How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Huba]

1 hour ago, Haiduk said:

Kalibr, for example, has march speed 0,8M (and 2-2.5M at the target), so it can be intercepted with some probabbility with MANPAD. 

Sorry for nitpicking, but that is only true for the 3M54 anti-shipping model. What RU is firing are predominantly way cheaper, subsonic 3M14 land attack versions, without the terminal rocket stage, but with double the warhead size - roughly similar to Tomahawk.

Edited October 10, 2022 by Huba

[LongLeftFlank]

Daah, whadda we gonna do tonight, Brain?

Actually, I am tempted by Galeev's thesis that Lugnuts is way smarter than he seems, a bit like Franco.

Seems he basically just told Putin, hey brah, sorry I gotta crap out of your crusade again, the Poles are sneaking around in the woods and stuff. And you do remember I just shipped you all my heavy tanks and SP arty, right?  But you know, other than that, me and my other tired old 'stache guys are totally behind you. Go Union!

....And from the replies :

 

Edited October 10, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[Billy Ringo]

Random comments:

Based on my understanding, PMCs are typically a "for profit" organization with a focus on filling someone's bank account outside of the full scope of government oversight.  (Not that the Russian military has oversight or control over it's own operations but that's a different factor altogether.)   It would seem reasonable that PMCs would be ripe for outside influence, infiltration, etc.   Basically, their loyalty is going to be influenced by the highest bidder.  It could get rather dicey if Russia goes this route.

If Russia is responsible for the pipeline destruction, cutting of undersea cables and assorted other random mishaps, and this continues--at what point does this trigger the NATO Article 5?   Seems like this escalation could be both--intentional by the Russians but also quite dangerous.

 

[akd]

Latest Russian airborne recruits:

 

[Battlefront.com]

7 hours ago, Letter from Prague said:

I assume everyone will now start apologising to Kraze? No?

(I know nobody will.)

What is there to apologize for?  Nobody disagrees with his assessment of the way Russians are right now.  The government is genocidal the the populace is generally supportive of it.  Nobody, not a single person here, thinks that the Russian people are going to rise up against Putin for his behavior towards Ukraine or even against Russians themselves.  Even the ones that truly object are too afraid to act.

The disagreement with Kraze is that the Russians can never be anything other than that forever and ever and ever.

It amazes me that point hasn't been made crystal clear in all of these discussions.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, RockinHarry said:

I still remain with my special IED boat theory here. Don´t underestimate UKR ingenuity paired with possible CIA lab developments. And UKR war is a huge proving ground for latest east & west military tech developments. So while the bridge attack might have been something very simple and overcomplicated by all the ongoing theories, I´d also expect some "surprises" that none knows about (publicly) until after the war maybe.

It's a bad theory   The boat theory is the one that is most easily ruled out.  No evidence of any explosion underneath, lots of evidence of an explosion on top.  If an IED boat were to be used it would have blown up a pier, none of which show any damage at all.

As much as I still favor a missile strike, I am definitely not ruling out truck IED yet.  I think the truck is the less likely of the two, but there's not much to suggest it isn't at least possible.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

Big truck bombs don't leave an impression in asphalt - they leave a crater. In this case, the truck and the part of the bridge close to the explosion will have have been blown to bits.

Here's a crater after a truck bomb in Kabul:

 

This is a good point and, in fact, it is an argument against Hrim-2 and in favor of ATACMS.  The HIMARS strikes on the Dnepr bridges show that the surface isn't affected all that much.  HIMARS and ATACMS should be fairly similar.  Hrim-2, on the other hand, might make a much bigger hole and/or surface damage.  We don't have anything to compare against.

The lack of visuals on the surface of the bridge span with the hole in it is frustrating refinement of the DBA.

Steve

[Lethaface]

7 hours ago, Letter from Prague said:

I assume everyone will now start apologising to Kraze? No?

(I know nobody will.)

EDIT: I wrote this before Kraze's post, synchronicity I guess.

