How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Grigb]

7 minutes ago, Huba said:

Here you go - Starshe Eddy from maybe 20 minutes ago. Basically their only supply road is under constant mortar fire and are about to be overrun, but they kill 1200 - 3300 Ukrainians daily so it's worth it. Seriously, sounds like dispatch from Stalingrad.

i would loke to clarify it

Quote

Brother, HiI Returned from the Lyman. On the way out, barely escaped the mortars twice. Khokhols shot at road in advance [of my move]. It saved me that I constantly braked and accelerated the car. 120mm was exploding in 20 meters away.
Copters fly everywhere. The shooting on the outskirts of the Lyman is tough. Mujahideen from 488 ( 488 mr regiment, 144 mr division, note from RU reporter) defends the city from three sides. Today, one dude ****ed the m113 khokhol APC from the RPG , other dudes took tropy - a pickup truck with a browning. But the shelling is tough, you can't lift your head. The forest from the south, according to the scouts, is littered with the corpses of khokhols. We have [our losses] one - 200th [killed], three - 300th [wounded] for the day of the battle. So, the truth is on our side, apparently.

[keas66]

6 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Sheesh... are you aware of an entire genre of German music that celebrates Nazi exploits, including murdering Jews?  I guess there's no hope for Germany because by your logic all Germans are just a bunch of fascist murderers pretending to be nice people.  Boy did they have me fooled!

Sorry for the distraction, but the degree of ignorance was just too difficult for me to ignore.

Steve

Why pick out extreme tenancies in a  small portion of  a population and   try to use them as indicators that  the general   population has not learned from the past ? . We have extremest Nazi Groups in America  and elsewhere as well - we don't hold them up as indicators of the general health of our populations attitudes  .  The ignorance you are pointing out is entirely your own .

[Huba]

Just now, Grigb said:

i would loke to clarify it

Well, that changes the meaning a little bit, thanks 

[FancyCat]

There was always a emphasis by the revisionist historians of the Eastern Front following the release of Soviet documents in the 90s, to refute the portrayal of Soviet forces as offered by the narrative in the West, based on German records and experiences, as being very biased against the Soviets. I feel like they might be watching their work be somewhat washed away at least in popular perception. I feel like maybe Russia has adopted the some very wrong lessons from WW2, or at least some impressions of WW2 that were never true. David Glantz, author of When Titans Clashed, is still alive, I wonder how he feels watching this occur. 

And it goes without saying that the second best army in the world should not be doing this. Russia is not the second best army in the world, nowhere near that place. 

 

 

[Huba]

3 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Yeah, it's pretty funny stuff.  They are losing ground and the guy can't drive down a road, but he has a pretty accurate estimate of Ukraine's losses.  Riiiiiiiiiiight

The only interesting thing in there was about the drones.  Another thing to add to the growing list of problems for the Russians in this area.  We've heard from Ukrainians that Russian EW presented a major problem for their commercial drones.  Who here thinks the Russians have any EW assets functioning in this area?  I sure don't.  So EW is no longer a factor and that must make the Ukrainian drone operators very happy.

This is a reminder that a nation's technological advantage only matters if it is present on the battlefield.  Sounds pretty obvious, I know, but it is the sort of thing that the pre-war "experts" didn't seem to take into consideration.  They looked at their checklist, saw that Russia has EW capabilities, crossed off a bunch of Ukrainian capabilities as effectively countered, drew conclusions that Russia is superior, then moved onto the next insightful analysis.  Yeah, heavy sarcasm, but if anybody's checked out my timestamps they'll see I didn't get much sleep

Steve

The losses part got clarified by Grigb, so sorry for posting the autotranslation. 
As for the drones - one of the photos of UA command posts from 2 pages ago shows something which seems to be a dashboard for managing drone camera feeds. Looks impressive!

[Peregrine]

28 minutes ago, keas66 said:

Indeed  ! - I'd be curious to see how the more civilized/prudent members of the Forum think we are going to re-educate the Russians after their defeat in Ukraine to purge this incessant hatred and lack of guilt/responsibility for their  uncivilized actions  ....but that would be a distraction . I more interested in what is going on around Lyman right now  .

