How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[sburke]

22 minutes ago, Aragorn2002 said:

Grow up, mate.

Somebody woke up on the wrong side of the thread today. 

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Because the consensus is, the Red Army were pretty much equal opportunity bastards, with a brutality exceeded only by their enemy.

This.

The Soviet Union was desperately short on manpower by the time 1944 came around.  Russians were not magically exempted because of racial ideology.  The regime had "bigger fish to fry", so I call BS on the notion that Stalin said "let's throw everything into the fight, except native Russians.  Because, as a Georgian, I want to preserve the pure blood, which obviously is not my people".

Now, what *IS* true is that the NKVD rounded up every able bodied Ukrainian male they could find as the front swept in and made sure they fought for the motherland.  But the Red Army would have done that if they were liberating Russian territory as well (see previous reference to manpower shortages).  Partisans, the loyal heroes fighting the Nazis, were used as cannon fodder.  Not because they were Ukrainian, per se, but because they were independent minded.  Stalin didn't like that as a general rule.  That they were independent minded Ukrainians was two strikes against them.

As for Berlin, the Red Army threw everything at the Germans and then threw some more.  Whatever was handy was fed into the fight, ethnicity was not a factor.  Were some Soviet commanders happier to shred a particular ethnicity over another?  I'd not be surprised to know that's true, but I have never heard any evidence that ethnic Russian units were shielded from the shredder.

Someone is going to have to provide a lot of very solid, peer reviewed evidence to show that Russians got special treatment before I even consider taking the notion seriously.

Steve

[LongLeftFlank]

1 hour ago, Beleg85 said:

https://twitter.com/LachowskiMateus/status/1583434136382939136

Reporter M.Lachowski refuting claims of RU propaganda channels their army entered Bakhmut. Guy was allowed into Opytne for a moment, so we can be sure Russian nationalists are lying again.

Also in other interview he described that town is turn into a fortress now, with earth and concrete fortifications, masked trenches joining safehouses, even several barricades on every street. Reportedly Ukrainian defenders there (58th, 110th, part of 93rd Bbs.) were greatly aided by experiences from Rubizhne.

 

Sounds like Stalingrad:  Commissar's House, Chemist's shop, etc.

This last one is one for the future map files.

Curious whether it is (or was) a wine shop or an actual winery:  Chateau de Azovstal? This is the region's 'sun belt', so certain hardy grapes will grow there. Never seen vineyards though, in my various map perusings.  I always thought of it as more a Sochi / Crimea thing.

Topos, a week old. River, though tiny, looks like it makes these defences tough to flank or envelop. So Ivan needs to plough straight ahead along the streets.

 

Edited October 21, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[dan/california]

2 hours ago, Beleg85 said:

Russian propagandist died during last night shelling of Antonovsky barges (story about doctors can be there to spice up things, though). It is worth to note strike was conducted after curfew, when regular Kherson locals are largely forbidden to leave their homes.

If the Ukrainians have ISR in Kherson that is so good that they can get hit a a specific priority target like this guy, as he is trying to cross what should be the most protected asset in the operational theater, I have to think they are still on track to wrap this up.

 

1 hour ago, panzermartin said:

I can't fully trust random pro russian accounts but they claim that so far artillery with krasnopol and UAVs are dealing blows to a new Ukrainian blitz today in Kherson. (Footage looks from 19th)

 

Not going to speculate on the accuracy of the particular clip, but we have talked a lot about the importance of the ISR/fires bubble. The clip above would be example A. You CANNOT let the the other guy have a capable drone up with a competent artillery battery in the loop. The U.S. needs to send Ukraine some, maybe even most, of the new shorad systems that are just now being accepted for service. There are some fancy new laser toys mucking about in the Arizona proving grounds as well. I would simply point out that if it kills Russian drones in Ukraine it passes the test.

More generally we are STILL trying to boil the frog slowly. What we need to do is blow the kitchen all over the neighbors yard and break the Russians army's will to stay in this thing.

[Battlefront.com]

38 minutes ago, Aragorn2002 said:

Grow up, mate.

If you're back to this thread just to take swings at people, you'll get another vacation.  Is that what you want, because I'm as capable of hitting the button as Elvis is.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

14 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

 

Sounds like Stalingrad:  Commissar's House, Chemist's shop, etc.

This last one is one for the future map files.

Curious whether it is (or was) a wine shop or an actual winery:  Chateau de Azovstal? This is Russia's 'sun belt', so certain hardy grapes will grow there. Never seen vineyards though, in my various map perusings.  I always thought of it as more a Sochi / Crimea thing.

