How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Onto happier thoughts... Lyman!

Catching up on the more interesting revelations in the past few pages, it seems the end game might come as soon as tomorrow.  Let's say there are 4000 forces there right now.  Here's how I see the Lyman Pocket™ playing out:

Roughly 2000 will attempt to flee.  Perhaps a little at first, but it will gain momentum VERY quickly.  Once they make a decision to flee they will be predisposed to surrendering if they find they can't retreat to safety.

Roughly 1000 will put up a little bit of a fight until they get the sense they are doomed.  This group will likely be obligated to surrender or die as they probably missed their chance to retreat.

Roughly 1000 will hedge their bets and try fighting it out and eventually wind up dying or surrendering.  Retreating won't be an option for them.

In the end I predict at least 25% of the forces will become casualties before this battle is concluded.

What do others think?

Steve

See below

1 hour ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Hot take:  Less Falaise, more Korsun!

(i.e.  don't let these combat veterans escape the trap and become cadres to train the mobiks).

I think the AFU are pushing very hard to actually put trenches right across the roads in question, and they have a LOT artillery aimed at that one road out. Unless I have missed something none of the units in the pocket are elite. My two cents is that less than 25% of what was in the pocket ~8 hours ago, it may be two slightly separated pockets btw, is going to get out in any militarily useful form. I think trapped ones will surrender almost immediatly when they realize they have seen their last supply truck.

7 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

A little like an AI attack?

The AI will be referred to forever more as the "Russian officer in command".

[Battlefront.com]

13 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

A little like an AI attack?

Yeah, except in Combat Mission there's a chance the AI is smart enough to succeed

Steve

[Chibot Mk IX]

45 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Onto happier thoughts... Lyman!

Catching up on the more interesting revelations in the past few pages, it seems the end game might come as soon as tomorrow.  Let's say there are 4000 forces there right now.  Here's how I see the Lyman Pocket™ playing out:

Roughly 2000 will attempt to flee.  Perhaps a little at first, but it will gain momentum VERY quickly.  Once they make a decision to flee they will be predisposed to surrendering if they find they can't retreat to safety.

Roughly 1000 will put up a little bit of a fight until they get the sense they are doomed.  This group will likely be obligated to surrender or die as they probably missed their chance to retreat.

Roughly 1000 will hedge their bets and try fighting it out and eventually wind up dying or surrendering.  Retreating won't be an option for them.

In the end I predict at least 25% of the forces will become casualties before this battle is concluded.

What do others think?

Steve

I am wondering if modern technology will help a lot of troops to escape the trap?

In WW2, a disorganized army like that means death sentence to majority of them, stragglers wandering around foreign territory on foot will easily get lost , exhausted , then give up the will to escape in front of enemy mobile patrol or checkpoint. 

But in modern day a group of trapped soldiers may just robs a civilian car, change to civilian clothes. Turn on their cellphone GPS map and drive to a relatively safe place. They may abandon the vehicle in front of enemy checkpoint and travel cross country on foot.

Pocket and disorganize the Russian group in Lyman still work in favor of Ukraine. It will speed up RU group's collapse, reduce UKR's casualty, ensure most of the RU heavy equipment lost in the pocket. But it doesn't mean it will generate large of amount of POWs.

******************************************************************************

of course I could be totally wrong, Lyman and surrounding villages experienced heavy fight a couple months ago, so how many civilian vehicles are in working condition is questionable. 

Then to RU group there is only one road leads to safety, and the distance seems to be too long .   30km to Kreminna. The raining will heavily degrade civilian vehicles off road ability.    

[chuckdyke]

In CM everything is possible, even a Ukrainian surrender.

 

[sburke]

2 minutes ago, Chibot Mk IX said:

I am wondering if modern technology will help a lot of troops to escape the trap?

In WW2, a disorganized army like that means death sentence to majority of them, stragglers wandering around foreign territory on foot will easily get lost , exhausted , then give up the will to escape in front of enemy mobile patrol or checkpoint. 

