is through their mortar ammo. Although this clearly does not scale/is not sustainable. BTW, I don't really get why UKR keeps asking for fighter jets, it seems several trainloads of mortars plus ammo would benefit them much more and would be infinitely easier to achieve.

Wow, stop making me blush! Your campaigns are works of art, by the way Can you retry with the most recent version? I just checked with a file I found on this forum by googling and it got unpacked with no issue. Or alternatively, send me the file causing issues, it may be a different version of the campaign than the one I found.

It may be worse than what can be reasonably considered as acceptable for a defensive battle like this, though. The way it seems to me, defensive battles become riskier and lead to increasing numbers of casualties for the defender over time, basically as prepared defenses, fortifications, etc. degrade and get progressively more shot up and therefore less effective. Also, with deteriorating overall situation, individual positions probably get overrun more often (leading to high casualties), necessitating local counter-attacks, which is also riskier. In addition, the attacker has superiority in indirect fires (pretty much an established fact for Bakhmut), making *any* kind of movement riskier, i.e., especially these localized withdrawals and counterattacks. The following are pretty much my own amateur conclusions and may well be off, but to me it seems the biggest mistake, so to speak, a defender can make is to stick in the fight for too long, fighting for too long to cling to or even recapture shot up positions, ruining the "exchange ratio" over time and messing up the attrition calculus, likely due to sunk-cost-fallacy. There are some harrowing descriptions in Storms of Steel from the Battle of the Somme that particularly stuck with me, of command sending company upon company into some totally untenable and destroyed position just to be smashed, either en route or on top of the previous occupants. Any resemblance of an effective defense from that point had long become impossible, as trenches had been smashed up, fields of fire altered by artillery terraforming, etc. And this does not even include any form of operational collapse of defensive, as the enemy begins to bypass remaining strong points, as we may start to see in the near future or are already starting to see around Bakhmut. EDIT: According to Wikipedia, casualty ratio for the entire Battle of the Somme was about 1.4:1, which seems pretty bad for a defensive battle and I'd wager that ratio much more favorable when the battle began in July and got progressively worse, as reserves were fed into counter-attacks and shot up positions

Potentially noteworthy, 30th Mech apparently in action north of Bakhmut. Maybe it's old news but I've personally not seen this brigade mentioned in recent weeks, so it was possibly sent to reinforce this sector.

So I skimmed through a few more entries and my alarm bells just kept ringing even harder. There are zero specifics except for a few names of vague localities in Vietnam and Ukraine, except for a bunch of random weapon statistics. There isn't even a single picture in the entire blog I've seen. Not that selfies in airsoft gear like with that other goofball would make it believable, but even a random picture of a burning tank you can't find through reverse image search would make me drastically more inclined to believe any of this. Also, guy is not only a 70-year old Vietnam vet still involved in active combat with SOF, he also fought in Syria with the SDF. A Thrice divorced, Russian speaking, steak loving badass, shooting Russians and ISIS guys at close range with his AK, call sign "lone wolf", it all reads like very cliché Call of Duty fan fiction.

Is this guy even legit? The 70-year old Vietnam vet jogging around Eastern Ukraine writing a blog in his spare time bit just raises every red flag there is for me.

From what I've seen and read in terms of estimates, we're still talking about a discrepancy of 5:1 of incoming to outgoing shells around Bakhmut. So the artillery superiority is not as crushing as last summer but still really bad. What's also different from summer is that now there is at least the possibility the Ukrainians may be deliberately holding back in favor of building up stockpiles for their own planned offensives. Also, it looks like the ISW assessment of the Bakhmut offensive having culminated in December were premature. Serious cracks in the defense have been appearing since January and now, after almost eight months, I wouldn't be surprised too if the city itself falls by the end of February. I don't want to overstate the importance of this in the grand scheme of things, but to me it looks like the Ukrainians are in risk of having fought a months-long defensive battle with an ultimately unfavorable casualty ratio, if they stay in this particular fight too long now and risk their defense collapsing. In other news, has this been covered here before? Russian "Marker" UGV being sent into Donbas for combat testing, basically an unmanned ATGM carrier by the looks of it.

This all reads like Russia used its penal colony population as a kind of one-shot weapon to bludgeon its way through a fewer layers of defense around Bakhmut and to cause attrition to the Ukrainian defenders, with any exchange ratio of casualties being favorable to them, given that they're happy to be rid of them, anyways. Ultimately a successful measure from their perspective but short lived. Now even the dumbest prisoners have apparently wised up and the contracts of the remaining survivors are bound to expire. I wouldn't expect Wagner to honor these contracts at all, but even the threat of gruesome execution can probably motivate for so long without any other incentives for the cannon fodder, second class types.

