How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Huba]

4 minutes ago, Holien said:

https://1drv.ms/u/s!AsFnjH5bTkbKyWY90x5lE87zfzhn?e=BA3AaZ

Just edited image to show the planes I am just not understanding why they seem to be in better shape than the others...

Are they? From the photos all we can say is that some planes didn't burn (too much at least) and are not dismembered. Can't say what overpressure and falling debris/ shrapnel did to them.

[Holien]

1 hour ago, Huba said:

Are they?

Well if you compare what happened to the same plane type of their neighbors they are.

Of course I don't think they will be flying anytime soon, especially if they are made of concrete...

just an oddity that I am hoping someone can explain.

In the grand scheme of things it really does not matter the overall effect is the same just intrigued...

Edited August 11, 2022 by Holien
Finally got image to show...

[DesertFox]

In this hot summer even tanks need a bath from time to time...

 

 

[Huba]

Interesting. AFAIK "state sponsor of terrorism" is not an international standard, am I right? Meaning that this proclamation doesn't have to mean sanctioning anybody doing business with Russia and so on, as US would have to do if it proclaimed RU a terrorist state.

 

[Butschi]

15 hours ago, Ts4EVER said:

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

If you know anything about German engineering you can be certain there is an extensive documenation covering what the requirements for the system were, under which assumptions, what was tested and how, and most importantly how it is safe to use.

If that doesn't fit your requirements, don't buy it. Oh wait, you didn't buy it. You were given it for free. After endlessly "requesting" it.

Seriously though, assuming the system was produced up to the specifications, it may well be the specifications were inadequate for this war because the specifications were not made with this war in mind. The same is certainly true for a lot of other systems.

[Taranis]

Belarus: army denies reports of explosions near military airfield
 

Quote

The Belarusian army on Thursday denied reports of explosions that allegedly occurred overnight near a military airfield in the Gomel region in the southeast of the country, not far from its border with Ukraine. "On August 10, at almost 11:00 p.m., during a control run, a vehicle caught fire after replacing its engine," the Belarusian defense ministry said in a statement. “The fire was quickly brought under control. No one was injured,” it said.

A Belarusian Telegram channel, specializing in particular in monitoring and monitoring the conflict in Ukraine, said earlier in the day that "at least eight explosions" occurred near a military airfield in Ziabrovka, in the Gomel region. . According to Franak Viacorka, adviser to Belarusian opposition leader in exile, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, Russian military planes are often stationed at this airfield. However, he clarified on Twitter that there was "no confirmation" for the time being that these explosions could be linked to Russian or Belarusian maneuvers on the territory of this former Soviet republic.

Main ally of Moscow, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, in power since 1994, had given free access to the territory of his country to the Russian army so that it could launch its offensive on Ukraine on February 24.

Source : Le Monde

Only an engine that catches fire and is quickly extinguished without injury while everyone around heard explosions... Yeah...

Or it's their new version of the T-72B that drives so fast it breaks the sound barrier...

Edited August 11, 2022 by Taranis

[Taranis]

 

Should Ukraine be afraid ? Attention, suspense... NO...
For details T-72BM2: new ERA on front, so some better protection vs a B3 but still the same sh*t (no CITV)

Edited August 11, 2022 by Taranis

[DesertFox]

5 minutes ago, Taranis said:

Or it's their new version of the T-72B that drives so fast it breaks the sound barrier...

ROFL! 

[Taranis]

Russian army shelling Pisky village near Donetsk with TOS-1A heavy flamethrower system

 

[Taranis]

3 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

ROFL! 

Yes I'm funny today... It's because I'm on vacation tomorrow and it's not in Crimea 

[DesertFox]

1 minute ago, Taranis said:

Yes I'm funny today... It's because I'm on vacation tomorrow and it's not in Crimea 

Enjoy your time and Bonnes vacances !

[Beleg85]

4 hours ago, Grigb said:

Losses are few, and they were not flying anyway. The cause is not clear and anyway it is not important. Important is calm down and not to be nervous now when UKR are hitting our airfield in deep rear.

That is exactly what I was arguing several pages ago- the immense ability of this system to simply ignore and collectivelly forget important unexpected setbacks. I am curious if Girkin or Murz will be so restrained in their comments after several days.

5 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

I've reexamined the videos and images.  Here's what I make of all of it.  Geolocating the various videos might help clear up details, but I'm too tired to do it. 

Excellent analysis.

Edited August 11, 2022 by Beleg85

[kraze]

1 hour ago, Huba said:

Interesting. AFAIK "state sponsor of terrorism" is not an international standard, am I right? Meaning that this proclamation doesn't have to mean sanctioning anybody doing business with Russia and so on, as US would have to do if it proclaimed RU a terrorist state.

