How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[LukeFF]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

This got me to remembering.  Recall back in the good old days when the pro-Russian crowd called this all propaganda? Sigh, I wish they were right. They are all pretty much gone now, not sure if we will see them again.

I will miss the accusations of being pro-US and short changing the Russians/Soviets.  The arguments about crappy T-72 spotting…harkens to a kinder gentler time…January.

I had a look at some of the last posts of members like @Sgt.Squarehead the other day - hoo boy, those didn't age well at all. 

[Machor]

Mourning wreath for the Moskva in Sevastopol - I believe Russia has yet to acknowledge loss of personnel:

 

[Machor]

More Moskva-related: Talk of a formal declaration of war by Russia:

The US has confirmed the Ukrainian account of the sinking:

One for the meme-war: 

[Machor]

A bizarre anti-Polish protest in Russia: 'Supporters' of the war in Ukraine gathered to destroy the Katyn memorial, but demonstrated their majesté by not doing so:

 

[FancyCat]

8 minutes ago, Machor said:

A bizarre anti-Polish protest in Russia: 'Supporters' of the war in Ukraine gathered to destroy the Katyn memorial, but demonstrated their majesté by not doing so:

 

This was in response to Poland tearing down Communist monuments. The horrid thing is how they are comparing a cemetery of a massacre vs a monument.

[billbindc]

2 hours ago, Fenris said:

There's this story going around... Obviously IDK if it's true and it is the internet, but it makes for a good story.

Here's the youtube vid mentioned

 

If there's a quibble to have with this, it's that the cultivation of fake sources, treating random contacts as producing agents, pocketing funding, concocting progress in unfriendly political environments, telling frightening bosses in Moscow pretty much whatever they want to hear was absolutely rampant in the KGB when Putin was an agent in Germany in the 1980's. As Masha Gessen puts it about one of Putin's tours:  "Putin and his colleagues were reduced mainly to collecting press clippings, thus contributing to the mountains of useless information produced by the KGB". 

Vladi had to know that on a variety of levels, he was being fed what he wanted to hear. In addition, the FSB wouldn't need 150 FSB agents to finance friendly militants in Ukraine. So...maybe plausible but it's putting far too much on one factor to say Russia failed because of this issue.

[db_zero]

Question to anyone who might know or have an idea...

Playing around in CMO and some of EW (electronic warfare) aircraft have effects that extend quite a distance. It looks possible to remain in friendly/neutral territory or in international waters, turn on the EW warfare gear and affect unfriendly nations radar/SAM guidance, ship radars and so on miles away.

Its was reported a few weeks ago that the US deployed a squadron of F-18 Growlers to Europe. These have an offensive ECM load out that has quite a range of effects when used. It appears they could easily stay in NATO territory, turn on the ECM and the effects would easily extend into Ukraine.

Over international water they could easily have effects on any ships within their ECM gears range.

I've heard of some reports the Russians may be jamming GPS.

What is the international law in regards to this sort of activity-if any? In peacetime and during conflict. Is interfering with a combatants use of the electromagnetic spectrum considered an act of war like blockading? Or is it something along the line of providing weapons and supplies, but not actively taking part in a conflict? Don’t see anything on this seems like a grey area.

I've heard of people losing TV reception and other effects to electronics when presumably military exercises were happening and jamming aircraft  presumably turned their gear on.

Edited April 16, 2022 by db_zero

[LongLeftFlank]

2 hours ago, LukeFF said:

I had a look at some of the last posts of members like @Sgt.Squarehead the other day - hoo boy, those didn't age well at all. 

Let's keep it civil here, s.v.p.

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, c3k said:

The Russian doctrine has been shown to be deeply flawed. They not only need to come up with a new doctrine, but they need to re-equip based on that doctrine, and re-train based on it.

In all my ranting about all the problems with the Russian Army I forgot to say one thing that you and The_Capt hit on.

There's still a bunch of experts out there stating that the Russians could have been successful if their overall strategy was better.  That the inherent qualities of the Russian armed forces wasn't fundamentally incapable of waging a war like this.  I think there's fewer today than yesterday who think this way, but they're also wrong.