Was thid really the case? I remember there being heavy battles for Volnovakha to the north well into March, which at the time seemed like the anchor of a potential escape corridor, if it could have been held. I would also think any defensive plans for the Sea of Azov coast pretty much hinged on Kherson not falling in the very first days of the invasion and there may not have been any coherent contingency plan for the defense of Mariupol

They did equip the much vaunted 3rd Army Corps (which curiously has rarely been heard of since) with a good amount of T-90s and BMP-3s though, and that formation was apparently basically a collection of BARS battalions, manned by often old and barely trained volunteers in it for the cash. A part of that corps was also used during the Kharkiv offensive IIRC.

I've read an article conveying details, allegedly sourcing a German volunteer involved in translating during the interrogation of the two prisoners. One is supposedly a Russian-German with dual-citizenship, the other a formerly unemployed guy from Berlin with no prior military experience. Monthly pay is apparently around 7000 Euro, so quite expensive cannon fodder. I wonder, do recruited convicts paid as well or is amnesty after surviving 6 months the only incentive?

For grenades that are meant to be actually thrown, you are probably right. Although they're was an awful lot of bickering and back-and-forth back in HQ whether this or that grenade did actually kill the guy, or "is he still moving", which is probably also not great for the guys on the ground trying to press the attack, although in this case the Russians were so clearly outmatched that it didn't really matter. For drone-dropped grenades, I've seen way too many videos of "missed opportunities", i.e. a grenade lands square in middle of a bunch of guys, but 4 out off 5 manage to scatter with minor wounds at best. But commercial drones dropping hand grenades is a crutch solution anyways implemented only for lack of any better solutions, that are actually available.

It seems that Ukraine has had a hard time stockpiling shells, HIMARS missiles, etc. before, so it would make sense to try and defend Bakhmut/Soledar on a "shoestring budget", even if that is a hard choice to make probably, trading lives for basically being able to save up shells and so on for later. I remember reading somewhere, e.g., that they had to kick of the Kharkiv offensive with only 1/5th of the stockpiled ammunition they had initially wanted for it. Also, back in July/August HIMARS were working overtime, when targets were juicy still plenty and the Russians were yet to take effective countermeasures. Now they appear to strike much more rarely. Curiously, most HIMARS strikes I've read about in recent weeks were roughly in the Melitopol direction. Maybe some "discrete" shaping operations are already underway?

This reminded me of another video, where two UKR soldiers can be seen clearing some busted trenches assisted by a drone for observation. One of them eventually goes down when a Russian throws 3 grenades at once out of his foxhole because they got too close. Back at the time I thought that it would probably make sense to practice drone-corrected hand grenade throwing for soldiers expected to clear trenches. It looks like they did that here to some extent? Also, I wonder if hand grenades might have to the beefed up in size given the abundance and apparent effectiveness of body armor, although I dont know to which extent this is possible without becoming impractical for throwing/carrying.

I remember a post by grigb where he translated something said by "civilian Girkin" (Neyman or something?) about another consequence of Western sanctions being a lack of modern seeds for planting and the Russians, having neglected to develop any on their own, now having to resort to older types of seed with less yield. Maybe related?

Just out of curiosity, I've played around with ChatGPT AI program today and at one point asked it the following question: Below is the answer it replied with. Note that this AI has apparently been trained exclusively on data available up until the end of 2021, so it knows nothing of what really happened during the current year. It's basically a summary of the many and often incorrect assumptions and estimations about Russia's capabilities that were floating around before the war, although I do find it interesting that it accurately "predicts" how heavily Ukraine would have to rely on NATO support, especially since it was hardly guaranteed before the war that NATO would in fact end up supporting Ukraine as resolutely as it ended up doing. Anyways, it's a fascinating tool and I encourage everyone to give it a spin: https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

A Ukrainianism that slipped through translation? Fun fact: In WW1 times, mortars were also called "mine throwers" in German.

Russians must be in awe of UKR organizational talent. Not only did they manage to capture a city that voted 99.99% to be annexed by Russia without a fight, they even managed to bring along hundreds of civilian crisis actors to cheer them on while they strut around in the place.

Does anyone know what happened to @Grigb? Hope he didn't get mobilized or arrested or anything.