Why the bleep should anyone here apologize to Kraze? (Rethorical question).

[RockinHarry]

13 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

It's a bad theory   The boat theory is the one that is most easily ruled out.  No evidence of any explosion underneath, lots of evidence of an explosion on top.  If an IED boat were to be used it would have blown up a pier, none of which show any damage at all.

As much as I still favor a missile strike, I am definitely not ruling out truck IED yet.  I think the truck is the less likely of the two, but there's not much to suggest it isn't at least possible.

Steve

Yup, ATM anything is still possible. As long as russia doesn´t find out exactly I´m perfectly fine with not knowing either.

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Actually, I am tempted by Galeev's thesis that Lugnuts is way smarter than he seems, a bit like Franco.

I totally agree.  Let's not forget that he played both sides of the fence pretty well in 2014/2015 and the years that came after.  If it weren't for Russia putting down the popular protests in 2020/2021 I think he'd have refused having Belarus serve as a base for Russia's invasion.

As we've discussed many times, Putin needs Lukashenko to remain in power.  Any political disruption there is bad news for Russia on many levels.  This gives Lukashenko some ability to call the shots, though he has to be careful to not overestimate his value.  Hence why he allowed Belarus to become a Russian base and has handed over a sizeable amount of military equipment/supplies.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, akd said:

Latest Russian airborne recruits:

 

Russia's actions in the last day make it much easier to put aside my Humanist tendencies when watching a video like this.

Steve

[keas66]

1 minute ago, Battlefront.com said:

Russia's actions in the last day make it much easier to put aside my Humanist tendencies when watching a video like this.

Steve

I was literally thinking exactly the same thing ! .

I'd been getting a little queasy of late  looking at the Death Clips showing up in ever increasing frequency ....but this morning my queasiness is gone .

Edited October 10, 2022 by keas66

[Battlefront.com]

Just now, keas66 said:

I was literally thinking exactly the same thing ! .

I'd been getting a little queasy of late  looking at the Death Clips showing up in every increasing frequency ....but this morning my queasiness is gone .

It certainly helps to think that the Russians blown up in that video were either willing to be there or didn't care enough about their own lives to make different choices.  Speaking of which... (next post)

Steve

[chrisl]

3 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

Could be, but then why was there not a huge spray of water?

There was a huge spray of water, but it came after the bridge hit the water.

2 hours ago, akd said:

All you need is a massive amount of ammonium nitrate, and as Oliver Alexander noted, this would be consistent with all the bits of burning material raining down after the explosion.  A unitary HE warhead would consume all the explosive material instantly. Incidentally, this is also why the collapsed parts of the span at the explosion site are less scorched.  The horizontal surfaces around it accumulated more of the burning material that was showering down.

I mean Timothy McVeigh managed the same almost entirely on his own. I think the SBU could pull it off.

All that stuff that much of twitter is calling "burning material" raining down is almost certainly just water droplets from the splash being swept back over the bridge (and through the field of view of the camera).  You can tell from the various video before & after the explosion that there was a strong gusty breeze coming from the northeast (the road side), and there are tons of lights all over the bridge.  The water droplets will scatter a lot of light (think laser light show, or using fog to make a laser beam visible) and will also retrotrflect light (why you don't use high-beams in fog) so that the light reflected back from lamps near the camera will make them appear very bright.

The bent deck is pretty well scorched, consistent with the neighboring deck.  This pic shows it, though the segment closest to the explosion is at an angle where you can't see the surface.

 

[danfrodo]

I'd say that (maybe) the biggest news right now is not Kerch or the Kyiv attacks.  It's the attacks on infrastructure in NATO countries.  What will these countries do?  What will NATO do?  What will the majority of the public want in these countries? 

Clearly Putin is betting that his nuclear threat will allow him to make these attacks on NATO countries w/o any response, in the hopes that there will then be pressure put on UKR to make a bad deal, soon.  This could have profound affects going forward.