I have forgotten now but there was a word Ukrainians would make you repeat that Russians were unable to pronounce.  Almost like a DUI test 

[LongLeftFlank]

2 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Yeah, except in Combat Mission there's a chance the AI is smart enough to succeed

Steve

Yes! which is why CM scenario designers should be able to:

a. assign default 'execute until interrupted' AI plans to player side units, or

b. allow some player side units to be not under human control!

[/wishlist]

(do you now regret stopping me posting harmless memes?)

[sburke]

A Russian oligarch's girlfriend was charged with lying to the feds while trying to enter the US to give birth to their baby (msn.com)

[sross112]

2 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

And then I see something like this and I wonder HOW THE F did this person make it to a significant rank and not get drummed out of service before causing harm.

I can't find any service dates in the articles I looked through but doctors are commissioned as Captains and are pretty much rubber stamped to Major in 5-6 years. Considering this one is 39 and only a major means that they probably suck. So actually what we would normally think, like you said, that someone with this type of loyalty problem wouldn't make Major in a normal military field really doesn't apply that much to the medical field in the military. 

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

For all we know Putin is desperately screaming at senior staff to fix this problem before it gets out of control, but the system for imposing order is so dysfunctional that there's just no ability for corrective action.  Leaving Putin with a choice of ending mobilization prematurely, with all that entails, or allowing it to continue as is and  gamble that he can get enough bodies to the front before experiencing overtly threatening blowback from the civilian population.

This is Russia, so it's hard to know if what we're seeing is deliberate indifference to life and reason or just gross incompetence (and an indifference to life and reason).

Now, let's just start this off with me stating right out of the gate that I am not a fan of Putin and this is just my hypothesis.

I'm thinking that a lot of what he has done in the last couple months has been to give him a case for staying alive at the end of this war. I think we all agree that he pulled the trigger on the invasion under false assumptions about Ukraine and his military's ability to wage war. We can also assume that he expected backlash from the west (big war chest amassed prior to invasion) but that he didn't think it would be as severe as it happened to be and that with a quick war he could get things smoothed out for the Russian economy in the near term. He counted on the gas and oil supplies to keep most of the major European powers either on the fence or ignoring the invasion and not the pretty much unilateral support for Ukraine.

A couple weeks in the Kremlin realized they were in trouble and it wasn't going to be a smooth blitz. They had to pull out from around Kiev or face a crushing defeat. The military convinced everyone that they had been given bad intel and that Plan A was no longer feasible. Plan B was to flatten everything with firepower and crush the remainder of the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts. At this time there was the purge of the FSB. Putin clearing out those not in lock step with him and placing the blame on the failed initial invasion on their shoulders. This was public and given to the people as the reason that their vaunted military forces failed. They were deceived and it will be ok, the nazis will still be crushed. The RA hammers Ukraine with missiles and the Black Sea Fleet sorties and shuts down any possible exports, ratcheting up the pressure on the economy and the civilian population. 

Mariupol falls and the spring offensive grinds into the summer. The Moskva is sunk and the northern pincer is stopped south of Izium. Several generals are fired and replaced for their inability to make things happen and Putin gets frustrated. Ru Nats are pointing out problems and screaming for mobilization. With the military going nowhere fast and taking heavy losses, the massive western support pouring into Ukraine and the western political block not budging he knows the game is up. 

Looking at the options, like everyone in this forum has liked to point out, his survival chances are severely decreased if the war is lost and it is pinned on him. He isn't stupid, he just sometimes does dumb things. He already has his security apparatus in lock step due to cleansing them earlier. Oligarchs that aren't firmly in his corner keep doing Icarus reenactments so he is making sure the money men are at least not against him even if they aren't actively with him. He decides that he really doesn't need to discredit the military since it has already done that to itself as well as revealed the levels of corruption throughout the entire military industrial complex. Who's left? The Nats. 

Putin has resisted the mobilization from the beginning as he knows that the military isn't capable of training, equipping and fielding large numbers of troops in time to make a difference. He knows that the mobilization will be a ***tshow. He knows that a large number of citizens from across the country will show up on the battle field untrained, horribly equipped and with low morale. He know the result will be a lot of dead conscripts and this will lead to a lot of angry family members. So he says "fine, have it your way" to the Nats and calls for the mobilization. The results we will see play out over the next few weeks. 

