How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[The_Capt]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

We saw this on full display when MH-17 was shot down.  They rushed a response out because they had to.  It was moronic and easily proven false (Ukraine Buk shot it down, IIRC, was first).  When this flopped they came up with a second one (IIRC Ukrainian MiG), this time backed up by obviously fabricated "satellite" images.  Not only did the images make everybody laugh, but someone within the ministry forgot to check to see how the variables of altitude, distance, speed, etc. meshed together.  They did not.  So unless Ukraine invented a new wonder weapon or wonder aircraft, the story was physically impossible.  So they fabricated more evidence such as the supposed Kiev air controller overhearing orders to shoot down MH-17, which then spun into a classic conspiracy theory.

My memory of the details might be a bit off, but the point I'm making is accurate.  They spin doctors are more like triage physicians, not surgeons.  They look at the problem and immediately make a diagnosis and recommendation.  Due to the restrictions of time it seems Russia skips over the consultation with the experts on that particular injury and instead go right to the press podium.  At that moment they are committed to whatever lie they spewed.  When it is proven wrong they have to go to the podium again and tell a different lie.  Repeat until something sticks or the audience tires and moves on.

Russians and their sympathizers don't have a problem with this, because they don't trust the spokespeople anyway.  Yet they believe what they are told anyway, even if they have to modify it themselves so that it makes better sense.  More intellectually puzzling is that they seem to be easily suckered into conspiracy theories.

Again, this isn't specific to Russians, though I think a bigger percentage of their population fits this description.  Look at Q-Anon followers.  They don't believe things which can be proven true/false when they don't like the conclusions.  But they'll believe an anonymous source on the Internet (of all places!) who has no track record of being correct even about the things that should be obvious lies.  Whatever allows for this, it is a defect (or defects) of the Human mind.  Russian culture might cater its messaging to such people, but inherently they're working with the same gray goo as the rest of the world.

Steve

Lies, bad lies, statistics, and Russian "truth".

[Battlefront.com]

3 minutes ago, akd said:

Interesting thread on the destruction of the 64th (now Guards) Motor Rifle Brigade:

Well, one theory way back when was that Russia wanted to get rid of all the possible witnesses and perpetrates by throwing the unit into heavy combat.  Whether that was true or not, seems the same end result.

3 minutes ago, akd said:

Also, Shtat for the 25th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade as of April 30th

 

The entire Brigade had less than 800 personnel, 8 tanks and 35 APCs divided into two weak BTGs.

https://twitter.com/Haruspexut/status/1557323735895506945?s=20&t=aPcb7EJ_Y-6cMWTAW7QC9A

 

Yikes.  And that's about 1 month AFTER it was withdrawn from combat (quick check) to Belgorod.

Steve

[Grigb]

I am moving slowly but surely. Here is a map for Maryinka battle. Maryinka settlement is located on another end of RU offensive. You undoubtedly heard many claims about it like 2/3 are captured or almost captured and so on. Well, let's look closer. This time I will use Google Earth. It is less pleasing for my eyes, but it does show terrain and in the case of Maryinka it is important.

The red line is the approximate border before the war. Yellow dashed line is the contested area where major fighting is happening. As far as I understand assault groups of both sides infiltrate contested area and engage each other often with arty. But to define what is generally happening we can use several notable features.

• On the right just in front of the border line there is farm fully under RU control from 6-Aug. There are just several hundred meters between the farm and RU forward positions and 10 days between start of offensive and statement of full control.
• The dominant feature that controls the eastern part of the village is the landfill of the former Shchurovo Mine.

According to RU sources the landfill was always in UKR hands. So, nobody really knows how RU almost captured Maryinka without capturing the landfill. Well, possibly they infiltrated several assault groups in to several places in contested area, declared Maryinka is almost captured and then got killed (see insert from sample video).