Hopefully people in EU will just get really angry and we'll see more pressure on RU and more support for UKR.  And the first thing to do is to kick RU off security council and call it a terrorist state, with all the implications of that.  I think leaders have resisted officially labeling Putin a terrorist because that's impossible to walk back later, but we past that now.  

[sburke]

59 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

What is there to apologize for?  Nobody disagrees with his assessment of the way Russians are right now.  The government is genocidal the the populace is generally supportive of it.  Nobody, not a single person here, thinks that the Russian people are going to rise up against Putin for his behavior towards Ukraine or even against Russians themselves.  Even the ones that truly object are too afraid to act.

The disagreement with Kraze is that the Russians can never be anything other than that forever and ever and ever.

It amazes me that point hasn't been made crystal clear in all of these discussions.

Steve

Exactly. We argue for a different response because it is what makes us different. It is the whole point of this war, we have a different set of values. We either stay true to those or Putin wins. 
That being said it is time to declare Russia a terrorist state. Bring the hammer. Send every freakin bit of artillery and anti air weapon the west has in stock. Give Ukraine the weapons to finish the job on that bridge. 

[Grigb]

Regarding damages suffered by the bridge here is opninn of "Civilian Girkin" ask Nesmyan. Basically, he says the bridge was built with violation of safety code due to lack of required technology in RU for supports/foundation columns. As a result, an explosion could lead to fluctuation of structure and damage we see.

Quote

...I continue to assume that a strong explosion on the surface, although it did not cause fatal damage to the bridge structure itself, affected it like an earthquake, shifting the supports[/columns]. But the displacement of the supporting structures is serious [matter]. During earthquakes, small literally displacements of load-bearing structures will lead to catastrophic damages. Earthquake—resistant structures are a special type of construction, and they are calculated for very specific conditions. But during the construction of the Crimean Bridge, if anyone forgot, changes were made specifically "for it" to the building codes and rules, which made it possible to circumvent many previously existing safety protocols during construction. And this was discussed quite openly, professional builders spoke very unfriendly about this.

But a political decision was made, and in this case all the protocols and norms went South. Moreover, the president's friends got huge budget to play with — well, who in such conditions will pay attention to [safety] trifles.

The main technological violation was the installation of supports[/columns] for the bridge at insufficient depth. According to all the rules, the supports must be installed on rocky ground. But, according to various estimates, they did not reach the rocky ground by about twenty meters, since there are no pile technologies for working with super-long piles in Russia. Accordingly, already in 18th [year], and especially in 19th [year], the "subsidence" of the bridge began. There was no talk about this [in RU], but foreign sources wrote about the problems that arose, as well as the solutions that were used — the builders tried to "tie up" the supports, pressing them to the ground, that "pushed supports out".

There was nothing in open sources about what kind of stresses arose in the structure after everything that happened to the bridge. Therefore, it is impossible to evaluate them.

The explosion, even superficial, did not cause (and could not cause) damage to the supporting structures themselves. But the vibrations that arose on the supports at the site of the explosion (and the supports, after all, continue to stand on shaky, muddy soil, not reaching the rocks), in general, these vibrations inevitably had to affect the weak points of the structure, which are the joints of the floor slabs and bridge supports. And this is exactly the nature of the destruction we are witnessing, no more and no less.

Therefore, I assume that we saw a combined impact on the structure: explosive, which led to its fluctuations, and the destruction of the places where the floor slabs rest on the bridge supports due to unaccountable vibrations of the structure.

 

Edited October 10, 2022 by Grigb

[chrisl]

8 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

I'd say that (maybe) the biggest news right now is not Kerch or the Kyiv attacks.  It's the attacks on infrastructure in NATO countries.  What will these countries do?  What will NATO do?  What will the majority of the public want in these countries? 

Clearly Putin is betting that his nuclear threat will allow him to make these attacks on NATO countries w/o any response, in the hopes that there will then be pressure put on UKR to make a bad deal, soon.  This could have profound affects going forward.

