How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Haiduk]

Ragnarok began

[chuckdyke]

If Putin doesn't win, he is 'Toast'.

 

[Battlefront.com]

5 hours ago, Saberwander said:

This being said, I don't think it is doable. Even if they successfully execute 1-4, I don't think that they can defeat Ukraine because Ukrainian morale is so high after successfully defeating Russia in combat - something not many expected. Even if Russia breaks through the lines and takes some land, Ukraine will not surrender and then Russia is in a long term conflict while under sanctions and with Ukraine receiving foreign military and economic aid.

And we keep coming back to the simple fact that Russia can NOT gear up its economy for war on fumes.  It can NOT replace the tech that is now embargoed *ever*.  It doesn't apparently have enough firearms or small arms ammo on hand to equip much more than the conscripts it is already drafting.  So on and so forth.

The people that continually argue that Russia has these massive reserves of men and material because 70 years ago they did are not keeping up with reality.  Even the US would have great difficulty scaling up like this.  Russia has absolutely no chance of it.  Period.  Which means any theory of Russia's options that is based on pure fantasy is, well, not going to happen.

And of course the other thing I keep coming back to... Russia doesn't get to decide its fate alone.  The world has some say in it, but Ukraine has a ton of say in it.  So far Ukraine has been pretty consistently saying to Russia, "we are going to kill every single last one of you until you leave".  Given their track record so far, I don't doubt that they will do exactly that. And this time the West is not going to pressure Ukraine into stopping.  Weapons will continue to flow from the West into Ukraine.

Therefore, any theoretical option that is predicated on Putin declaring victory and unilaterally stopping the war is pure fantasy.  No such option exists for Russia.  None.  Russia must FORCE Ukraine into a cease fire.

So to anybody wanting to speculate that there's some big bad thing coming down the road from Russia... either address Russia's war footing limitations and Ukraine's ability to keep the war going or don't waste time typing into this thread.  Because not developing a theory that accounts for these two things is just about as meaningful as saying that the Russian space force hidden on the dark side of the moon will come down and finish this once and for all.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, Combatintman said:

The inconvenient problem with this plan is that under current practice (eg not the Korean anomaly) a deployment of peacekeepers requires UNSC sign off and the agreement of both warring parties.  If Ukraine says no then it won't happen and it wouldn't surprise me if some of the UNSC members decide to be awkward out of sheer badness.  Norway, possibly the French and more likely the UK and US could simply veto the draft resolution to deploy said peacekeeping force.  The UK and US have plenty of motives to stick it to Russia in this manner thus keeping it in a conflict that drains its blood and treasure and sends the wider message that armed tomfoolery by rogue regimes is frowned upon.

That and Russia is not ever going to allow UN forces on "its land".  This is the whole sad joke about Russia claiming it wanted peace in the Donbas in 2014-2022.  If peace was what it wanted, it could have allowed peace keepers on its side of the line.  Aside from allowing unarmed OSCE observers in wherever and whenever it felt helped its goals, none were ever allowed.  In fact, early on Putin threatened war with any nation that dared to put peace keepers into Ukraine.  So yeah, I think we know pretty well what Putin's take on real peace keepers would be... not in the cards.

BTW, all the claims Russia makes about Ukraine killing its own people and framing Russia.  Obviously we all know that it's complete crap, but sometimes a lie can pass the initial sniff test even if it is not believed.  In this case, it doesn't.  Ukraine and the world are already as motivated as they can be to kick Russia out of Ukraine.  Killing its own people doesn't make them more motivated.  Therefore, Ukraine has no incentive to kill its own people.  I know it's pretty obvious to us, but I'm tossing it out there as an easy way to debunk anybody who is calling incidents like the train station "false flag" attacks.

Steve

[LongLeftFlank]

Hot off the presses: 'the Ukrainian Way of War' short piece by St. Andrews prof of strategic studies.  Few surprises for the Long Thread Marchers here, but nice to see affirmation in the mainstream press: 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/ukraine-military-strategy-russian-failure-kyiv/629514/

The author's summary:

 

Russian aircraft can and do bomb Ukrainian positions, but these missions seem very much to be of the in-and-out variety, and don’t involve the continual exercise of airpower....

The Ukrainians, having witnessed the Russian failures in heavy assault, may decide to avoid making the same mistakes and instead continue their light, attritional warfare. This will probably not result in a swift end to the war, but it offers the possibility of draining Russian military and political will, allowing Ukraine to achieve many of its aims in negotiations.

[acrashb]

10 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Plus, as I stated at the start of this Izyum scenario, Russia also has somehow do all of this while Ukraine (hopefully) pounds the crap out of it with massed artillery fire. 

Everyone says this like Ukraine has an unlimited number of artillery pieces and ammunition.  For all I know that's correct, but it seems to me that, in the excitement about Switchblades, Javelins and NLAWS, no-one is talking about resupply of arty ammunition.

Does anyone have an analysis of Ukraine's stocks and usage rates?  I presume that can't be manufacturing much right now, so it's whatever was in stock.

[Holien]

4 minutes ago, acrashb said:

I presume that can't be manufacturing much right now, so it's whatever was in stock.