If a person wrote a broadly simplistic description of what Afghanistan looked liked as a nation state (governance, culture, GDP etc) in 2000 and then a description of what Afghanistan looked like in 2022 it should be obvious how little even a stupendous amount of money and violence can accomplish no matter how desperate or well intentioned.

Hopefully post loss, post-Putin Russia (he will die someday) will start a transformation process down a more constructive path but hoping that external forces can significantly and definitively inflict and positive and lasting change is wrong.

[Battlefront.com]

2 minutes ago, keas66 said:

Why pick out extreme tenancies in a  small portion of  a population and   try to use them as indicators that  the general   population has not learned from the past ?

Why pick out one song and say that it proves the decedents of the people who sung it will never change their mindset?

2 minutes ago, keas66 said:

We have extremest Nazi Groups in America  and elsewhere as well - we don't hold them up as indicators of the general health of our populations attitudes  .  The ignorance you are pointing out is entirely your own .

You're ability to follow this discussion is disappointing to say the least.  Tell you what, go back just 10 pages worth of posts and find me ONE example of anybody saying that Russia doesn't have a serious and fundamental problem with imperialist tendencies AND that it needs to be corrected before they can rejoin the world.  Find me one.  While you are searching for that needle in the haystack that doesn't exist, make a tally of how many times people, including me, have said how bad things are with the Russia cultural psyche and how difficult it will be to "reeducate them" to be a better class of world citizen.  You can round to the nearest hundred to save some time.

It's like you don't even read what is being written, either that or you don't understand the discussion at all.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

12 minutes ago, Huba said:

Well, that changes the meaning a little bit, thanks 

Yeah, quite a bit!  So he's instead saying that they've taken losses in the 1000+ range.  That's interesting for us to hear as we've so far only been able to guess at the scale of Russian losses so far.

If this reporter is even remotely accurate with his assessment, this probably is the single concentrated (time and space) loss of Russian forces since the early days around Kyiv.

And it was totally optional.  Lyman could have, and should have, been evacuated days ago when it was clear their efforts weren't amounting to anything.  Especially given the dramatic shortage of defending forces along the entire sector.

Steve

[danfrodo]

So it looks like RU nats, in their endless brainless freakouts, are now trying to convince everyone that this is a war for Russian survival.  Of course, the exact opposite is true.  The best thing RU could do is just leave.  And kill Putin.  We saw this in so many US escapades where idiots say that somehow leaving our foreign expeditionary war would lead to imminent collapse at home.

I am wondering how much UKR advance is helped by all the ammo it picks up along the way.  If a unit has carries 2-3 days of ammo but keeps finding nicely pre-positioned replenished from RU all along the route, it's gotta help.  I wonder how much fuel they are also capturing intact.  Plus working vehicles to replace breakdowns/losses, just need to find a can of paint.  

Edited September 29, 2022 by danfrodo
typo

[Battlefront.com]

13 minutes ago, Peregrine said:

If a person wrote a broadly simplistic description of what Afghanistan looked liked as a nation state (governance, culture, GDP etc) in 2000 and then a description of what Afghanistan looked like in 2022 it should be obvious how little even a stupendous amount of money and violence can accomplish no matter how desperate or well intentioned.

Yup, nation building is pointless if there is no nation to be built.  Also, incompetent execution of a nearly impossible task isn't really productive either.

13 minutes ago, Peregrine said:

Hopefully post loss, post-Putin Russia (he will die someday) will start a transformation process down a more constructive path but hoping that external forces can significantly and definitively inflict and positive and lasting change is wrong.

I do feel that Russians, generally, want to live better lives.  Their problem is that they want to "have their cake and eat it too".  They want all the trappings of a modern, liberal society while at the same time remaining imperialistic and tolerating (even supporting) high levels of repression by their own government.  The West allowed them to not have to make a choice between the two diametrically opposed realities.  Now, with great help from Ukraine, they will be forced to choose.