Thanks for the updates.

It seems that the Bakhmut situation has largely remained as it has for months now.  The Russians continue to take ground very slowly and at great cost.  Ukraine is unable to stop or reverse the trend, just maintain the status quo.  The thing is Russia has been doing this for months now and the result is that even the paltry meters per day advances have added up over time to the extent that they are finally entering Bakhmut.

This whole Bakhmut battle is... fascinating?  I guess that's the word for it.  At the strategic level this is one of the dumbest things Russia has done since it decided to invade.  Whatever possible military value Bakhmut offered Russia was made irrelevant months ago, yet the Russian's are pouring desperately needed resources into trying to take it.

It's even worse than it looks because Wagner's troops are supposedly some of the best that Russia has.  Instead of using them as a sort of elite shock force to blunt Ukrainian advances, where they very likely would cause Ukraine serious headaches, they're not even a distraction for Ukraine.  At best they are an annoyance.

It boggles my mind that so much practical need is deliberately being ignored so that this Bahkmut fight can continue.  Whatever lessons Russia has managed to learn in this war, not wasting precious resources on pointless political exercises is something they seem stubbornly unwilling to accept.

Steve

[LongLeftFlank]

1 minute ago, Battlefront.com said:

Thanks for the updates.

It seems that the Bakhmut situation has largely remained as it has for months now.  The Russians continue to take ground very slowly and at great cost.  Ukraine is unable to stop or reverse the trend, just maintain the status quo.  The thing is Russia has been doing this for months now and the result is that even the paltry meters per day advances have added up over time to the extent that they are finally entering Bakhmut.

This whole Bakhmut battle is... fascinating?  I guess that's the word for it.  At the strategic level this is one of the dumbest things Russia has done since it decided to invade.  Whatever possible military value Bakhmut offered Russia was made irrelevant months ago, yet the Russian's are pouring desperately needed resources into trying to take it.

It's even worse than it looks because Wagner's troops are supposedly some of the best that Russia has.  Instead of using them as a sort of elite shock force to blunt Ukrainian advances, where they very likely would cause Ukraine serious headaches, they're not even a distraction for Ukraine.  At best they are an annoyance.

It boggles my mind that so much practical need is deliberately being ignored so that this Bahkmut fight can continue.  Whatever lessons Russia has managed to learn in this war, not wasting precious resources on pointless political exercises is something they seem stubbornly unwilling to accept.

Steve

Yeah, this is one of these places where if I somehow had the time to do a CM map it would really aid understanding of what both sides are grappling with.  It's nothing dramatic but just well chosen ground, defended by highly professional soldiers.

[sburke]

6 hours ago, cesmonkey said:

From 2015, right?

https://www.worldpipelines.com/equipment-and-safety/09112015/rov-with-explosives-seen-near-nord-stream-pipeline/
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/6296977

seems so.  Interesting they neglected that bit of info in that article.  dips***s.

[Battlefront.com]

Seems Mr Sburke found a hole in our potty mouth filter.  I have manually corrected that.

Steve

[sburke]

Just now, Battlefront.com said:

Seems Mr Sburke found a hole in our potty mouth filter.  I have manually corrected that.

Steve

one of the few things I am good for it seems.  

[dan/california]

6 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Ok, c’mon let’s be consistent in our analysis.  Back in the early days of this war it was all about how the Russians were firing very expensive weapons to try and hit cheap UA drones = “Yay”, Perun even did a video on this.  Now that it is Russian cheap drones and expensive UA counters it is all “Well one has to consider PRICIE/DOTMLPF”?!

Look the reality is that cheap unmanned systems are flipping the cost equations of waging war everywhere.  We have been here before when it was costing us millions to kill two guys in a pickup.  Unmanned systems are a cost disruptor no matter what side we are talking about.  We will be spending years figuring that one out.  For now it is the depth of pocket that is far more determinative.  Russian strategic depth is shrinking, likely why they have switched to low cost systems…[that is learning btw which is also not a positive signal.  Of course the fact the Russians are still hitting civilian terror targets shows they are not learning that quickly].  The UA still has the deep pockets of the West, so firing off expensive missiles is an affordable counter.  That, and the psychological and information payoff is also not small.  In the end Russia may have long range loitering munitions but they clearly do not have the competitive C4ISR architecture to plug them into.  It has driven the cost of this war up for Ukraine and the west…ok, let’s live with that and move on.

