How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[RockinHarry]

8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

What a mess.  Towards the end you can see they neatly placed a bunch of intact, but obviously non-functional, vehicles while generally leaving the place a complete chaotic mess.  Maybe they intended this to tempt Ukraine to target that area and not the base.

Steve

where russians were there´s alway heaps of sh*it and rubbish left behind. Same for when the scumbags left eastern germany til 1994. And we even got them payed on top of all that... ...but at least they´re gone for good.

[cyrano01]

12 hours ago, The_Capt said:

 To the point that it is driving their military targeting enterprise.  Russia should theoretically be able to cripple the Ukrainian rail infrastructure.  Railways do not move, their supporting infrastructure is impossible to hide - one can see it from Google Earth.  If Russia had done that, the ability of Ukraine to conduct two simultaneous operational offensives separated by over 400 kms would have been severely challenged. Ukraine having a rail system able to sustain an "85% success rate" (something I know the UK would find impossible to do right now in peacetime, having just suffered their rail system) should not be possible at this point in a war this large - especially when their opponent has the ability to hit the full range of their nation. 
 

It’s reaching a long way back, but there haven’t been too many recent railway bombing campaigns as an adjunct to major ground warfare in developed countries. From a historical perspective the experience of WW2 suggests that while railways are a potentially fruitful target for this sort of strategic air attack they are not necessarily an easy one.

 

The British post-war survey backs up the Capt in identifying maintenance works, stations, yards and other fixed infrastructure as the most productive targets rather than lines or trains directly. I guess this would fit well with weapons that are P-ishGMs. What is noticeable is that to close these targets and keep them closed they had to be attacked and re-attacked pretty regularly. The allies used prodigious numbers of sorties against transport targets in mid 1944. During the run up to D-Day the French railway system alone (so excluding attacks on German railways) received 67,000 tons of bombs. They did pretty much shut down the railway traffic, although more effective against goods/freight movement than one-off military trains.

 

There now follows some really sketchy analysis…totally back of an envelope but I just wanted to get a feel for the orders of magnitude compared with historical cases. (Not something I would have dared to present to the boss back in the day and massively sensitive to wild-guess assumptions, feel free to alter these to taste)

 

Let’s assume a key target area per target of about a square mile, since I happen to have some figures on hand for target areas that size.

 

Let’s also assume that the French railways and Ukrainian railways have about the same depth of alternative routes/facilities that need to be hit– I’ve no basis for this one but it is a starting point.

 

1944 figures are, very roughly, 1% of bombs dropped land within a square mile of the aiming point, if we assume that pretty much all the Russian fairly precise missiles making it to the target would get within that area then that implies the Russians would need get about 670 tons of warheads through to the railway targets for similar effect. Russian missiles seem to average about 0.5 tons payload per missile so they would need to land about 1340 missiles on railway targets to achieve a comparable effect to the allies in France 78 years ago.

 

Now I have no real idea of the shoot-down rates of incoming missiles or their failure rates for other reasons. Clearly the UKR air defences have got better at bringing down incoming missiles in recent months, and, if they perceived a focus on railway targets, defences at these locations would be stepped up. If we were to assume a success rate per launch of 50% than you might need about 2680 missiles launched. If we assume a success rate of 33.3% then it’s 4020 etc. Adjust to taste based on your desired assumptions about defences, missile performance and the number of targets that need to be struck.

 

(I suspect that there are rather fewer UKR rail targets to be hit but I may be over-generous to the reliability of RUS missiles.)

 

This all sounds do-able but would be a decent proportion of the Russian missiles launched. I think Zelensky claimed they had fired about 3000 from the outbreak of war through to July, not sure of the current figure.

 

This would have needed a decision to prioritise railway targets to be made and followed up with plenty of ‘maintenance of the aim.’ Eschewing the desire for splashy, headline generating terror attacks on Ukrainian cities. I’m not convinced the Russians have shown this degree of focus or clarity especially often.

 

OK back to my tax return for me.

Edited November 17, 2022 by cyrano01

[Battlefront.com]

The US just goes to show that it doesn't have all the answers to fighting wars efficiently and effectively.  Apparently it's having a difficult time with the paperwork needed to get ammo production ramped up!  Another side benefit of supplying Ukraine is uncovering deficiencies in the administrative side of fighting a large conventional war:

https://www.businessinsider.com/administrative-problems-may-hinder-us-military-ammunition-production-2022-11

Steve

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Once the retreating muzhiks blow up the Zaprozh nuke plant, which they will, I hope Ukraine can spare 3 HRIMs to pop into the Kursk nuclear power station, on the coldest night of the year.....