Now we have the strikes on Nordstream. Someone a bunch of pages back put out the theory that it was to stop any faction that wanted to get rid of him and start the flow of gas again to the west. That makes a lot of sense to me when you look at it from this perspective of Putin trying to stay alive.

So he has solidified his security, the military is a hollow shell, the moneymen are dead or in line, and the Nats will be discredited. There is a good chance with the collapse of the mobiks there will be a collapse with the RA. Kherson is a matter of time and so Russia will lose the territories they have occupied and the war, but probably not Crimea. At least not right away with everything else. 

Putin can then speak to the Russian people and plead his case. He was deceived by the corrupt military and military industrial complex that he spent the last 20 years trying to build up. He pumped billions into them and they assured him that the improvements were being made yet it all went into their pockets and poor Russian boys died. The FSB betrayed him and provoked him into a SMO on faulty information that led to Russian boys dying. The Nats were in on it with the rest and pressed for a failed mobilization that led to lots of Russian boys dying. 

He gives the same old Soviet lines. The People were betrayed by the boyars and they must be purged!! The great Russian nation was betrayed by the greedy RA officers and they must be purged!! The people are innocent victims of these horrible people and Putin will set it right!! 

I'll bet a couple beers that if he doesn't suffer from acute lead poisoning in the next few weeks he can pull this off. This plays into what those in the know on this forum about the Russian people have said. It gives them the excuse of they weren't defeated by an external enemy but by internal treason. If they are indoctrinated as we think they are and the masses are as inactive as they are said to be they will support Putin and cry out for the blood of the criminals that caused all this. He continues on, a bunch of people die, the gulags get fired up and Russia is back to a miserable 1980 something for a long, long time. New cold war. Russian isolation for a generation. He doesn't care as he still has the perks and remains in power.

Russian power is neutered and it is a pariah state so that is pretty much a good thing. Easy to keep contained and not able to meddle much with the rest of the world. The only down side is for all of you that want your electric cars as without Russian lithium, copper, nickel and cobalt that vaunted 2035 plan isn't going to happen.

Edit: I forgot to add about his little buddy Prigozin (SP?), you know, the Wagner guy. Some think that he is angling himself to take out Putin but he also plays into the above. Putin has him being portrayed now as the founder of the most successful military unit in theatre. He will be the one to assume control of the STAVKA and reform the military after their defeat. Quick transition of power to the only respected semi-military guy they have and one that has the backing of the PMC to take out any military groups that might think they want to have a go at ending his regime. It will be telling if in the next few weeks he is given operational control of more units than just the PMC. 

Edited September 30, 2022 by sross112

[Battlefront.com]

8 hours ago, NamEndedAllen said:

Steve thanks for your thoughtful and in depth response. Last night I wrote back an even more in-depth response filled with insights and scholarship  - brilliant, really. And when I hit “reply”, it disappeared into a crack in space. On this tablet apparently I get logged out after not too long an interval. Lesson learned.

The most brilliant things ever to be written are also the most likely to disappear before being read.  That's my story too, and so we'll stick together on this!

8 hours ago, NamEndedAllen said:

I don’t see an analogous template for the other Warsaw Pact/former USSR republics you mention.

In detail?  No, but that wasn't what I thought you were asking.  I thought you were asking for examples of aggressive national identities and cultural attitudes that changed without direct outside interference (e.g. Germany, Japan, and the often forgotten about Italy).  Let's take Romania for example. 

After the Soviet Union collapsed the country had a choice between remaining an autonomous dictatorship or transforming itself into something else.  Possibly worse.  Unlike the rest of the former Warsaw Pact countries, Romania didn't undergo a voluntary collapse of authority and instead had had a very violent military coup that pitted the military against each other.  It resulted in the execution of the dictator.  Despite coming to power through military means, just about zero experience with democratic concepts, and having various territorial disputes with its neighbors, Romania chose a path towards the West and its ideals.  It was not an easy path and it could have reverted to authoritarian governance at any time.  Today it is doing very well on the whole.  Certainly it's progress massively from where it started... pretty much the bottom of the Warsaw Pact barrel.