The BTG concept itself is flawed.  The simple fact is the lower down the military chain of command you go the less "plug and play" works.  Training and supporting factors can influence the degree of problems it cause, not eliminate them.  If the US Army went about trying to hot swap individual soldiers, tanks, or platoons between totally unrelated formations they'd see a massive hit to cohesion and therefore combat performance.

Which means a doctrine or practice that conceives of its lower level units as interchangeable widgets is not going to work under combat conditions.  The Russian can't simply stop doing this.  Their entire force is structured around the concept.  No couple of weeks or months of rebuilding is going to change that.  Probably 5 years just to figure out what a new way is and another 5 to start implementing it and another 5 to be any good at it.

3 hours ago, c3k said:

This is not the atmosphere that is conducive to being flexible with doctrine.

Heh.  Ya think?

Steve

[MSBoxer]

Had a strange, but not surprising thought.

Thanks to this discussion, I know more about what is happening, or will probably be happening in Ukraine than some Russian commanders.

[acrashb]

5 minutes ago, MSBoxer said:

Thanks to this discussion, I know more about what is happening, or will probably be happening in Ukraine than some Russian commanders.

Which makes me wonder what happens if Russian forces read this thread - there's no reason they wouldn't.

In the end I don't think they are operationally or tactically flexible enough to benefit from it.

[chuckdyke]

39 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

That the inherent qualities of the Russian armed forces wasn't fundamentally incapable of waging a war like this. 

It is the social media. Conscript Army we all know those days should be over unless your country itself is invaded. Even if you make a C2 function in RL you do Combat Mission. Military internet in the 21st century must be on a different level. It may very much possible that the Russian conscript lost the battle in Cyber Space before it even happened. 2014-2022 plenty of time to train the Ukraine army for the 21st century. The tank is not out of date yet, I think the T72 is. 

[Battlefront.com]

British SAS apparently doing some on the spot training outside of Kyiv:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sas-troops-are-training-local-forces-in-ukraine-32vs5bjzb

Steve

[LongLeftFlank]

1 hour ago, acrashb said:

Which makes me wonder what happens if Russian forces read this thread - there's no reason they wouldn't.

In the end I don't think they are operationally or tactically flexible enough to benefit from it.

TBH, the only kinds of Russian officers who would be intellectually open to benefit from it are the very kinds needed to build a new, better Russia, focused on human development and not graft (yup, that's a pretty hard road, no illusions on that score)

As most people here will know, Chekists and foreign service types were early backers of Gorbachev and glasnost, not because they were liberals, but for the simple reason that they had access to hard info on just how hopelessly far behind the USSR was falling.

Putin was one such although, significantly, his posts kept him behind the Curtain (DDR). Which may, unfortunately, have inclined him to take only his own advice regarding the, ahem, pacification of former 'satellites.'

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32066222

"Their German friends give them a 20-year-old washing machine and with this they drive back to Leningrad," says Putin biographer and critic Masha Gessen. "There's a strong sense that he was serving his country and had nothing to show for it."

...And it's not only former Russian colleagues who've stayed close to Putin. Take Matthias Warnig - a former Stasi officer, believed to have spent time in Dresden when Putin was there - who is now managing director of Nordstream, the pipeline taking gas directly from Russia to Germany across the Baltic Sea.

Edited April 16, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[Rooks And Kings]

2 hours ago, db_zero said:

Question to anyone who might know or have an idea...

Playing around in CMO and some of EW (electronic warfare) aircraft have effects that extend quite a distance. It looks possible to remain in friendly/neutral territory or in international waters, turn on the EW warfare gear and affect unfriendly nations radar/SAM guidance, ship radars and so on miles away.

Its was reported a few weeks ago that the US deployed a squadron of F-18 Growlers to Europe. These have an offensive ECM load out that has quite a range of effects when used. It appears they could easily stay in NATO territory, turn on the ECM and the effects would easily extend into Ukraine.

Over international water they could easily have effects on any ships within their ECM gears range.

I've heard of some reports the Russians may be jamming GPS.

What is the international law in regards to this sort of activity-if any? In peacetime and during conflict. Is interfering with a combatants use of the electromagnetic spectrum considered an act of war like blockading? Or is it something along the line of providing weapons and supplies, but not actively taking part in a conflict? Don’t see anything on this seems like a grey area.