A better way to kill drones is is the new golden goose for defense contractors. The people that figure it out are buying new boats. There are a lot of systems in development using twenty to one hundred kilowatt lasers on various trucks or Strykers. Is anyone trying to hang one on a C-130 or similar with an integrated radar that could knock these things down over a broader area? 

There have also been one or two videos of drones hunting drones in various improvised ways, I assume that is in frantic development as well.

[Offshoot]

Zelensky denies that Ukraine was responsible for the explosion on Kerch Bridge.

https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/3597628-explosion-on-kerch-bridge-zelensky-says-ukraine-definitely-did-not-order-that.html

[dan/california]

1 minute ago, Offshoot said:

Zelensky denies that Ukraine was responsible for the explosion on Kerch Bridge.

https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/3597628-explosion-on-kerch-bridge-zelensky-says-ukraine-definitely-did-not-order-that.html

Ukrainians are giving a masterclass in trolling.

[Seedorf81]

2 hours ago, billbindc said:

Also, isn't it obviously true that who got recruited when also had quite a bit to do with what territory the USSR controlled? Germany had conquered everything in Ukraine West of the Dnieper by August of 1941, West of the Donbas by December of 1941 and the balance by the next July. The Russian army didn't reconquer the balance until 1944. Of *course* more Ukrainians got recruited later on in the war as that population again became available to the Soviet Army.

Also: Belorussia and Ukraine were for a significant time completely occupied by the Germans, while a huge part of Russia was not.

The Germans would happily kill every fighting-age man in occupied territory, while Stalin realized that he needed every soldier he could muster. (He even released prisoners from the Gulag).

So that would make a higher number of casualties for Ukraine and Belorussia plausible.

[danfrodo]

1 hour ago, sburke said:

Elvis is crashed out snoring after a drunken binge with the Eagles at 6 and 0. We have a buy week so he’ll have a chance to sober up and thrash you canucks. 

He's watching Eagles highlights over & over in a stained bathrobe w a tallboy in his hand a cigarette dangling from his mouth.  I thought we were safe for a while, but turns out Steve has super powers also, dang it. 

So to TheCapt.  Excellent points once again on Kherson & the value of time.  I have been saying for a long time that UKR needs to end the kessel sooner rather than later.  And while Kherson may show that RU can do something competent, it also shows how stupid they can be to put so much of their best men and material in what is 99% likely to fall, losing most of the troops & material there.  Is morale good there, as was mentioned above somewhere? -- seems unlikely to me.  It's good enough to hold for now, but as food & ammo get thinner & thinner?  They could pull those troops out and within a week they'd be able to capture the Bakhmut garbage dump, over which they seem to be obsessed.  So to me it still seems  incredibly stupid.  Classic dictator wishful thinking that is backed up every day he holds on ("see comrade, it's working!"), masking the inevitable reality of the situation.

By the way, is there a washing machine factory in Bakhmut??  That's the only way this 'offensive' makes sense.

[LongLeftFlank]

7 hours ago, The_Capt said:

Look the reality is that cheap unmanned systems are flipping the cost equations of waging war everywhere.  We have been here before when it was costing us millions to kill two guys in a pickup.  Unmanned systems are a cost disruptor no matter what side we are talking about.  We will be spending years figuring that one out.

Speaking of 'flipping'

Can we empty out the vintage warbird museums in a good cause?

[chrisl]

14 minutes ago, dan/california said:

A better way to kill drones is is the new golden goose for defense contractors. The people that figure it out are buying new boats. There are a lot of systems in development using twenty to one hundred kilowatt lasers on various trucks or Strykers. Is anyone trying to hang one on a C-130 or similar with an integrated radar that could knock these things down over a broader area? 

There have also been one or two videos of drones hunting drones in various improvised ways, I assume that is in frantic development as well.

That started decades ago: ABL

That got cancelled, but as higher power lasers have gotten smaller and less demanding of input power I suspect it's come back in various forms.

 

[Butschi]

45 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Yeah, this is one of these places where if I somehow had the time to do a CM map it would really aid understanding of what both sides are grappling with.  It's nothing dramatic but just well chosen ground, defended by highly professional soldiers.

I am a little reluctant to promote my tool here as expectations are already way too high for my taste and somehow my free time seems to never match up with what still needs to be coded but given that we are talking about a present day conflict this might be a really good use case for CMAutoEditor. At least in places where OpenStreetMap is not too sparsely populated.