More general question, are old fashioned SCUDs no longer available on world arms markets? This isn't the old Ukraine any more, but there have gotta still be some wheeler-dealers there who can procure a few dozen.

...Sure, the S400s might splash most of them, but like the Doolittle raid, it would put Russia's populace on notice that they are not immune. The warmongering babushkas will go, umm, ballistic (yeah, black humour), but what are they gonna do, bomb Ukrainian civilians in retaliation? 

And as a practical matter, anything that forces RU forces to spread themselves thinner (or prioritise SCUD hunting) is a net gain for Dmitro fighting at the front.... 

Keep those bastards stretched, frazzled, reacting.

[And no, they will not toss a nuke. It would actually harm Russia far worse if they did!]

I keep arguing for. a Ukrainian version of the Shaheed 136. Preferably directed at the Moscow electricity system in large numbers. But people keep telling me that would be uncivilized.

[sross112]

18 minutes ago, dan/california said:

I keep arguing for. a Ukrainian version of the Shaheed 136. Preferably directed at the Moscow electricity system in large numbers. But people keep telling me that would be uncivilized.

Well Dan, I'm an Old Testament guy, eye for an eye and all of that, so I'm with you.  Not when it comes to the terroristic civilian attacks (and I don't think you are advocating for that either), but for the infrastructure targets I say fair is fair. Love to see Ukraine to be able to hit them tit for tat when they are targeting power plants and such. Might be just what the doctor ordered to make it stop.

[Battlefront.com]

More tea leaves that Russia is starting to realize its maximalist demands for ending the war aren't going to happen, yet keeping the war going is becoming problematic:

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

8 hours ago, Offshoot said:

The Guardian did a background piece on Stremousov. Given how he was behaving, it is still quite possible it was an inside job - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/14/kirill-stremousov-rise-fall-and-death-of-russia-installed-kherson-official

"His murky death, whether indeed a genuine accident or the result of a Russian security services plan to get rid of an inconvenient loudmouth no longer useful to the authorities, will likely remain a mystery for the foreseeable future."

The plot might be thickening.  It's on Reddit so take it for what that means

As for Kiril's death possibly being a criminal enterprise feud, of course that is a possibility.  With Russians and their proxies, it's always a possibility.

EDIT, just saw this in yesterday's ISW report:

Quote

Russian officials continued their efforts to replace proxy officials in occupied territories with Russian officials on November 16. Multiple Russian media outlets reported that Russian officials detained Kherson Oblast occupation deputy head Ekaterina Gubareva, who previously served as a Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) foreign minister and later a DNR parliament member, for unspecified economic crimes.[70] As ISW has previously reported, Russia has been importing Russian civil servants and bureaucrats to fill roles in occupation administrations, partially due to a lack of reliable collaborators and partially to streamline the administrative frameworks of occupied areas with the Russian Federation. [71] Russian officials similarly replaced the proxy head of Mariupol with a Russian government official on November 5, and Gubareva’s alleged detention is likely an attempt to set conditions to fill her position with an imported Russian official.[72]

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

5 hours ago, The_Capt said:

I am still in the “they are weak Ukrainian mouse, bug Russian bear will terrorize them into submission” camp.

Yup, that seems to be what's going on (still).  However, it doesn't seem to be working very well   The clip on the previous page with the Kherson guy saying he's happy to be without power, heat, or cellphones because they are also free of Russians, and being free from Russians is way more important.

Way to win the hearts and minds, Vlad.

Steve

[Haiduk]

2 cruise missiles were shot down over Kyiv and 2 Shakheds over Kyiv water reservoir this morning.

Reportedly missiles hit industrial facility in Dnipro, causing strong fire. 3 civilians dead, some were wounded. Also a missile hit some object in Odesa oblast

 

[Pete Wenman]

Not sure what to make of this ?

 

P

[Butschi]

57 minutes ago, Pete Wenman said:

Not sure what to make of this ?

 

P

At least it's an interesting coincidence. The polish village is Przewodów, right? Indeed it is at the same longitude as Lviv and latitude as Kiew. Though both cities are rather large and the probility of a coordinate coinciding with a large city isn't that small.

[poesel]

4 minutes ago, Butschi said:

 The polish village is Przewodów, right? Indeed it is at the same longitude as Lviv and latitude as Kiew. Though both cities are rather large and the probility of a coordinate coinciding with a large city isn't that small.

Yes, but no. It is 'similar coordinates', not same. So probably just coincidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_missile_explosion_in_Poland

has the coordinates.