Nobody imposed this on Romania's population.  Their culture is still intact.

 

8 hours ago, NamEndedAllen said:

The Capt’ iirc many pages ago argued eloquently and in detail not only for thoughtful caution but for a still terrible but reasonable dictator who could hold Russia together and be contained by the rest of the world. Until next time. Because you can’t alway always get what you want in a world.

And I hate that.

I was prepared for an "until next time" successor to Putin before this war and I'm still open to it now because it's the only realistic thing to hope for.  However, thanks to the war there's a lot of preconditions that go along with the wait for the next time.  Whomever succeeds Putin is going to have a lot of baggage to carry.  And if he complains about all the weight, I say give him another bag until he shuts his cakehole.

That said, whatever transition options I pictured for Putin's regime post war are pretty much all gone now.  Whatever is coming next is going to be far more likely to involve some degree of federal disintegration.  I think that's inevitable at this point.

Steve

[LongLeftFlank]

32 minutes ago, sross112 said:

I can't find any service dates in the articles I looked through but doctors are commissioned as Captains and are pretty much rubber stamped to Major in 5-6 years. Considering this one is 39 and only a major means that they probably suck. So actually what we would normally think, like you said, that someone with this type of loyalty problem wouldn't make Major in a normal military field really doesn't apply that much to the medical field in the military. 

Now, let's just start this off with me stating right out of the gate that I am not a fan of Putin and this is just my hypothesis.

I'm thinking that a lot of what he has done in the last couple months has been to give him a case for staying alive at the end of this war. I think we all agree that he pulled the trigger on the invasion under false assumptions about Ukraine and his military's ability to wage war. We can also assume that he expected backlash from the west (big war chest amassed prior to invasion) but that he didn't think it would be as severe as it happened to be and that with a quick war he could get things smoothed out for the Russian economy in the near term. He counted on the gas and oil supplies to keep most of the major European powers either on the fence or ignoring the invasion and not the pretty much unilateral support for Ukraine.

A couple weeks in the Kremlin realized they were in trouble and it wasn't going to be a smooth blitz. They had to pull out from around Kiev or face a crushing defeat. The military convinced everyone that they had been given bad intel and that Plan A was no longer feasible. Plan B was to flatten everything with firepower and crush the remainder of the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts. At this time there was the purge of the FSB. Putin clearing out those not in lock step with him and placing the blame on the failed initial invasion on their shoulders. This was public and given to the people as the reason that their vaunted military forces failed. They were deceived and it will be ok, the nazis will still be crushed. The RA hammers Ukraine with missiles and the Black Sea Fleet sorties and shuts down any possible exports, ratcheting up the pressure on the economy and the civilian population. 

Mariupol falls and the spring offensive grinds into the summer. The Moskva is sunk and the northern pincer is stopped south of Izium. Several generals are fired and replaced for their inability to make things happen and Putin gets frustrated. Ru Nats are pointing out problems and screaming for mobilization. With the military going nowhere fast and taking heavy losses, the massive western support pouring into Ukraine and the western political block not budging he knows the game is up. 

Looking at the options, like everyone in this forum has liked to point out, his survival chances are severely decreased if the war is lost and it is pinned on him. He isn't stupid, he just sometimes does dumb things. He already has his security apparatus in lock step due to cleansing them earlier. Oligarchs that aren't firmly in his corner keep doing Icarus reenactments so he is making sure the money men are at least not against him even if they aren't actively with him. He decides that he really doesn't need to discredit the military since it has already done that to itself as well as revealed the levels of corruption throughout the entire military industrial complex. Who's left? The Nats. 

Putin has resisted the mobilization from the beginning as he knows that the military isn't capable of training, equipping and fielding large numbers of troops in time to make a difference. He knows that the mobilization will be a ***tshow. He knows that a large number of citizens from across the country will show up on the battle field untrained, horribly equipped and with low morale. He know the result will be a lot of dead conscripts and this will lead to a lot of angry family members. So he says "fine, have it your way" to the Nats and calls for the mobilization. The results we will see play out over the next few weeks. 