I've heard of people losing TV reception and other effects to electronics when presumably military exercises were happening and jamming aircraft  presumably turned their gear on.

This probably won't happen. De-escalation is the priority here and while it may seem like they went to Europe for that purpose, the reality is we send things to Europe with and without a conflict nearing. We've had aircraft south of Ukraine and they've stayed south. Jamming on Growlers is more effective the farther you are away but I find it highly unlikely it's for Offensive ECM and more likely it's transferring to a squadron for regular rotation. 

[Battlefront.com]

Some sense of Ukrainian losses so far came today from Zelensky:

Quote

Zelensky said that Ukrainian officials think about 2,500 to 3,000 Ukrainian troops have died in the war, comparing the figure to what he said are Russia's casualty numbers of 19,000 to 20,000 (Russia has acknowledged 1,351 military casualties). Zelensky added there are about 10,000 Ukrainian troops who have been injured and that it's "hard to say how many will survive."

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/15/politics/tapper-zelensky-interview-cnntv/index.html

Time to crunch some numbers to test out certain concepts of where this war is and where it might be headed in terms of both sides' ability to sustain this war from a casualty standpoint:

Let's take the high number of 3000 KIA and 10,000 WIA (which is an "expected" ratio) for the Ukrainian side.  Ukraine estimates Russia is now up to an estimated 20,000 KIA which would mean an additional 60,000 WIA.  That is 1 Ukrainian lost for every 6 Russians.

I haven't checked extensively for other figures, but one I quickly found from late March by NATO put the total losses at 40,000 KIA/WIA.  Even with NATO's more conservative figure this is more than 3 Russians lost for every 1 Ukrainian. 

Based on the ratios of confirmed lost vehicles, I'm inclined to think the Ukrainian figures for Russian losses is more accurate than NATO's.  But let's say the loss ratio is 1:5 just for the sake of it.  That's 65,000 total Russians lost.

We know Ukraine has at least 100,000 new uniformed personnel forming up.  That's roughly 6 soldiers available to take the place of every 1 casualty. 

For Russia to have the same available replacement level as Ukraine they would need to have nearly 500,000 reservists in training since a month ago.

Is there still anybody left reading this thread that cares to try and explain how Russia's traditional manpower advantage over its enemies applies to this war?  Especially when Ukraine can probably raise another 100,000 if it has to.

I've been loosely following Ukraine General Staff's daily tallies of Russian casualties during this "low intensity" period of the war.  Unscientifically it seems that Russia loses about a company's worth of personnel and equipment every day or perhaps every other day.  This means that every 3-6 days it loses the equivalent of 1 BTG's worth of combat power.  Some estimates are that Russia has 90 BTGs left in the front lines now.  Figure 20% loss makes the entire force combat effective, that's the equivalent of 18 BTGs.  Factor in their daily loss rate and that means in 2-4 months Russia's existing combat formations will be combat ineffective if this "low intensity" level of combat continues.

Of course these are all extremely crude indicators, but they do indicate   What they say to me is that if Russia goes on a big offensive adventure that results in large amount of friendly casualties, then the front will be at risk of collapse pretty soon thereafter.  Days to weeks.  If instead Russia were to just try and hold what they have they'd be looking at not making it through the summer. 

There's a bunch of variables to consider, such as what the loss rate would be for Russia if it stopped making dumb attacks, but it doesn't consider suffering any "pocket" events such as are afforded around Kherson.  It also doesn't take into account the complexities of the biannual loss/gain of conscripts.  So this is only a crude indicator of rough concepts of time.  Taken with the mandatory pinch of salt, this does seem to confirm that Russia can't make it through the summer without throwing in massive numbers of untrained conscripts.  Which, I should add, would simply bump up the daily loss rate and so probably not change the timeframe too much.

Steve

[sburke]

7 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

If it's not been a total surprise to me, it's not been a total surprise to others.  Although I have a fairly poor opinion of many talking heads and so-called experts out there, I know there's a lot of people more experienced and smarter than me that didn't miss what was going on at the time.  Based on what has happened I'd say that the US government had a lot of those people working for it and their voices were listened to by the most important decision makers.