Steve

[Bearstronaut]

29 minutes ago, FancyCat said:

There was always a emphasis by the revisionist historians of the Eastern Front following the release of Soviet documents in the 90s, to refute the portrayal of Soviet forces as offered by the narrative in the West, based on German records and experiences, as being very biased against the Soviets. I feel like they might be watching their work be somewhat washed away at least in popular perception. I feel like maybe Russia has adopted the some very wrong lessons from WW2, or at least some impressions of WW2 that were never true. David Glantz, author of When Titans Clashed, is still alive, I wonder how he feels watching this occur. 

And it goes without saying that the second best army in the world should not be doing this. Russia is not the second best army in the world, nowhere near that place. 

 

 

That video reminds of something that has always stuck out in my mind from reading Louis Barthas’ memoir of WW1. His regiment had spent all day marching in the freezing rain and he said something like “when we got to our bivouac area the officers claimed all the farmhouses and barns and graciously allowed us to sleep in a muddy field.” 

Edited September 29, 2022 by Bearstronaut

[Battlefront.com]

23 minutes ago, FancyCat said:

There was always a emphasis by the revisionist historians of the Eastern Front following the release of Soviet documents in the 90s, to refute the portrayal of Soviet forces as offered by the narrative in the West, based on German records and experiences, as being very biased against the Soviets. I feel like they might be watching their work be somewhat washed away at least in popular perception. I feel like maybe Russia has adopted the some very wrong lessons from WW2, or at least some impressions of WW2 that were never true. David Glantz, author of When Titans Clashed, is still alive, I wonder how he feels watching this occur. 

And it goes without saying that the second best army in the world should not be doing this. Russia is not the second best army in the world, nowhere near that place. 

 

 

This is similar to the group of Russian conscripts that were put on a train somewhere in the border area during the "exercises" earlier last winter, dropped off at an empty train station, and left there with nobody to meet them.  They called home to complain to their mothers, their mothers called their military base to complain, and eventually someone got them to wherever they were supposed to be.

The above video shows how badly "wrong" the Russian mentality is towards gross incompetency.  They were pulled from their homes, dropped into an empty training ground in the cold, nobody is there to process their needs, they have no supplies, and no contact with anybody who can change the situation for the better.  All normal and as expected!  Instead of being angry about it they joke and "self mobilize".  He himself said they were dropped off "like sheep".  He doesn't get the irony is that is exactly what they are, except that they are sheep that consciously move towards their own slaughter.

If a bunch of Westerners were treated this way they would "self demobilize".  Russians would call this behavior "soft", but I think we'd all agree it would be "smart".

Steve

[akd]

19 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

So he's instead saying that they've taken losses in the 1000+ range.

??? He says one killed and three wounded.

[keas66]

16 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Why pick out one song and say that it proves the decedents of the people who sung it will never change their mindset?

You're ability to follow this discussion is disappointing to say the least.  Tell you what, go back just 10 pages worth of posts and find me ONE example of anybody saying that Russia doesn't have a serious and fundamental problem with imperialist tendencies AND that it needs to be corrected before they can rejoin the world.  Find me one.  While you are searching for that needle in the haystack that doesn't exist, make a tally of how many times people, including me, have said how bad things are with the Russia cultural psyche and how difficult it will be to "reeducate them" to be a better class of world citizen.  You can round to the nearest hundred to save some time.

It's like you don't even read what is being written, either that or you don't understand the discussion at all.

Steve

You  think I was referring to just that one song as if I was some sort of simplistic fool ??

The perils of communicating by text I guess

There is evidence everywhere that the general Russian Population  has a tendency to think what they are doing in Ukraine is justified . Everywhere I look I see video clips of Russian mums saying their Boy is just going to run around a little and lose some weight - or Audio clips of Girlfriends/Wives sympathizing with the plights of their poor husbands ... What I don't see is mass protests or  comments  about how unjust  the Russians are being by their own population - There are always a small few who make the effort and are punished for it  almost immediately - but the great Russia Mass seems to be happy to  let things happen .

[Seedorf81]

44 minutes ago, FancyCat said:

 

 

 

This blows my mind.