Hopefully people in EU will just get really angry and we'll see more pressure on RU and more support for UKR.  And the first thing to do is to kick RU off security council and call it a terrorist state, with all the implications of that.  I think leaders have resisted officially labeling Putin a terrorist because that's impossible to walk back later, but we past that now.  

It's tempting to hope that some Russian submarines mysteriously stop communicating, but that's probably a little too escalatory.

[Battlefront.com]

A bunch of pages ago there was a couple of posts from RU Nat sources talking about the ability for Russian soldiers to "opt out" of specific attacks.  We've seen this reported too many times to disbelieve it.  Some thoughts on the implications:

• large quantities of Russian formations are now nothing more than mobs of men that are more militias than structured military forces
• Russia's well known structural command weakness (lack of NCOs) has reached a critical stage.  It was never a good system, but now that there aren't enough officers available the system has largely broken down
• it appears the surviving low level commanders, likely through experience, have determined that ordering soldiers to DO THEIR JOBS risks an overt mutiny.  Possibly with them getting a bullet in the head.  So they conform to reality and have formalized the volunteer concept
• whatever theoretical combat power Russian BTGs have is just about nullified by the reliance upon volunteers.  Already weak on manpower, having a fair amount of a unit "opt out" of an attack ensures that whatever is thrown into a battle won't be strong enough to do much of anything
• the inability to follow the most basic concepts of organized military units (i.e. subordinates following orders) a formation that allows its subordinate units to "opt out" at the individual man level makes them combat ineffective in any meaningful way

This is obviously going to be more or less relevant to any specific formation.  However, as the war drags on the formations capable of conducting meaningful military missions is decreasing rapidly.  Russia is likely to continue concentrating its fewer and fewer capable units into smaller and smaller sectors of frontage, thus leaving open larger and larger sectors for relatively easy Ukrainian advances.

Seems to me the prewar experts haven't taken this sort of breakdown of discipline into account when projecting what Russia can do going forward.

Steve

[Maciej Zwolinski]

12 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

I'd say that (maybe) the biggest news right now is not Kerch or the Kyiv attacks.  It's the attacks on infrastructure in NATO countries.  What will these countries do?  What will NATO do?  What will the majority of the public want in these countries? 

C

This is how it should be. However, the affected countries probably have to make the first move of making an international scandal of this. So far Sweden and Germany have been quiet.

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, akd said:

All you need is a massive amount of ammonium nitrate,

Yeah, and that requires a lot of logistics to make happen.  Easier than truckloads of TNT, for sure, but it's still a big effort that risks tripping some sort of alarm bell.

2 hours ago, akd said:

and as Oliver Alexander noted, this would be consistent with all the bits of burning material raining down after the explosion.  

I am also someone that thinks the "sparks" are optical effects caused by water.

2 hours ago, akd said:

A unitary HE warhead would consume all the explosive material instantly. Incidentally, this is also why the collapsed parts of the span at the explosion site are less scorched.  The horizontal surfaces around it accumulated more of the burning material that was showering down.

Didn't follow your logic here.  Explain a different way?

2 hours ago, akd said:

I mean Timothy McVeigh managed the same almost entirely on his own. I think the SBU could pull it off.

For sure it could pull it off in theory.  No debate there.  That said, adding to what Kinophile posted in response, a new McVeigh would find it very hard to pull off the same thing today because now people are alert to the danger.  Russia has reasons to be paranoid about this sort of thing long before Ukraine came into the picture.  I'd be shocked if they weren't at least attempting to monitor large purchases of fertilizer.  Even if the controls are ineffective (this is Russia, after all!) it  increases the chance of the operation being discovered.  Compare this to putting some C4 on rail cars.

I'll say this again.  The biggest argument against the truckbomb theory is that it is complicated and therefore prone to failure.  Ukraine's track record shows it is in favor of things that are simple and prone to success.  If Ukraine had it's mind set on blowing up the Kerch bridge on Putin's birthday, in conjunction with other logistical strikes, it seems pretty unlikely it would have placed all its bets on a truckbomb plot when more certain options existed.