 

Latvia also stopped letting russians in and Estonia today as well. Czech did it right away back then. It's a process which will only gain momentum as russians keep pissing everyone off all around the world by being what they truly are.

Remember how half a year ago I wrote here that russians are all the same and need to get "cancelled" everywhere because all of them are responsible - and some people here were "naaah you are just being bad saying all russians are bad" - but as it turns out it's all about sitting back, relaxing and simply letting russians do what they do best - and they will eventually get noticed. And promptly squished.

Serves them right.

Edited August 11, 2022 by kraze

[Grigb]

8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

I've only skimmed a couple of these, but they are interesting.  Official correspondence from the Russian military prosecutor's office were hacked and are now available to Bellingcat and The Insider.  It's pretty grim stuff showing how aware some portion of the Russian population is to the horrors of this war:

https://theins-ru.translate.goog/politika/252097?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Steve

I decided to translate a couple of cases to show the reality of RU liberation on the ground. There is a reason why UKR calls RU orcs. (Adjusted for better readability)

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"For 8 years, my parents have not seen such an atrocity"

Mostly, relatives of the military or the military themselves send complaints to the Russian military prosecutor's office, but after the outbreak of the war, a wave of appeals began to arrive from Russians whose relatives suffered from violence and looting in the occupied territories. Here are some examples:

[RU regulars looting]

"Hello, I want to address you once again, with a request to understand the situation, atrocities and looting by the Russian military. My parents live in the territory of the DPR, Donetsk region, Lyubovka village, Sovetskaya str., 1, for all 8 years we have been in the territory controlled by the DPR, we are citizens of the Russian Federation, my grandparents, Russians, citizens of the USSR. But the brutality that my relatives felt on themselves from the Russian military cannot be hidden.

Shortly before April 9, Russian units entered our village and decided to base not far from our house. When the GRAD bombardment of their positions began on April 8, the parents fell to the floor and, after waiting out the shelling, left for a neighboring farm to wait out an unsettled situation. The next day, when mom returned home in the morning, she saw an atrocity [here is looting with extreme damage to everything] in our garage ... a big tank knocked out our gates, tore down a fence made of a huge slab, tore down huge hangar gates in the garage, which later fell on cars that were standing in the garage, <...> stole spare parts and tools for 200 thousand rubles [big amount for villagers, like they lost all their life savings or at least major part], to the point that they stole change from the car and a condom, from the car of [out] brother, tell me, are these human being? And when mom arrived, she went up there and asked [if the understand] what they had done, because after knocking out the gate, they drove a tank into the garage, and they didn't even drive in completely [implying they did not want to hide there, it was intentional damage], it was military [man] who rudely sent her [off] and said at the end "go back where you came from"... They are hiding behind our backs, [do] they came to protect us or rob and kill? I repeat, my parents lived for 8 years, on the territory of the DPR, they did not see such an atrocity ... are they [really] Z-Defenders [as RU media portray them] ?".

[LPR profession looters]

"Good afternoon! Yulia Viktorovna Puntus, a resident of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug of the city of Labytnangi, addresses you on the issue of looting in the Luhansk region of the Kremen district of the village of Baranikovka. My late mother's house was looted, as were many houses in the village. A gang of looters, saying they were officers and soldiers of the LPR, entered our village after March 8 and boldly robbed a school, a kindergarten, a pharmacy, three shops, farmers and, breaking locks, occupied two houses on Novoselov str. 11, sq. *** (my house) and Novoselov str. 14, sq.*** (house Skrypnik Gennady Eduardovich). The gang numbered about 20 people. They lived in my house for two weeks, and then took out all the property, even toys and used clothes. At that time, they were robbing the whole area. 15 cars of the stolen goods were exported in an unknown direction. This gang was with machine guns on a military vehicle "Ural" with the letter V on board and the inscription "FOX" [Fox is nickname of cool bandit from Soviet extremely famous detective movie]. It was obvious that they were professional looters, because they did not disdain anything. In the villages, they knocked out the doors in houses, cellars and selected everything from there: potatoes, carrots, televisions. They raked out everything they saw and were able to take away. Almost all farmers in the district have more than 30 cars stolen. They robbed grain, gasoline, diesel fuel. The sowing campaign has been disrupted. These Inhumans had not second thought about RU federation support [of LDNR] and did not think that they were leaving residents without schools, pharmacies and shops. This lawlessness lasted until the end of March. There was no any communication at that time. The looters knew about it and did not spare anyone, threatened neighbors who made remarks to them. Residents of the district believe that bandits got the power in LPR."

 

[Grigb]

1 hour ago, Butschi said:

If you know anything about German engineering you can be certain there is an extensive documenation covering what the requirements for the system were, under which assumptions, what was tested and how, and most importantly how it is safe to use.