However, we have an interesting development. Yesterday, two weeks after start of the offensive RU stated they captured position at the landfill and were moving toward the center. But I need a definite statement that the landfill is captured because I know how RU propaganda works. Let's wait and see.

• Last is checkpoint Maryinka. There is no any information about it. So, we can assume RU did not reach it at all. 

This should give you an idea how RU is progressing at both ends of the offensive. 

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Grigb said:

Girkin to rants about Crimea strike in case you are interested.

 

 

Wow.  I checked my Sarcasm Meter and found not a trace of sarcasm there at all.  I think I need a new meter

His response is interesting in that he does not even attempt to speculate about what happened.  Instead, he focuses on the announcements from officials and propagandists with a combination of contempt and dismay.  He goes further to tie it to past announcements (the Syrians for example) and larger problems with Russian forces (the "all the necessary equipment" jab).

This fits in with how I figured things would go with the RU Nats.  It is dangerous for their mental state, if not physical well being, to seriously discuss the ramifications of this attack as we are doing here.  The reason is that once they start going down that road, defeatism is going to come along for the ride.

Steve

[Harmon Rabb]

12 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Well, one theory way back when was that Russia wanted to get rid of all the possible witnesses and perpetrates by throwing the unit into heavy combat.  Whether that was true or not, seems the same end result.

Yikes.  And that's about 1 month AFTER it was withdrawn from combat (quick check) to Belgorod.

Steve

I was thinking the same thing, regardless if it was intentional or not that brigade has become an embarrassment for the Russian military. The Russians are probably happy that a lot of them are dead.

My question is did the Ukrainian military manage to capture any of them during the fighting?

[Grigb]

44 minutes ago, Twisk said:

Grigb, thank you for making these overlays they are very informative and add good context. I wonder are these image being uploaded to the Battlefront website? I ask because often if you look at old forum posts and many images are now 404 and give bad result because images were uploaded to free image hosting and are now gone. It would be unfortunate to lose your hardwork to internet rot



@Haiduk Thank you for taking time to respond, appreciate your input.

Thank you for your kind words. I bought an account in one image hosting site. I am hoping to keep it up until the war ends. After that unfortunately I cannot guarantee anything as most probably I will move on.

I did not consider uploading it to Battlefront. There is an issue with the size - due to the monitor I currently use my screenshots are rather huge (mb wise). I am reducing them to tolerable (but still big) size. They could be decreased further but it will require me spending more time to adjust everything. But time is what I do not have now.

Probably after the war ends, I will pay at once for a few years and that should fix the issue. The only thing is it does not allow me to upload mp4 and it hurts. I am thinking about Youtube which means I will have to handle two accounts but it should allow me to add subtitles which is good. So, that is where I am probaly going soon. 

[Taranis]

Big fire after explosions at Chonhar (North Crimea)
 

 

[Letter from Prague]

58 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Thanks for that.  I made my post before I read yours, but that is exactly what I was thinking.

This base is "safely in the rear" manned by the Russian military.  Good security requires strong leadership, chain of command, accountability, and discipline.  It also requires those things to be fairly consistently in place 24/7/365.  Any signs that the Russian military possesses these traits?  No.  Even on the frontlines these qualities don't seem to exist, at least not equally and frequently enough to be counted on.

Security can, of course, doesn't have to rely totally on Humans.  Lots of high tech options exist for these purposes.  Who here has faith that Russia installed such systems in a way that would be consistent with Western concepts of security?  Anybody?  No, I thought not.

So what we have is a base that is likely poorly guarded with limited support technology in an area where Russians were unlikely to be concerned about hardening ground based defenses.

Kinda idea setting for SOF ops.

Steve

The other thing is that we have talked a few times about how Russians don't have people for fighting in Ukraine. I can perfectly well imagine an airfield in "safe location" being basically unguarded, because the command put most of the guards into BMPs and sent them to Kherson.

[Combatintman]

About Saki Airfield ... I had a rummage around the place on Google Earth just to confirm the annotations of fuel and ammunition storage on other imagery that have been doing the rounds.  I agree with those assessments.  What I did find was something else ...