[Taranis]

↑ Sum up :  The T-80 would currently and generally not be favored for modernization because of the cost of its turbine and its consumption. It is also a tank that requires a qualified crew (which is hardly the case currently). The quantity of Russian T-80s in stock and produced has surely been exaggerated. Personally, I also think that it is a much more difficult tank to modernize at present for a struggling Russian industry unlike a T-62

↑Sum up : At present, the US makes 90% of the donations of shells to Ukraine. A depletion of NATO ammunition (with current consumption) could be foreseen between July 2023 and February 2024 depending on the minimum quantity in the depots accepted by NATO.
 

[Butschi]

36 minutes ago, poesel said:

Yes, but no. It is 'similar coordinates', not same. So probably just coincidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_missile_explosion_in_Poland

has the coordinates.

I didn't actually watch the video. I just checked that the longitude of Przewodów is somewhere within the boundary of Lviv and and the latitude in the range of Kiev. That part is true as far as I can see.

[Beleg85]

51 minutes ago, poesel said:

Yes, but no. It is 'similar coordinates', not same. So probably just coincidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_missile_explosion_in_Poland

has the coordinates.

Yup, coordinates from this theory were choosen to fit it. Lviv and Kyiv are large cities.

Unfortunatelly as predicted issue is NOT going away in public space, people are talking constantly on the incident. Roughly half of them here is pissed on Zhelensky, Rheznikov and other officials for terrible info policy to cover their ***, while other half suspect UA was right from the start and it is indeed NATO trying cover up for Russian rocket. Somehow.

Barely anybody normal blame Ukrainians for acting in self-defence, but mood is visibly swinging against their credibility. The longer issue is not cleared, the matters will go worse. And there is no time for full investigation. Various theories arise at arithmetic rate.

Edited November 17, 2022 by Beleg85

[Taranis]

For History (15-31/10/22)

 

[Taranis]

Quote

 

Igor Girkin, Sergei Dubinsky, and Leonid Kharchenko are found to be guilty of the downing of MH17. Oleg Pulatov is acquitted

 

 

Quote

 

MH17 court: "The court has ascertained that the Russian Federation coordinated military actions in the DPR, finanzed and provided weapons to the militants, but also undertook military actions on its own. Russia was in full control of the DPR"

 

 

[Huba]

Something to lighten the mood a bit:

 

[Billy Ringo]

1 hour ago, Beleg85 said:

Yup, coordinates from this theory were choosen to fit it. Lviv and Kyiv are large cities.

Unfortunatelly as predicted issue is NOT going away in public space, people are talking constantly on the incident. Roughly half of them here is pissed on Zhelensky, Rheznikov and other officials for terrible info policy to cover their ***, while other half suspect UA was right from the start and it is indeed NATO trying cover up for Russian rocket. Somehow.

Barely anybody normal blame Ukrainians for acting in self-defence, but mood is visibly swinging against their credibility. The longer issue is not cleared, the matters will go worse. And there is no time for full investigation. Various theories arise at arithmetic rate.

Mountain out of a molehill.  The Russians spew BS day after day regarding hundreds of situations and it's just ignored.  Zhelensky/Rhexnikov make one yet to be verified mistake and it's a major issue repeated over and over again.

In my opinion, it's the Russians intentionally driving the discussion to keep people "talking constantly on the incident"  to diminish their credibility.   Blowing up one single issue amongst hundreds of transparent and honest statements over the past 10 months to harm the Ukrainians. 

Don't fall for the BS.

 

 

 

[cyrano01]

12 hours ago, cyrano01 said:

It’s reaching a long way back, but there haven’t been too many recent railway bombing campaigns as an adjunct to major ground warfare in developed countries. From a historical perspective the experience of WW2 suggests that while railways are a potentially fruitful target for this sort of strategic air attack they are not necessarily an easy one.

 

The British post-war survey backs up the Capt in identifying maintenance works, stations, yards and other fixed infrastructure as the most productive targets rather than lines or trains directly. I guess this would fit well with weapons that are P-ishGMs. What is noticeable is that to close these targets and keep them closed they had to be attacked and re-attacked pretty regularly. The allies used prodigious numbers of sorties against transport targets in mid 1944. During the run up to D-Day the French railway system alone (so excluding attacks on German railways) received 67,000 tons of bombs. They did pretty much shut down the railway traffic, although more effective against goods/freight movement than one-off military trains.

 

There now follows some really sketchy analysis…totally back of an envelope but I just wanted to get a feel for the orders of magnitude compared with historical cases. (Not something I would have dared to present to the boss back in the day and massively sensitive to wild-guess assumptions, feel free to alter these to taste)

 

Let’s assume a key target area per target of about a square mile, since I happen to have some figures on hand for target areas that size.