Steve

This is one thing that fascinates me.  Clearly the US intel community decided very very early on that this wasn't the usual gamesmanship from Putin.  I don't know that we will ever know, but I'd love to understand the intel that allowed them to make that call and with such assurance.  Putin has to be convinced someone sold him out and that someone has to be in a pretty small circle of his most trusted.  Could be that no one did but someone was careless with info (yeah not exactly shocking there). Maybe the source of Shoigu's heart attack.

[Kinophile]

Thats interesting that the UKR KIA:WIA are in the classic ballpark of 1:3. Zelensky's comment about how many will actually make it is sorta irrelevant - the numbers are straightforwardly realistic. I think of the typical WIA its 25% who pass away later/life long palliative care, 50% out of the war for good but have a life, 25% can return to combat? Not sure...

NATO did a lot for the development of a professional NCO corp; this has had immense effect at the critical small unit level in terms of effectiveness and initiative and morale (you can trust your sarge to actually want you to live!). 

A more effective medivac system could be the next big target for unit cohesion/morale. I assume battlefield extraction is super hard to improve in the current situation, also they obviously don't have Walter Reed or John Hopkins et al. 

But I think immediate medic-level care can be drastically improved by even just widespread NATO/US-level first responder kit. I doubt UKR has very much better first-aid gear than RUS...?

Edited April 16, 2022 by Kinophile

[Kinophile]

6 minutes ago, sburke said:

This is one thing that fascinates me.  Clearly the US intel community decided very very early on that this wasn't the usual gamesmanship from Putin.  I don't know that we will ever know, but I'd love to understand the intel that allowed them to make that call and with such assurance.  Putin has to be convinced someone sold him out and that someone has to be in a pretty small circle of his most trusted.  Could be that no one did but someone was careless with info (yeah not exactly shocking there). Maybe the source of Shoigu's heart attack.

Yes, exactly. What was the indicator that coalesced the smoking-room boys thoughts, I wonder...

[kraze]

10 hours ago, db_zero said:

My guess and its only a guess is if you look at a map of the natural gas reserves in Ukraine a wide sweeping movement would put a vast majority of those natural gas reserves under Russian control.

Another issue is water. Ukraine cut off the water supply to the Crimea and it caused crop failures and water rationing. Russia wants to control water flow so the Crimea has access to enough to meet its needs.

Neon for lasers used in microchip production. Last thing the West wants is Russia in control of a good portion of the global supply. Lithium is also a potential factor.

Behind every war there is usually a economic and resource issue behind the stated "noble" goals. It may not be completely rational from a military point of view to attempt a wide sweeping offensive, but it wouldn't be the first time a dictator insisted on military strategy based on resource reasons as opposed to sound military strategy.

 

This offensive has nothing to do with resources and never did. Or at least not literal resources. For example russians couldn't care less if occupied Crimea ever gets drinking water - even if everybody died there of starvation - "those are just khokhol traitors anyway". Their military base was getting enough and that's the only thing that ever mattered.

And you know why? If russians ever cared about their economics - they wouldn't still be so critically dependent on black stuff from a hole in the ground.

Russia has only one single, unchangeable goal: destruction of Ukraine, complete elimination and enslavement of ukrainians - nothing else. Because if ukrainians exist and resist - this makes a huge plothole in their empire-building mythology and this is why you see putin spewing absolute insanity.

 

[dan/california]

This is a great thread. Some implications for the coming showdown in the Donbas, depending on whether the Russians can reorg to deal with some of their most atrocious corruption related screw ups.

[kraze]

9 hours ago, The Steppenwulf said:

The discussion points raised around a hypothetical cease fire/peace settlement are forgetting that Russia's predominant demand for settlement is that Ukraine be a neutral nation without any security guarantee - the  counter demand of Ukraine for any such agreement.

If Russia is serious about any deal it will have to drop this demand and that would mean an acknowledgement of a strategic defeat for Russia and Putin. The overall aim of this conflict would be thwarted and Putin would be agreeing to it. This position is intractable presently and can only be settled if Putin is deposed or RA accepts defeat.  

Russia has no demand for Ukrainian neutrality. Everybody in there knows this. That's why any talk about it is an empty talk designed to earn political points at home.

Why?

Because Ukraine is neutral to this very day. Ukraine just stopped being constitutionally neutral in 2017, more than whole 3 years into the war that russians themselves started.