Hmm I wonder if there are any former Warsaw pact countries nearby with old stock they might be prepared to offer to Ukraine? 

[Harmon Rabb]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

BTW, all the claims Russia makes about Ukraine killing its own people and framing Russia.  Obviously we all know that it's complete crap, but sometimes a lie can pass the initial sniff test even if it is not believed.  In this case, it doesn't.  Ukraine and the world are already as motivated as they can be to kick Russia out of Ukraine.  Killing its own people doesn't make them more motivated.  Therefore, Ukraine has no incentive to kill its own people.  I know it's pretty obvious to us, but I'm tossing it out there as an easy way to debunk anybody who is calling incidents like the train station "false flag" attacks.

Steve

A number of commentators including ones who post on this topic have compare Russia's war in Ukraine to the Winter War. Here is a Pro-Soviet propaganda pamphlet published by the Russia Today Society. The rhetoric in this pamphlet sounds familiar.

 

Edited April 8, 2022 by Harmon Rabb

[LongLeftFlank]

And about that idea of the Russians 'digging in like ticks'.

UA:  Make my day....

This was flagged as 'sensitive content' but I  can't really see anything very graphic going on.

Mariupol streetscape. Either they fight for every house or they're wasting tons of ammo blasting them all.

 

 

Edited April 8, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[womble]

8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Imagine after the shooting stops that the Russian government isn't cooperative with handing over people responsible for war crimes

One thing that bothers me isn't the criminals, it's the innocents that Russia has spirited away. How ever do the forces of light get those folk back out of Mordor when Putin just denies their existence?

[kraze]

1 hour ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

Well, that is all the S300 equipment Slovakia has. One battery

yeah, but it isn't the only country that has it - is what I mean. Once others see there's no fallout (pun intended) - there will be no excuses not to send more

[womble]

I get the feeling that "dug in" is becoming synonymous with "waiting to die". Any artillery that doesn't displace immediately it has finished a "mad 5 minutes" is potentially vulnerable to counterbattery fire. Even if the CB radar can't get a good enough fix for the counter-battery to FFE before the mission is finished, it may well be feasible to get a good enough position to send in a drone for a look, leading almost inevitably to the aforesaid FFE.

In return, a static position trying to hit SPA that are a) shooting-and-scooting and b) firing from dispersed positions is going to have a job registering any success, even with vast superiority of numbers.

It's possible to build shellproof defenses, I guess, but those take megatonnes of concrete and rebar to cover even a couple of hundred km of frontage, and artillery can't fire out of them - they need open overheads.

Do any of the UA SPA platforms have "Multiple Round, Single Impact" (MRSI) capability?

[Battlefront.com]

21 minutes ago, acrashb said:

Everyone says this like Ukraine has an unlimited number of artillery pieces and ammunition.  For all I know that's correct, but it seems to me that, in the excitement about Switchblades, Javelins and NLAWS, no-one is talking about resupply of arty ammunition.

Does anyone have an analysis of Ukraine's stocks and usage rates?  I presume that can't be manufacturing much right now, so it's whatever was in stock.

For sure ammo supply is a big concern for both sides.  Ukraine has asked NATO for ammo of all sorts.  This is one reason why there's some motion on getting them NATO caliber weaponry because that can be supplied in definitely.

I am sure there are some stocks of Soviet era ammo sitting around in various countries. Hopefully stored better than the Soviet era ammo Russia is also tapping into.  A couple of reports say the dud rate is pretty high.

Steve

[Kinophile]

13 minutes ago, womble said:

One thing that bothers me isn't the criminals, it's the innocents that Russia has spirited away. How ever do the forces of light get those folk back out of Mordor when Putin just denies their existence?

So true. Russia will never give its own people up , no matter what they did. Getting the hostages back is going to be so hard.

Ref arty ammo, its a recurring, 2nd level priority from UA Gov, after ATGMs. @Haiduk can confirm, but I believe there was some UKR R&D into MRSI tech but the inevitable corruption killed it.

Edited April 8, 2022 by Kinophile

[DesertFox]

Again Prof. Timothy Snyder is spot on.

Quote

As I have been saying since the war began, "denazification" in official Russian usage just means the destruction of the Ukrainian state and nation.  A "Nazi," as the genocide manual explains, is simply a human being who self-identifies as Ukrainian.  According to the handbook, the establishment of a Ukrainian state thirty years ago was the "nazification of Ukraine."

Russia's genocide handbook - by Timothy Snyder (substack.com)

[kraze]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

And we keep coming back to the simple fact that Russia can NOT gear up its economy for war on fumes.  It can NOT replace the tech that is now embargoed *ever*.  It doesn't apparently have enough firearms or small arms ammo on hand to equip much more than the conscripts it is already drafting.  So on and so forth.

The people that continually argue that Russia has these massive reserves of men and material because 70 years ago they did are not keeping up with reality.  Even the US would have great difficulty scaling up like this.  Russia has absolutely no chance of it.  Period.  Which means any theory of Russia's options that is based on pure fantasy is, well, not going to happen.