Now we have the strikes on Nordstream. Someone a bunch of pages back put out the theory that it was to stop any faction that wanted to get rid of him and start the flow of gas again to the west. That makes a lot of sense to me when you look at it from this perspective of Putin trying to stay alive.

So he has solidified his security, the military is a hollow shell, the moneymen are dead or in line, and the Nats will be discredited. There is a good chance with the collapse of the mobiks there will be a collapse with the RA. Kherson is a matter of time and so Russia will lose the territories they have occupied and the war, but probably not Crimea. At least not right away with everything else. 

Putin can then speak to the Russian people and plead his case. He was deceived by the corrupt military and military industrial complex that he spent the last 20 years trying to build up. He pumped billions into them and they assured him that the improvements were being made yet it all went into their pockets and poor Russian boys died. The FSB betrayed him and provoked him into a SMO on faulty information that led to Russian boys dying. The Nats were in on it with the rest and pressed for a failed mobilization that led to lots of Russian boys dying. 

He gives the same old Soviet lines. The People were betrayed by the boyars and they must be purged!! The great Russian nation was betrayed by the greedy RA officers and they must be purged!! The people are innocent victims of these horrible people and Putin will set it right!! 

I'll bet a couple beers that if he doesn't suffer from acute lead poisoning in the next few weeks he can pull this off. This plays into what those in the know on this forum about the Russian people have said. It gives them the excuse of they weren't defeated by an external enemy but by internal treason. If they are indoctrinated as we think they are and the masses are as inactive as they are said to be they will support Putin and cry out for the blood of the criminals that caused all this. He continues on, a bunch of people die, the gulags get fired up and Russia is back to a miserable 1980 something for a long, long time. New cold war. Russian isolation for a generation. He doesn't care as he still has the perks and remains in power.

Russian power is neutered and it is a pariah state so that is pretty much a good thing. Easy to keep contained and not able to meddle much with the rest of the world. The only down side is for all of you that want your electric cars as without Russian lithium, copper, nickel and cobalt that vaunted 2035 plan isn't going to happen.

Edit: I forgot to add about his little buddy Prigozin (SP?), you know, the Wagner guy. Some think that he is angling himself to take out Putin but he also plays into the above. Putin has him being portrayed now as the founder of the most successful military unit in theatre. He will be the one to assume control of the STAVKA and reform the military after their defeat. Quick transition of power to the only respected semi-military guy they have and one that has the backing of the PMC to take out any military groups that might think they want to have a go at ending his regime. It will be telling if in the next few weeks he is given operational control of more units than just the PMC. 

Great piece.

'Icarus reenactments' is a keeper.

And using the mobiks to cull potential pool of malcontents is a GoT worthy move, also used by Franco to ship off his hardcore Fashie wingnuts to expend their life energies on the Volkhov front.

Prigozhin looks more like a Yezhov to me though, a thoroughly unlikeable fall guy (and an amateur, to boot) to be purged in turn once he has purged the others on behalf of the Dark Lord.

Edited September 30, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[The_MonkeyKing]

Happy unification day to you in Lyman!

[Aragorn2002]

7 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

Happy unification day to you in Lyman!

[G.I. Joe]

13 hours ago, sburke said:

I'll give it a shot though I am not even remotely qualified.

First off to address a previously used example - Japan. My spouse is Japanese.  I studiously avoid discussion of ww2. The Japanese version is significantly different than what I understand to be Japan's actions in ww2.   Japan was demilitarized, but never forced to really teach generation after generation of the atrocities committed.  It is still a very xenophobic society, though it does a lot of good humanitarian work around the globe.

Very good post...I did want to expand on this point a little but couldn't find time to finish a reply this afternoon. Downplaying wartime atrocities is definitely an issue in Japan, and I would hesitate to imply that they have done as well as Germany at confronting the worst chapters in their history (who has, really?) But, a comparative survey of Japanese, South Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese and U.S. school textbooks found that the Japanese texts used in the vast majority of schools were the most neutral of the ones surveyed and did acknowledge war crimes and Japan's role as the aggressor:

Divided Memories: History Textbooks and the Wars in Asia

I don't have anything comparable to your personal experience, but I can say the two Japanese people I have discussed World War II with at any length readily acknowledged Japanese war crimes and found the revisionist textbooks abhorrent (admittedly a very small sample size, but it's the personal experience I've got...and there may be a generational effect in play).  Maybe it says something that I have interacted with a lot of other Japanese people without World War II coming up...but then again, casual conversations with Germans and Italians rarely veer straight into Hitler and Mussolini (this forum notwithstanding).