 

Let’s also assume that the French railways and Ukrainian railways have about the same depth of alternative routes/facilities that need to be hit– I’ve no basis for this one but it is a starting point.

 

1944 figures are, very roughly, 1% of bombs dropped land within a square mile of the aiming point, if we assume that pretty much all the Russian fairly precise missiles making it to the target would get within that area then that implies the Russians would need get about 670 tons of warheads through to the railway targets for similar effect. Russian missiles seem to average about 0.5 tons payload per missile so they would need to land about 1340 missiles on railway targets to achieve a comparable effect to the allies in France 78 years ago.

 

Now I have no real idea of the shoot-down rates of incoming missiles or their failure rates for other reasons. Clearly the UKR air defences have got better at bringing down incoming missiles in recent months, and, if they perceived a focus on railway targets, defences at these locations would be stepped up. If we were to assume a success rate per launch of 50% than you might need about 2680 missiles launched. If we assume a success rate of 33.3% then it’s 4020 etc. Adjust to taste based on your desired assumptions about defences, missile performance and the number of targets that need to be struck.

 

(I suspect that there are rather fewer UKR rail targets to be hit but I may be over-generous to the reliability of RUS missiles.)

 

This all sounds do-able but would be a decent proportion of the Russian missiles launched. I think Zelensky claimed they had fired about 3000 from the outbreak of war through to July, not sure of the current figure.

 

This would have needed a decision to prioritise railway targets to be made and followed up with plenty of ‘maintenance of the aim.’ Eschewing the desire for splashy, headline generating terror attacks on Ukrainian cities. I’m not convinced the Russians have shown this degree of focus or clarity especially often.

 

OK back to my tax return for me.

So, the dangers of over-reliance on secondary sources. The allied bombing accuracy figure I used came from an article rather than a primary source and felt a bit low to me. After a bit of hunting around I managed to find where I had stored my copy of the original British bombing survey and looks like the article from which I got the allied bombing accuracy figure either mis-read or misunderstood the data. The graphs for Bomber Command attacks give a bomb density of between 6 and 8 per square mile at the aiming point per 100 bombs dropped. Note these are Bomber Command figures. The USAAF and the tactical air forces of both allies may, or may not, have been more accurate depending on the weather, degree of opposition etc.

 

So if we say 67,0000 tons with 7% within one square mile at the aiming point you need to land 4690 tons.

 

I’ve also found some numbers (thank you Google) which suggest that the French railway system of the inter-war era was about three times as large in terms of mileage as the current Ukrainian one. If we take this as a crude proxy for the number of targets needing to be hit then our necessary tonnage comes down to 1563. Maybe 3126 missile hits.

 

If we stick with about 50% of RUS missiles arriving at the target and going bang successfully that’s 6252 launches. Still do-able but pretty much eating up most of the RUS missile effort. Earlier in the war with UKR defences less effective the numbers may well look much better from a RUS perspective.

 

Of course all this changes if a greater percentage of missiles get through or if my assumptions about target size are too high (as I suspect they are). Still it was only supposed to be a rough thought experiment to gauge the order of magnitude of effort needed to attack a well developed railway system so even with gross errors it feels to me like:

 

(1) The Capt was right to say that the Russians could have severely degraded the UKR railway network.

 

(2) It would have needed them to identify the railway network as a priority target system early on.

 

(3) they would have had to apply decent ISR to identify the key targets within the system

 

(4) It would have required a high proportion of the missile attack capacity to be devoted to railways so they would have had to forsake other targets, reducing their attacks on the civilian population and infrastructure.

 

I’m not convinced that the Russians have shown themselves capable of 2-4 above on a large scale during this conflict.

 

Edited November 17, 2022 by cyrano01

[Harmon Rabb]

37 minutes ago, Billy Ringo said:

Mountain out of a molehill.  The Russians spew BS day after day regarding hundreds of situations and it's just ignored.  Zhelensky/Rhexnikov make one yet to be verified mistake and it's a major issue repeated over and over again.

In my opinion, it's the Russians intentionally driving the discussion to keep people "talking constantly on the incident"  to diminish their credibility.   Blowing up one single issue amongst hundreds of transparent and honest statements over the past 10 months to harm the Ukrainians. 

Don't fall for the BS.

 

 

 

I imagine that currently our "friends" at the Internet research agency are being instructed by their masters to make this incident one of their priority talking points, because they know it has the potential to create division between Ukraine and its supporters.

Anyone who falls for this nonsense should just be reminded that if it was not for Russia's illegal unjustified war of aggression, no missiles would be falling in Poland or Ukraine for that matter.