So how can it be an "overall aim of this conflict" if Russia attacked a perfectly neutral Ukraine, where 82% opposed joining NATO, in 2014?

It's just as legit goal as russians officially demanding Ukraine to shut down its US-led biolabs with birds that spread weaponized covid aimed at ubermensch russian genes. Every single Ukrainian politician will agree to do it. Because we have none.

Edited April 16, 2022 by kraze

[Aragorn2002]

2 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:

TBH, the only kinds of Russian officers who would be intellectually open to benefit from it are the very kinds needed to build a new, better Russia, focused on human development and not graft (yup, that's a pretty hard road, no illusions on that score)

As most people here will know, Chekists and foreign service types were early backers of Gorbachev and glasnost, not because they were liberals, but for the simple reason that they had access to hard info on just how hopelessly far behind the USSR was falling.

Putin was one such although, significantly, his posts kept him behind the Curtain (DDR). Which may, unfortunately, have inclined him to take only his own advice regarding the, ahem, pacification of former 'satellites.'

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32066222

"Their German friends give them a 20-year-old washing machine and with this they drive back to Leningrad," says Putin biographer and critic Masha Gessen. "There's a strong sense that he was serving his country and had nothing to show for it."

...And it's not only former Russian colleagues who've stayed close to Putin. Take Matthias Warnig - a former Stasi officer, believed to have spent time in Dresden when Putin was there - who is now managing director of Nordstream, the pipeline taking gas directly from Russia to Germany across the Baltic Sea.

Well, well, well. I guess that's another problem. Germany never cleared itself of it's DDR past properly. You can bet that the Stasi and the KGB left a web of their agents behind, who continued their treacherous activities. It's high time all these moles are dug out and prosecuted. I think the infiltration of western society by the Russians, said to be at least as dangerous and intense as in the Cold War, is one of the reasons why Putin believed he could get away with attacking Ukraine.

Edited April 16, 2022 by Aragorn2002

[Aragorn2002]

38 minutes ago, kraze said:

This offensive has nothing to do with resources and never did. Or at least not literal resources. For example russians couldn't care less if occupied Crimea ever gets drinking water - even if everybody died there of starvation - "those are just khokhol traitors anyway". Their military base was getting enough and that's the only thing that ever mattered.

And you know why? If russians ever cared about their economics - they wouldn't still be so critically dependent on black stuff from a hole in the ground.

Russia has only one single, unchangeable goal: destruction of Ukraine, complete elimination and enslavement of ukrainians - nothing else. Because if ukrainians exist and resist - this makes a huge plothole in their empire-building mythology and this is why you see putin spewing absolute insanity.

 

And the reason why they won't give up and will do absolutely anything to crush Ukraine. Despite all the victory bulletins everywhere (also on this forum) the worst is yet to come and we will be surprised by how far Putin is prepared to go. So brace yourself, Ukraine.

[Combatintman]

On 4/14/2022 at 12:03 PM, Haiduk said:

There was a photo of destroyed vehicles of this unit and captured documents, so at least one BTG (4th) of 201th MB is involved. Region unknown. Photos was issued by Air-assault Command, so this can ve also Izium direction

201st MB is not Dagestan (this is Russian Caucasians autonomous republic), but Tadjikistan. Since Taliban came close to their border, I didn't think, Russians can detach many troops from this deirection. 201st MB has three moto-rifle regiments and tank battalion. The latter was equipped with T-72AV/B1, but in December of 2021 was rearmed on T-72B3. Also MD got at least 18 BMP-2M in 2020.  

Theoretically Russia could spare the troops.  The Taliban and Islamic extremist threat is over egged massively by both Russia and Tajikistan.  A couple of months back the Tajik President came out with the outlandish figure of something like 6,000 Islamic militants active in Afghanistan's north east which was 'confirmed' by Russia.  In reality the numbers don't even come close to what's up there in Afghanistan's Badakhshan, Takhar and Kunduz provinces - maybe 2,000 at best and even that would be an optimistic assessment.  Coupled with this is that the Taliban are keeping a lid on these guys.  However, it plays into a good narrative of being strong on terrorism and allows Russia to trumpet the CSTO as well as find good reasons to station its forces in non-Russian territory.