 

Edited October 21, 2022 by Butschi

[Battlefront.com]

3 minutes ago, Offshoot said:

Zelensky denies that Ukraine was responsible for the explosion on Kerch Bridge.

https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/3597628-explosion-on-kerch-bridge-zelensky-says-ukraine-definitely-did-not-order-that.html

Now that is interesting.  I wonder why this statement wasn't made loud and clear at the outset when there would have been more attention to it?  At the time I speculated that it could have been some sort of domestic problem for a variety of reasons, but Ukraine said it did the attack.  Which made no sense to me because even if Ukraine did do it there were good reasons to lie and say it was a domestic sourced attack.

I don't know what to make of this one statement, however I am still not comfortable with the theory that Ukraine carried out a truck bomb attack on the bridge. 

When the attack happened there were two questions raised:

1.  What caused the explosion?
2.  Who caused the explosion?

I was comfortable with missile and Ukraine, not truck bomb and Ukraine.  Now that the evidence seems to have concluded that it was a truck bomb, I'm thinking the answer to the second question is "not Ukraine".

However, as discussed earlier I don't think this was a false flag attack.  That's the obvious non-Ukraine option, but I don't think any Putin approved attack would have done something that harmful to the war effort and Putin's image as keeping Russians safe.  So not a false flag attack in the classic Russian state sense of the term.

This leaves four different options:

1.  Security apparatus (FSB)
2.  Military
3.  Political rival
4.  Internal social/ethnic/religious faction

Any one of them could have carried out the attack easier Ukraine.  No matter who did the attack it is obvious that the Russian government would blame Ukraine and only Ukraine.  The only other possible option would have been to say it was a terrible accident, which obviously Russia did not do.

The one with the least to lose would be some sort of internal terrorist act.  Yet no claims of responsibility happened, which is out of character for such a group.  I'd put that one at the lowest level of possibilities.

FSB could be looking to harm the war effort in order to get the war ended sooner, but it weakens their status within the regime because they are the guys who are supposed to prevent such an attack.

Political rival is possible, but I don't know that there is anybody strong enough to carry out this sort of attack without the backing of either FSB or the military.  Which, in my view, lands the ball in either the military or the FSB's court.

The military might want the war to wind down before there's nothing left of them and make the FSB look bad in the process.  Of the four alternatives to Ukraine, this is the one that seems most likely to me.

Steve

[LongLeftFlank]

3 minutes ago, Butschi said:

I am a little reluctant to promote my tool here ... but given that we are talking about a present day conflict this might be a really good use case for CMAutoEditor.

Intriguing! Do you discuss this elsewhere on the boards?

[danfrodo]

8 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Speaking of 'flipping'

Can we empty out the vintage warbird museums in a good cause?

Wouldn't that be great?  UKR recruits all those pilots that show up at airshows w vintage planes every year and uses them to down drones.  That would be amazingly cool!  Heck, Tom Cruise is a pilot and I think he owns a P51?  

[Butschi]

4 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Intriguing! Do you discuss this elsewhere on the boards?

That very thread I linked to.

[Battlefront.com]

8 minutes ago, chrisl said:

That started decades ago: ABL

That got cancelled, but as higher power lasers have gotten smaller and less demanding of input power I suspect it's come back in various forms.

 

50kw laser armed Stykers are a reality already.  Production samples have been delivered for evaluation ahead of full production:

https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/08/15/us-army-stryker-lasers/

And the first I've heard of a smaller one for lighter vehicles:

Quote

Apart from integrating lasers into Stryker armored vehicles, the RCCTO revealed that it has recently launched a new project to mount a 20-kilowatt laser on an infantry squad vehicle.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

About Russian morale... I've had some thinking on this and am curious to know what people think.

I think Russians have a peculiar type of morale.  Many of Russia's forces are unhappy enough that they refuse to attack, they even sometimes kill their own, and generally they are not reliable.  The list of reasons is long, but it includes things like KNOWING they aren't adequately equipped, no faith in any level of leadership, knowing their personal chance of survival is not great, they aren't fed regularly, etc.  However, when push comes to shove quite a lot of them will fight doggedly on the defensive instead of running away (others do, of course, run away).

In Combat Mission it would be akin to being unable to move a unit into combat, but if left alone having it continue to fight even after getting beat up.  This can happen in CM when units have low morale, but it is not likely to.  At least not to the extent I think we're seeing this in the war.

This begs the question... should CM have some sort of way to distinguish a unit that is fragile when attacking but not when defending?

Steve

[Taranis]

"Russian soldiers at the Khakovka roadblock on May 20. AP"


"A soldier of the Ukrainian national guard, in the occupied territories in the north of the Kharkiv region, on October 21, 2022. SERGEY BOBOK / AFP"