Edited November 17, 2022 by Harmon Rabb

[The_Capt]

14 minutes ago, Billy Ringo said:

In my opinion, it's the Russians intentionally driving the discussion to keep people "talking constantly on the incident"  to diminish their credibility.   Blowing up one single issue amongst hundreds of transparent and honest statements over the past 10 months to harm the Ukrainians. 

Don't fall for the BS.

I agree with this.  Look, we are talking about thousands of pounds of HE being flung around that theatre on nearly an hourly basis.  Although we talk about precision and its effects on the modern battlespace a lot here, the reality is that warfare is still a human activity and as such will be prone to human error in either the manufacture or employment of weapon systems.  

It is tragic that two innocent people in Poland got killed in this strike but people do not need to do a Zapruder Film level of analysis here - a weapon system went way off target (experts are leaning toward a UA GBAD system) and landed where it was not supposed to.  This validates The_Capt's Rule of War #18 - in war things get broke - if you don't want things to get war-broke, don't go to war.  How many incidents of US/western "whoopsies" with long range fires are out there from Afghan weddings to the freakin Chinese embassy on Belgrade?

These are not an international conspiracy or complex disinformation operation - a freakin missile went off course and landed on a farm.  Again, this really sucks for the victims and their families, but this is not a strategic turning point etc.  What this does do is highlight just how dangerous this stupid war is, and how easy it would be for mistakes to lead to uncontrolled escalation. 

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Taranis said:

MH17 court: "The court has ascertained that the Russian Federation coordinated military actions in the DPR, finanzed and provided weapons to the militants, but also undertook military actions on its own. Russia was in full control of the DPR"

 

This just in... obvious facts are proven to be true!  Next we'll have to get the courts to conclude that Humans breath air and Charlize Theron is worthy of every single word of praise heaped onto her.

What I'm waiting for is some informed, fact based explanation as to whether the shoot down was deliberate or an accident.  So far I've seen nothing to convince me either way, but I'm still of it being accidental.

The thing I hate most about guessing about Russian actions like MH-17 is that Occam's Razor thinking doesn't work.  The theory stipulates that the most obvious answer is likely the correct one.  But Russia is nearly equally nefarious and incompetent, so when faced with a situation that could be evil or stupid it's not so easy to figure out which one to go with.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

NYT has a long article on the Kerch bridge explosion:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/17/world/europe/crimea-bridge-collapse.html

Great graphics plus a good roundup of what is known and what isn't.  Nothing different than what we discussed here at the time (other than omitting mention of possible ballistic missile strike and instead mentioning only the boat theory):

Quote

But the experts differed on whether the sequence indicated a sophisticated plan.

It was possible that planners of the attack hoped the fuel tanks would explode and inflict major damage on the railway bridge, said Adam Evans, a structural engineer at Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates. But he said it was unlikely that the explosion was intentionally timed at a sweet spot to cause damage to the roadway.

“I would be hard-pressed to believe that,” Mr. Evans said. “I think it’s probably more like, ‘We’ll drive a bomb over this bridge and we’ll cause a lot of damage.’ ”

In fact, several engineers said, the damage from the explosion might have been greater if the bomb had gone off a minute or two later. The truck had already started up the incline to the large, raised section of the bridge held up by a set of soaring steel arches.

Steve

[Butschi]

40 minutes ago, Billy Ringo said:

Mountain out of a molehill.  The Russians spew BS day after day regarding hundreds of situations and it's just ignored.  Zhelensky/Rhexnikov make one yet to be verified mistake and it's a major issue repeated over and over again.

In my opinion, it's the Russians intentionally driving the discussion to keep people "talking constantly on the incident"  to diminish their credibility.   Blowing up one single issue amongst hundreds of transparent and honest statements over the past 10 months to harm the Ukrainians. 

Don't fall for the BS.

You are right, of course. No one who thinks rationally and doesn't have some sinister motives will blame Ukraine for a stray SAM or whatever.

But of course the world doesn't consist of only this kind of people. Frankly, I'm glad this didn't happen in Germany. This would be a feast for the cynics who just care about their own well-being, the usual AfD suspects, the conspiracy theorists, the opportunists, you name it (well there is a remarkable overlap between these groups).

The thing is IMO, the Ukrainian government has somewhat brought this onto themselves. As I said earlier they have taken the moral high ground and been telling a lot of other nations what to do. Justified in many cases, mind you. But if you play that game - and Zhelensky & Co played it very well, so far - you better make damn sure you hold that high ground. You can't really afford such a PR blunder as this one. Ukraine is held to higher standards than Russia which is why such comparatively small things are so easy to exploit.

Ugh, a sad mess when indeed the world should instead look at all the other definitely Russia-induced tragedies happening all over Ukraine.