If that doesn't fit your requirements, don't buy it. Oh wait, you didn't buy it. You were given it for free. After endlessly "requesting" it.

Seriously though, assuming the system was produced up to the specifications, it may well be the specifications were inadequate for this war because the specifications were not made with this war in mind. The same is certainly true for a lot of other systems.

While I do like to bash Germans while driving German car to a German pub for German beer with German sausages, I do believe we must not rush to conclusions and blame Germans engineering. This war is not like NATO led war. UKR are using arty much harder to compensate disparity in numbers and save lives. Obviously, things are going to break. They are going to break whether they are German, French, Polish or US made.

But what is important is the NATO long range artillery is doing good work. RU does not distinguish between types now. They say just NATO long range artillery for CAESAR, Crab, Pz2000 or M777 and you can see the pain on their faces (I watch videos) when they talk about that arty. The usual RU derision of NATO arty disappeared completely.  Everybody is doing excellent work.

Edited August 11, 2022 by Grigb

[Billy Ringo]

9 hours ago, dan/california said:

Its not gone well....

Down South in the US we call this...shooting ducks on the pond.

11 hours ago, DesertFox said:

Significance of the Saki Strike:

 

 

Comments/Observations from another site, this is not from my own knowledge but may add to the conversation:

"Not quite. They moved their carrier training facility just across the Kerch Strait into Yeysk, Russia a few years ago."

"Gvardiyskoye NAB
Kacha NAB

seem to still exist. "

[The_Capt]

2 hours ago, Holien said:

Well if you compare what happened to the same plane type of their neighbors they are.

Of course I don't think they will be flying anytime soon, especially if they are made of concrete...

just an oddity that I am hoping someone can explain.

In the grand scheme of things it really does not matter the overall effect is the same just intrigued...

So having spent a fair amount of time around high explosives in my youth, these look like dead zones.  Hollywood has led most to believe explosives are a big uniform ball of fire.  The reality is that they are a bunch of waves of energy that bounce around like mad.  They create dead zones, which make no sense unless you have seen them before.  I have seen explosions where people basically next to them have survived, not seriously hurt, while people 100m away are cut in half.

Considering that we have multiple explosions that seem to happened simultaneously, that makes a dead zone even more probable.

[Grigb]

Interesting RU comment about UKR not shiny units. Keep this in mind when somebody says UKR is a corrupt country. I know one extremely corrupt country, and it is not UKR.

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I read nonsense about a backward AFU, in which everything is bad, which has nothing and everything is gone. They say that there are charged [cool] units with Western MLRS and a arty that Western intelligence works with - and there are unhappy minion's, most of whom, without armor and communications, who will give up within five minutes. I have not yet seen Ukrainian soldiers with Mosin and in iron helmets. We equipped ourselves with bulletproof vests, in the barracks of a shabby [forgotten by logistic service] anti-tank artillery unit of Ukrainians from the Western region, who were armed not with Javelins but with ordinary Rapiers [guns]. They ate cool dry food, they have a Ukrainian uniform according to NATO standards, all layers, all sets - and not a glass pixel [most likely he means cheap cloth that turns in to brittle plastic when burning]. A ****ing company officer of any Ukrainian unit can call an attack drone if necessary. Let's get away from hat-throwing [believing in enemy inferiority] and giggling at the enemy - in order to destroy and defeat him, we must not underestimate him, we need to clearly understand who and what we are fighting with.

 

[Los]

Guys don't be perplexed because some planes looked unscathed from satellite photos. A few small holes in the side of any aircraft, or even suspected blast pressure damage will require maintenance teams to go over them with a fine tooth comb. And what's the status of the maintenance facilities, I saw a lot of blown up hangars in other pictures.

[Calamine Waffles]

Tom Cooper has an interesting perspective on the ground war, and I think it's interesting he doesn't think Russia has problems getting men to throw (at least cannon fodder)

https://medium.com/@x_TomCooper_x/ukraine-war-early-august-2022-part-2-63aad98130c4

 

Quote

Amid all the Ukrainian-, Western-, and few Russian reports (not to say ‘bragging’) about Putin’s ‘problems with replacing severe losses of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (VSRF) through finding enough volunteers to fight in Ukraine’, my impression is that he’s actually got no problems to do so. That is: quantitatively, he’s got enough troops.

The reason is that over the last 22 years, the Fool in Kremlin took care to build up a huge pool of paramilitary organisations, followed by a large pool of private military- and security contractors to mobilise from. Arguably, original idea was to safeguard his own regime, but now this huge organisation is coming handy.

What do I mean with ‘huge’?