We only see some of these unbelievable video's, but it looks like this mobilization-f#^k up is all over Russia.

If this doesn't fuel some kind of revolutionary action, I don't think anything ever will..

Edited September 29, 2022 by Seedorf81

[Battlefront.com]

21 minutes ago, akd said:

??? He says one killed and three wounded.

Holy crap.  Yeah, I misread the 200 and 300.  I really needed more sleep.

Steve

[FancyCat]

Russian TV isn't gonna try and broadcast Zelensky's messages to Russia on primetime mind you.

Something else to think about, we already had reports of looting and seizure in both occupied and recently occupied areas of Ukraine, if their ability to supply the mobilized units remains as bad as it is now, we are going to see that rise, and a according rise in hardship for the civilian population. While looting isn't isolated to one side in any war, there seems to be noticeable effort by Ukraine including both government and civil society to try and assist civilians in the front line zones. I'm sure the same exists on the Russian side, but if Russian reports indicating the requisition of supplies remain true and persistent, it won't be hard to argue that we are going to see Russian support erode even in the more longer occupied regions of Ukraine. 

Also, i want to emphasize that by no means, the Russian military should be resorting to such practices or lack of discipline, if you have been listening to Russians being called orks enough, maybe you forgot, but this practice is not supposed to occur in a professional, modernized military, certainly not one claiming to be the 2nd most powerful in the world. It boggles the mind that the analysts got this wrong. Certainly a lot of it was Russian PR, but inexcusable all the same. 

How many decisions by the West were done with a eye towards Russian military prowess, or the belief that whatever improvements in the Ukrainian military would pale to the might of the Russian military? I mean, as seen in the BBC Russia article i posted, the professionalization of the Russian military that Putin needed to illustrate the military standing of Russia, does not seem to have occurred.

Our pre-invasion expectations of the Russian military were not purely quantity (at least i don't think so), but based on a force functional in SEAD, missile guidance, personnel who were trained on heavy equipment, etc, the mobilized personnel look....frankly, pretty worthless. Sound pretty worthless. What a big difference than pre-invasion. 

Certainly, despite the lack of personnel needed for any mid-term or long term control of Ukraine, I want to say we assumed the invasion force would crush Ukrainian organized resistance cause obviously, it had mass and training/tactics, it looks exceedingly clear that without tactics/training, their mass could not be used effectively against Ukraine, as much as Ukraine charted their own early victories, Russia has some near-fatal wounds sapping its ability to fight Ukraine. 

[Battlefront.com]

19 minutes ago, keas66 said:

You  think I was referring to just that one song as if I was some sort of simplistic fool ??

No, I am saying you are inventing a straw man.

19 minutes ago, keas66 said:

The perils of communicating by text I guess

There is evidence everywhere that the general Russian Population  has a tendency to think what they are doing in Ukraine is justified . Everywhere I look I see video clips of Russian mums saying their Boy is just going to run around a little and lose some weight - or Audio clips of Girlfriends/Wives sympathizing with the plights of their poor husbands ... What I don't see is mass protests or  comments  about how unjust  the Russians are being by their own population - There are always a small few who make the effort and are punished for it  almost immediately - but the great Russia Mass seems to be happy to  let things happen .

Right, and has ANYBODY disputed this in all of our discussions in this thread?  Anybody?  Even once?  No, not even once.  Yet you felt the need to take a cheap shot at people having a detailed discussion about this topic when you said this:

I'd be curious to see how the more civilized/prudent members of the Forum think we are going to re-educate the Russians after their defeat in Ukraine to purge this incessant hatred and lack of guilt/responsibility for their  uncivilized actions

You made this comment as if the very things you say you are curious about haven't already been discussed in depth and detail 100 times already.  Which is why I labeled your comment as "ignorant".  Either that or you haven't properly understood anything that was said, in which case I would have to swap out the world "ignorant" with something less flattering.

If you're going to take shots at people who are spending their time discussing complex and intellectually challenging topics you need to be prepared to defend your words.  Otherwise stay silent on the matter.