Therefore, if Ukraine lacked a missile capable of hitting the bridge it would more likely turn to blowing up a fuel train than a truck bomb.

Steve

[Bulletpoint]

24 minutes ago, chrisl said:

It's tempting to hope that some Russian submarines mysteriously stop communicating, but that's probably a little too escalatory.

And then US subs also strangely stop communicating? Or is it only the US that knows the location of Russian subs at all times, and not the other way around? If so, what's the point for Russia to even operate submarines?

Edited October 10, 2022 by Bulletpoint

[sross112]

2 minutes ago, Maciej Zwolinski said:

This is how it should be. However, the affected countries probably have to make the first move of making an international scandal of this. So far Sweden and Germany have been quiet.

I think everyone has a pretty good idea who is responsible, but the powers that be are probably awaiting proof. Once concrete evidence is there they have two options:

1. Go public with it and whatever their responses will be. My guess would be more sanctions and stuff like that as once they go public there will be a howl not to escalate. Probably increased hardware support as well.
2. Stay quiet and hit back quiet. Cyber warfare probably the best for this. Especially if they could knock out stuff as an exponential tit for tat. By this I mean establish a ratio for the kremlin. You knocked out power to this island, we take down 5 of your plants, permanently if possible. That is the only thing Russia understands is strength. You have to hurt them more than they can hurt you otherwise their asshattery will persist and if you accept it you encourage it.

8 hours ago, FancyCat said:

They took the wrong lessons from Chechnya and Syria.

 

 

This is a big fail on NATO and western supporters. Ukraine should have a better AA umbrella by now. It is a defensive weapon, not escalatory, and their is a documented need to protect civilians. There can be absolutely no negative to supplying Patriots or whatever they need to stop this crap. 

I'm an old testament, eye for an eye type. I know it isn't always appropriate and in this case I don't advocate terror strikes against Russian civilians or anything, but Ukraine should be given the means to retaliate against these strikes. Right now there should be a hundred missiles leaving Ukraine for targets in Russia; infrastructure, air bases, logistics hubs, Black Sea Fleet, pipeline terminals, whatever. Not apartment buildings and crowded parks but sensitive targets. The only way this stuff stops is if it hurts them more to do it than any possible gain they get from it.

I think it is apparent that the verbal reprimand and written reprimand haven't worked and it's time for a meeting in the paint locker.

[Battlefront.com]

27 minutes ago, Grigb said:

Regarding damages suffered by the bridge here is opninn of "Civilian Girkin" ask Nesmyan. Basically, he says the bridge was built with violation of safety code due to lack of required technology in RU for supports/foundation columns. As a result, an explosion could lead to fluctuation of structure and damage we see.

 

Whether Girkin is correct about the details or not, it's a safe bet that the bridge has numerous engineering compromises built into it.  Either by design (capabilities, costs, timelines, etc.) or through execution (corruption, poor quality materials, incompetence, etc.).  It is entirely possible that the bridge was already destined to fall apart at some point way ahead of normal bridge life expectancy.

I've built quite a lot of structural things in my time.  In fact, I'm supposed to be building one right now instead of typing   A funny saying an older contractor friend of mine likes to joke about is making something just good enough that it outlives the builder.  Because after the builder is dead, "it is someone else's problem".  If Putin was given two plans for the Kerch bridge, one of which ensured it would stand for 100 years and another 20 years, with the 100 year one costing significantly more and/or taking more time and/or requiring help from the West... which do you think Putin would select?

Steve

[Bulletpoint]

I'm willing to eat crow if I'm wrong, but I still think it was a truck bomb. If you claim it was a missile, I would like to ask two questions:

1: How could one single missile cause such an enormous explosion? An ATACM carries only 250 kilos of explosives. I do not think that is enough to cause this level of damage.

2: If it was a missile, why only ONE missile? There's still plenty of bridge left. Why not strike it again and cut the bridge completely? Did Ukraine only own one single missile?

Edited October 10, 2022 by Bulletpoint