For the start, consider what I call the ‘Putin’s Pasdarans’: the Rosgvardia. This is a armed body of about 340,000 outside the chains of command of the Ministry of Defence and/or the Ministry of Interior. The Rosgvardia is responsible to Putin only. Arguably, Rosvgvardia is not really trained for frontline duties, but primarily serving as guards of installations of strategic importance in Russia. However, it has large units (including an entire division for special purposes) capable of conducting combat operations, too.

The groups naming themselves the Russian Cossacks are including another 600,000 trained troops — thousands of which are already serving in the VSRF, which has its own Cossack units and Cossack military educational facilities, too.

Then add the Russian Union of Paratroopers: that’s another 300,000 veterans, renowned for their ‘cohesion’. So much so, over the last two months entire battalion tactical groups of the VDV have been rapidly ‘re-filled’ by their veterans from 5, 10, 15 years ago.

Then add another 40,000 or so from the OMON (subjected to the control of Rosgvardia), and another 40,000 from the SOBR….

….and don’t forget over 600,000 Russians working in the Russian private security sector alone.

….yes, now you’ve got the picture.

He also notes Russian artillery remains a big problem, and the dedicated artillery units have pretty good drone integration, and when I asked him he thinks the West should be sending at least 300-500 155 mm systems to Ukraine in order to allow the Ukrainians to halt and push back the Russians.
 

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With US and NATO deliveries remaining meagre, this is unlikely to change any time soon. On the contrary, the Russians are known to have meanwhile assembled the complement of at least one, if not two full artillery brigades by pulling stored 2S7 self-propelled howitzers calibre 203mm from the 94th Arsenal, near Omsk (see the photo below). Unsurprisingly, at Pisky they have clearly demonstrated what they can do when focusing the fire of two or three artillery brigades on an extremely narrow section of the frontline: they’ve saturated an area of about 1.000 by 300 metres with 6,000–7,000 shells, on 1 and 2 August alone (this is something nobody can survive).

 

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Finally, contrary to the situations from back in February-April, nowadays, such concentrations are well-supported by UAVs and forward artillery observers (FAOs), and these are well-connected to headquarters and artillery units with help of an ‘application’ with the literally-translated designation ‘Unified System for Managing a Tactical Unit’ (Единая система управления тактического звена, ЕСУ ТЗ).

For simplicity purposes, I am abbreviating the designation of this app as UTCS (for Unified Tactical Control System). Essentially, it’s one of sub-systems of the Constellation automated tactical management system, which top command nodes of the VSRF — from the National Defence Management Centre (NtsUO), via the HQ South in Rostov-na-Donu, down to HQ of combined arms armies — are using to command and control operations of all of units involved in operations in Ukraine (another such sub-system is used to control the work of air defences, but that’s a different story). The UTCS is as important because it proved highly flexible, and very efficient in coordinating the work of UAVs and artillery units: to quite some luck of Ukraine, so far it has not been deployed by VSRF’s tank- or motor-rifle troops, nor by the VDV.

 

[Holien]

9 minutes ago, Los said:

A few small holes in the side of any aircraft, or even suspected blast pressure damage will require maintenance teams to go over them with a fine tooth comb.

Yep I don't doubt that and thanks to @The_Capt for the first plausible explanation as lucky for me don't get to be near too many loud bangs of this nature  

[akd]

This May imagery more clearly shows that each of the locations with cratering and massive blast damage appear to have ordnance lined up in the open:

Here you can more clearly see some smaller cratering at the location of the lined up bombs near the workshop building at bottom center of above:

 

Edited August 11, 2022 by akd

[Holien]

9 minutes ago, Calamine Waffles said:

Unsurprisingly, at Pisky they have clearly demonstrated what they can do when focusing the fire of two or three artillery brigades on an extremely narrow section of the frontline: they’ve saturated an area of about 1.000 by 300 metres with 6,000–7,000 shells, on 1 and 2 August alone (this is something nobody can survive).

Hmmm well through the detailed analysis kindly done by @Grigb I think we can say they did survive but had to pull back slightly. His last post was very amusing with the journalist travelling down a contested road...

The problem is people don't have the time to get into the weeds to fully understand what happened at say Pisky and having the skills and time to do that analysis before writing something. 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Holien

[Bulletpoint]

9 hours ago, chrisl said:

The things that bothers me about the pictures are:

a) there aren't any really *big* holes in the ground that would indicate one (or three) ginormous HE bombs.

b) all those planes surrounded by berms are just cooked, and only a few of them have visible craters within the view angle of their front opening. And most of the berms look pristine, even after the bomb.  Something came in from above and set them on fire without banging around.

 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Bulletpoint

[The_MonkeyKing]

3 hours ago, Hapless said:

Krulak Centre's Brutecast tackles it, exploring some possible options:

 

Good vid, cannot count out the air force either as a suspect. 

We have so many suspects, haha. Good indicator that Ukraine indeed has lots of options (or easily realizable options) for deep strikes.