There is an area at the north of the facility which is not shown on the other annotated imagery that was taken hours before the strike that has been posted widely.  The attached .kmz file will take you to the point I have annotated as Grid 36T WQ 46855 94846.  I have put imagery from April and June 2021 side by side because some features are more obvious in one image than they are in the other.

 

Points to note are:

• That the vehicle entrance facing north has a tarmac roadway which leads to the compound gate and; therefore, is truly a vehicle entrance and exit.  The vehicle entrance facing west does not have a tarmac roadway.  Cycling back through historical imagery shows that vehicles come out of the underground facility using that entrance and park up adjacent to it.
• The personnel entrance I am fairly sure is part of this facility and is possibly an emergency escape route as it lies outside the perimeter of the underground facility.  It certainly is not part of the aircraft revetment which is the bunded feature immediately to the right of it as none of the other revetments on this airfield, or quite a few others that I have looked at in this part of the world, have them.
• The facility is clearly of some importance as it sits fully enclosed in its own compound and is underground.

What it is though, I have no idea.  Despite it being of some importance, it is right next to the airfield's perimeter fence.  By the looks of reporting on the Ukrainian strike, it appears either to have been not important enough to target or judged to be too hardened to destroy with the means available to the Ukrainians.  It is certainly not a 'special weapons' facility as these are generally double fenced. 

Anyway - if anybody's got any informed ideas I'd be grateful to hear them, otherwise, I just found it interesting.

36T WQ 46855 94846.kmz

[Haiduk]

55 minutes ago, Grigb said:

On the right just in front of the border line there is farm

So called "Stables" position in DPR/Russians reports. Ruines of horse club "Donbas Equiсenter" facilities. The place of permanent deadly "Counter-strike" games since 2015

[Artkin]

50 minutes ago, Grigb said:

I did not consider uploading it to Battlefront. There is an issue with the size - due to the monitor I currently use my screenshots are rather huge (mb wise)

lensdump allows up to 100MB images I believe. 

[DesertFox]

LOL! Genius!

 

 

 

 

 

[akd]

35 minutes ago, Combatintman said:

About Saki Airfield ... I had a rummage around the place on Google Earth just to confirm the annotations of fuel and ammunition storage on other imagery that have been doing the rounds.  I agree with those assessments.  What I did find was something else ...

There is an area at the north of the facility which is not shown on the other annotated imagery that was taken hours before the strike that has been posted widely.  The attached .kmz file will take you to the point I have annotated as Grid 36T WQ 46855 94846.  I have put imagery from April and June 2021 side by side because some features are more obvious in one image than they are in the other.

 

Points to note are:

• That the vehicle entrance facing north has a tarmac roadway which leads to the compound gate and; therefore, is truly a vehicle entrance and exit.  The vehicle entrance facing west does not have a tarmac roadway.  Cycling back through historical imagery shows that vehicles come out of the underground facility using that entrance and park up adjacent to it.
• The personnel entrance I am fairly sure is part of this facility and is possibly an emergency escape route as it lies outside the perimeter of the underground facility.  It certainly is not part of the aircraft revetment which is the bunded feature immediately to the right of it as none of the other revetments on this airfield, or quite a few others that I have looked at in this part of the world, have them.
• The facility is clearly of some importance as it sits fully enclosed in its own compound and is underground.

What it is though, I have no idea.  Despite it being of some importance, it is right next to the airfield's perimeter fence.  By the looks of reporting on the Ukrainian strike, it appears either to have been not important enough to target or judged to be too hardened to destroy with the means available to the Ukrainians.  It is certainly not a 'special weapons' facility as these are generally double fenced. 

Anyway - if anybody's got any informed ideas I'd be grateful to hear them, otherwise, I just found it interesting.