Steve

[Bulletpoint]

1 hour ago, FancyCat said:

There was always a emphasis by the revisionist historians of the Eastern Front following the release of Soviet documents in the 90s, to refute the portrayal of Soviet forces as offered by the narrative in the West, based on German records and experiences, as being very biased against the Soviets. I feel like they might be watching their work be somewhat washed away at least in popular perception. I feel like maybe Russia has adopted the some very wrong lessons from WW2, or at least some impressions of WW2 that were never true. David Glantz, author of When Titans Clashed, is still alive, I wonder how he feels watching this occur. 

And it goes without saying that the second best army in the world should not be doing this. Russia is not the second best army in the world, nowhere near that place. 

 

 

I'm no expert on military history at all, but I did start getting the feeling that modern day Russia is fighting a lot like the German propaganda said the Soviets were fighting back then.

[Battlefront.com]

22 minutes ago, Seedorf81 said:

If this doesn't fuel some kind of revolutionary action, I don't think anything ever will..

In and of itself I don't think it will.  The Russians are quick to anger at a perceived slight of their "honor", but very slow to muster the courage to act against the state.

That said, the history of Russian opposition to authority can be characterized as "for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, but the reaction tends to come all at once". 

What we're seeing is the Putin regime wearing down the Russian population's willingness to remain complacent.  We've already seen lots of examples of patience running out, both at the local level and much more widespread.  Not the sort of reactions we would expect in the West to such gross incompetence and utter lack of concern for citizens' rights, of course, but in the context of Russian opposition to authority it is significant.  The reaction from the regime is, in its own way, showing that it understands how bad things really are.  Mostly in the form of hesitation to do something about the people complaining.

With this in mind, I think the mobilization is probably going to erode most of what remains of Putin's ability to keep the population bottled up.  But something else, I think, is needed to push them over the edge.  Since the beginning of this war I've thought a total military collapse in Ukraine is what will do it.  I still think that to be the case now.  Fortunately for everybody other than Russians, that is the direction this war is headed.

Steve

[riptides]

1 hour ago, Huba said:

The losses part got clarified by Grigb, so sorry for posting the autotranslation. 
As for the drones - one of the photos of UA command posts from 2 pages ago shows something which seems to be a dashboard for managing drone camera feeds. Looks impressive!

You want to know why Ukraine is winning.

The guy thinks into his cell phone prior to blasting the tank on the screen.

 

[billbindc]

8 hours ago, Grigb said:

Sensing military defeat RU Nats are turning to a very fully familiar rhetoric

 

https://faridaily.substack.com/p/putin-always-chooses-escalation

This is well worth reading in the sense that describing how the iceberg and the Titanic met is well worth reading. The inescapable conclusion is that for the war to end, Russia must be clearly seen to have lost and Putin must be dead or gone. Preferably both.

 

Edited September 29, 2022 by billbindc

[FancyCat]

ChrisO took the time to link to a tweet where a Russian shows off more decent conditions for the mobilized, so despite all the issues seen, we still have thousands of mobilized men who may be able to fight decently, have decent morale, at least until they start getting hit in Ukraine. I lost the tweet, but there was a tweet noting that entering Ukraine, the Russians were able to be fine with heading to the front, be somewhat confident, but upon experiencing combat, and being in Ukraine, changed their opinion and their morale sank. 

 

 

[kevinkin]

Know it's very early, but which contemporary historians are best suited to chronical and analyzed the war? Will they be some well known NY Times best seller ("Killing Putin") or relative unknowns out of the fields of journalism or military studies? I suppose the first histories will be written by frontline reporters and military analysis might take years to publish in book form. The Pentagon will probably quickly put out some kind of lessons learned type report which will interest all of us. Books detailing all the geopolitical factors, along with battle analysis, might be hard to come by for a while.

Edited September 29, 2022 by kevinkin

[billbindc]

A suggestion: think less about dubious ethnic essentialism and/or pretty fantasizing about a post-Russia world. Instead, try to imagine how this war ends. It's a far more salient question and harder likely than you think. 

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/how-the-war-in-ukraine-might-end

Edited September 29, 2022 by billbindc