Personally, I think a big part of the difference is that Japan didn't have any real equivalent to the Nazi party. Without a readily identifiable mass political movement to anchor the discussion on, there's no equivalent to being able to draw a distinction between Nazi and German...I don't want to imply that coming to terms with the past has been easy for Germany in any way, but having that distinction to work with has no doubt helped in some ways. And that really does underscore what a missed opportunity the fall of the USSR was.

Edited September 30, 2022 by G.I. Joe

[sburke]

David Axe over at Forbes is a pretty decent reporter

Russian Correspondent: Thousands Of Russian Troops Are About To Get Trapped In Eastern Ukraine (msn.com)

[Kinophile]

Time to move on, guys. 

Russian units are about to start falling quicker than knickers in a bordello.

[The_MonkeyKing]

 

Wonder what is going to  come out of this

[G.I. Joe]

9 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Time to move on, guys.

Agreed...but I spent a good chunk of my afternoon trying to to finish that post and getting sidetracked (yay, parenting!), and I have a bit of a stubborn streak.

Edited September 30, 2022 by G.I. Joe

[Battlefront.com]

Nice short video from Kherson.  Interesting detail?  I think at the end of the video we see the crew bailing out to hop in a car to get away from their SPG.  If correct, it's an interesting and quite smart tactic.  You can't drive around forever, you can't drive out of range every time either.  Not practical.  Which means eventually you have to park and when you park there's always a chance it's going to get hit.  Very little can be done about that, however the crews can be saved by having them not be there.

I'm wondering if this is why we're seeing so many drone bomber videos of vehicles that seem to be abandoned.  Maybe it's just the vehicle is not actively on a mission so the crew is as far away from it as they can be.

 

[The_MonkeyKing]

https://old.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/xrl5cf/ukrainian_combat_footage_sept_29th/

interesting video of a raid on RUS positions in Kherson with commentary.

• Russian artillery has pre-sighted pretty much everything
• Response time of the artillery is only couple of minutes

[Battlefront.com]

Meant to mention something about a post Gigb made a bunch of pages ago.  It was a posting by Khodakovsky where he was talking about how bad many of the Russian commanders are.  The interesting part was he paid high compliments to a Russian general from the fighting in 2014.  He said that working with him was amazing.  It's always nice to have the people saying they were independent "separatists" back at the time now admitting that they were coordinating and taking orders from Russian generals the whole time.  The media of the day should be ashamed of themselves for the nearly universal "give Russia the benefit of the doubt" attitude.  Still burns me that we had to go through that.

Steve

[LongLeftFlank]

Happiness is a warm gun.

 

 

[Zeleban]

it is claimed that this is footage of the Russian retreat from Yampol

[paxromana]

1 minute ago, Zeleban said:

it is claimed that this is footage of the Russian retreat from Yampol

That's not a retreat ... they're running way ... a rout. If true, of course!

Will they even stop this side of the Russian border?

[Huba]

Morning Rybar is out. I'm sure Grigb will go over it in more detail, but few most interesting points:

- UA recon groups are crossing Zherebets north of Torskie/ Zarichne

- forces from Yampil and Dobryshevo withdrew to Liman - the cauldron is not only closed, but shrinking fast

- this is my impression only, but it looks like UA is not going to storm Torskie/ Zarichne directly, but also just encircle it. Both roads to the chokepoint seem to be under UA fire, or even direct control

[LongLeftFlank]

15 hours ago, FancyCat said:

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. 

 

 

Another good quick summary assessment, in translation (from Czech) from ChrisO.  @The_Capt, I think you've said some of the same.

 

 

Edited September 30, 2022 by LongLeftFlank