36T WQ 46855 94846.kmz 792 B · 3 downloads

One thing I can’t figure out is where this huge steel girder originated such that it appears to have impaled the car at approx. 45°05'33"N 33°34'49 with a near horizontal arrival from the east (the car was originally parked close to N-S and the girder entered the front passenger door and exited the front driver door).  

Possibly only what looks like an unprotected corrugated metal roof hanger / work shop amidst the aircraft dispersal revetments correlates, but is somewhat south of east.  This third ammo dump you note is roughly to the east also, but even more north of the E-W line.

 

 

Edited August 10, 2022 by akd

[DesertFox]

 

 

[Aragorn2002]

7 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

 

 

Even a bed spring is more effective.

[dan/california]

~80 years after Tigers had far more losses to their own running gear than the Russians it would appear that the German military industrial complex has learned exactly nothing...

[Grigb]

27 minutes ago, Artkin said:

lensdump allows up to 100MB images I believe. 

Thank you. I will check it.

[keas66]

Is this for real ? Well  apparently from 2018 ..... but one wonders how many of these installations are actually present in Crimea currently .

 

 

Edited August 10, 2022 by keas66

[Grigb]

Quick update on Pisky - I managed to check fresh UKR Butusov video from Pisky. The chit chat that I could understand was not important (just general  chit chat that situation is difficult due to RU shelling, but it is under control). However, the most interesting part is the drive of the reporter to Pisky. 

So, as you can see while RU controls the southern (village) part, UKR control the northwestern (urban) part and it is safe enough to drive unarmored car with reporter straight to Pisky outskirts.

[UPDATE] Meanwhile RU fully captured Pisky on 5-Aug

Quote

The village of Peski in the DPR came under the full control of the Allied forces

The village of Peski, located near Donetsk, is under the control of Allied troops. This was announced on August 5 by Ilya Yemelyanov, deputy commander of the 11th Separate Guards Motorized Rifle Regiment of the Yenakiyevo-Danube People's Militia of the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR)...

"It is safe to say that the settlement [Pisky] itself is under our control," he said on Channel One...

Edited August 10, 2022 by Grigb

[photon]

So, I've been reading Ian Toll's Pacific Trilogy, and in "Twilight of the Gods", he writes this:

• By contrast, according to Wylie, a cumulative operational strategy does not involve territorial offensives and pitched battles, but a "less perceptible minute accumulation of little items piling one on top of the other, until at some unknown point, the mass of calculated actions may be large enough to be critical". It weaponizes the logic of "death by a thousand cuts." In the Pacific, cumulative strategies chipped away at the economic and political foundations of Japan's imperial empire.

It struck me that the Russians appear to have adopted what Toll calls a "sequentialist" strategy: "we will march to Kiev 100 yards of dirt at a time", while the Ukranians appear to have adopted a cumulativist strategy: "we will degrade the Russian ability to make war until it collapses".

I think that analysis broadly harmonizes with The_Capt's description of warfare as decision space shaping. A sequentialist attack changes the decision space (the US capture of Saipan, for example, or the Japanese capture of Borneo), but cumulativist strategies (building a metric crapton of escort carriers; destroying the Japanese merchant marine) lead to breakthroughs and shorten the overall war by undeciding things and forcing bad decisions on the part of the adversary.

In many ways it feels like the Russians are duplicating Japan's WWII playbook while the Ukrainians are duplicating that of the Allies.

[Vergeltungswaffe]

56 minutes ago, dan/california said:

~80 years after Tigers had far more losses to their own running gear than the Russians it would appear that the German military industrial complex has learned exactly nothing...

The question is why?

They may have arrived in good shape and been treated like crap.

I'll be interested to see where the finger pointing leads.

[Combatintman]

1 hour ago, akd said:

One thing I can’t figure out is where this huge steel girder originated such that it appears to have impaled the car at approx. 45°05'33"N 33°34'49 with a near horizontal arrival from the east (the car was originally parked close to N-S and the girder entered the front passenger door and exited the front driver door).  