And of course the other thing I keep coming back to... Russia doesn't get to decide its fate alone.  The world has some say in it, but Ukraine has a ton of say in it.  So far Ukraine has been pretty consistently saying to Russia, "we are going to kill every single last one of you until you leave".  Given their track record so far, I don't doubt that they will do exactly that. And this time the West is not going to pressure Ukraine into stopping.  Weapons will continue to flow from the West into Ukraine.

Therefore, any theoretical option that is predicated on Putin declaring victory and unilaterally stopping the war is pure fantasy.  No such option exists for Russia.  None.  Russia must FORCE Ukraine into a cease fire.

So to anybody wanting to speculate that there's some big bad thing coming down the road from Russia... either address Russia's war footing limitations and Ukraine's ability to keep the war going or don't waste time typing into this thread.  Because not developing a theory that accounts for these two things is just about as meaningful as saying that the Russian space force hidden on the dark side of the moon will come down and finish this once and for all.

Steve

There are two logical flaws that can be pointed out.

One is - Russia may draft a million men, but what will they ride to the front, when even that "12000" tanks figure now looks more like 4000 tops, across the whole country and they need them in other places.

And the other one is - there's no ideological figure for our army among politicians - like it's for russian army with putin. Zelenskyy may seem cool to you, but he has no fanatical loyalty of the army, which was reformed for 8 years to promote individual decision making. Even if russia somehow decided to offer us ceasefire on their terms - there's so much innocent blood - we would have A LOT of rogue soldiers trying to get revenge on russian troops still on our territory, disregarding orders and forcing the war to either not stop or escalate shortly after.

[DesertFox]

You can´t make this up, can you?

 

 

[Ts4EVER]

Well If I was a Russian bigshot I'd start drinking too.

[Kinophile]

I feel personally that referencing WW2 is a fallacy, especially in weapons tech conversations.

Technologically, WW2 was still a mechanical war. This invasion is a digital war (read- electronic).

I'm singing to the choir here, but in WW2 most tanks were (comparatively) simple to build, operate and maintain. The more "high-tech" German ones were very finicky and required high maintenance, not just because it was new tech but because that's the nature of electronics - they're more brittle, vulnerable to shocks etc. Making them robust enough for battle has been another technology thread all in itself.

Building the high-tech weapons Russia needs to succeed is orders of times more difficult than what Nazi Germany faced with Tiger 2s, even Panthers. FFS, Russia didn't even a decent home-grown thermals, they were using French tech. Their tactical comms need western components and even if they replace with their own versions, those will never be as good; also, the effort required to reverse engineer, build & manufacture those replacement bobbles and bits will inherently put them an entire iteration behind the western equivalents. So their comms will always be behind Western gear and inherently hackable.

None of this was an issue in WW2. 

By comparison, Ukraine is being offered gee-whiz, murderous-iphone type technology in abundance. They have real-time satellite visuals available at company & sometimes platoon (and even at specialized squad) level. They have embraced open source software as a fount of good, an organic source of solutions to their own UKR-specific problems. 

Russia is fighting this war with one foot in the past, technology and doctrine-wise. Ukraine has both feet in the future.

WW2 is not a reference for this fight, it just leads to misconceptions.

Edited April 8, 2022 by Kinophile

[kraze]

12 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

Again Prof. Timothy Snyder is spot on.

Russia's genocide handbook - by Timothy Snyder (substack.com)

A good article for people denying russians are doing genocide.

The only reason they didn't kill more in Bucha, Irpin, Vorzel etc is because whole north was a constantly contested territory - so they had to do mass murders of "nazis" in between fighting and couldn't be fully dedicated to it.

I'm afraid of what we will inevitably discover in the south. Remember - those videos of brave people in Kherson area protesting stopped appearing for a while.

And then we also have Donetsk and Luhansk. Those are probably much much worse. A single "Isolation" example is chilling and we know about it only because it had survivors.

[BletchleyGeek]

 

That's very close to Kherson. I brace myself for what is going to be found there.

[billbindc]

2 hours ago, billbindc said:

This. The crucial geopolitical fact that the Russian invasion of Ukraine accomplished was to convince Germany, France, Finland, Sweden, Slovakia, etc that Russia is a problem that cannot be handled through accommodation. More to the point, in places like Germany, it's popular to advocate for more direct confrontation with Putin. Leaders will get pilloried (as Scholtz is) for not taking a firm stance and parties will lose voters if they mishandle the conflict in the long term. The EU/NATO may not always act as quickly or as adeptly as many wish but this is not a job that most nations' leadership think can be left half done. 

Forgot to add: 

[billbindc]

 

It's going to be everywhere.

[Nicdain]

37 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

Again Prof. Timothy Snyder is spot on.

Russia's genocide handbook - by Timothy Snyder (substack.com)

All of what is written in that article is crazy ... and scary. It seems to come directly from the early years of last century.
I wonder how it is possible that there are people who are still trying to justify Putin ...

[Ultradave]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Russia must FORCE Ukraine into a cease fire.

And I haven't seen evidence they are capable of doing so since the invasion began.