Possibly only what looks like an unprotected corrugated metal roof hanger / work shop amidst the aircraft dispersal revetments correlates, but is somewhat south of east.  This third ammo dump you note is roughly to the east also, but even more north of the E-W line.

 

 

If you were referring to my post as describing the third ammo dump in your post that I have bolded ... I said no such thing.

As to the girder, I don't know.  Interestingly there is no obvious scarring on the tarmac and the girder does not appear to have passed through anything else before impaling the vehicle so its trajectory was more near horizontal than horizontal.  Based on the limited information available, that corrugated hangar, which I agree is more of a workshop than anything else, based on the fact that it is too small for aircraft and no aircraft have been seen on any of the imagery I've looked at parked in it, is the most likely source of the girder.

There is another fuel storage facility, which does not appear to have been covered anywhere else, annotated in the image below.

It is certainly a more likely source than any of the other facilities for an explosion that would cause a girder to move east to west but still too far south for my liking.

 

[Grigb]

3 minutes ago, Vergeltungswaffe said:

The question is why?

They may have arrived in good shape and been treated like crap.

I'll be interested to see where the finger pointing leads.

There is German article

Quote

According to the report, the Bundeswehr assumes that the problems are related to the high speed of fire at which the Ukrainian armed forces use the guns in the fight against the Russian invaders; the loading mechanism of the howitzer is thus enormously loaded.

 

[Ts4EVER]

4 minutes ago, Grigb said:

There is German article

 

That is one way to look at it. The other is that they are not suited to the requirements of modern war.

[Haiduk]

18 hours ago, akd said:

Maj. Askar Robortdinov, unit unknown (aviation?)

@sburke

319th separate helicopter regiment (Chernigovka airfield, Far East) of 11th AF/AD Army, Eastern Military District

Also you maybe skipped (or I skipped your post):

Colonel Kanat Mukatov, division deputy commander of personnel training of 20th motor-rifle division, 8th GCAA, Southern Milityary District. Killed Jul 9 when HQ of divsion was HIMARSed.

I don't know if should be included in he list this guy, but well

Lt.colonel of police (retired), Nikolay Aristov. Before the war he was a deputy of ataman of Novorossiysk cossack community. Likely enlisted to cossack volunteer battalion of Kuban' region and got lost on 29th of July. Probably was battalion HQ member, but his rank and duty unknown.   

And this guy deserves of separate post, though he wasn't military. 

Konstantin Tulinov. Conviced recidivist. Suspended sentenves in 14-17 years old for car theft and robbery . In 18 years old first real jail term fro attempted murder. Next terms for refill stattion robbery and drugs. In the jail he was so-called "activist" of privileged prisoners, who collaborated with UFSIN personnel (Federal Service of Penalty Executions). This "active" together with UFSIN personnel humilitated, brutally beat up and tortured other convicted. The video of theese tortures were issued by Russian jouralist Vladimir Osechkin. Despite Osechkin turned out under the pressure of authorities, society resonance was enough big, so Investigation Committee of Russia opened a case against "activists" and Tulinov got next 6 years of jail. 

But after Prigozhin voyage by jails, where he agitated to enlist to PMC for the war In Ukraine, Tulipov enlisted and got freedom. He was liberated on 6th of July and approx on 9-10th of July they already arrived to Rostov-on-Don. And already on 14th of July Tilipov got "heroically" lost, "blowing up himself and three UKR nationalists with grenade, when he being wounded, covered withdrawal own comrsdes".

So, convicted, which enlist to PMC has very short training - looks like 1-2-3 days and they go to the grinder.

His decision to serve a Motherland and his death Putin's propagandist Nikita Mikhalkov now shows like act of heroism and devotion of Motherland. Some sort of: "even if the person didn't liked authorities and law, but look -he sacrificed himself for Motherland, not for Govt. He is a role model!

 

Edited August 10, 2022 by Haiduk