How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Huba]

Boom, JDAMs for Ukraine!

Article does not specify how exactly these are to be employed, but hanging them from MiG-29s, perhaps the Slovakian ones that were just retired and are reportedly awaiting the journey to the UA front would make the most sense. I guess either toss bombing from low altitude, or hopefully long range launches with JDAM-ER kits would be the preferable tactic. Looks like fixed RU defense positions will become less useful...

 

Edited December 15, 2022 by Huba

[chris talpas]

3 hours ago, Kinophile said:

But... what if we like the strap?

 

 

_giggity

Perhaps time to change your name to kinkyphile.  

[dan/california]

10 minutes ago, Huba said:

Boom, JDAMs for Ukraine!

Article does not specify how exactly these are to be employed, but hanging them from MiG-29s, perhaps the Slovakian ones that were just retired and are reportedly awaiting the journey to the UA front would make the most sense. I guess either toss bombing from low altitude, or hopefully long range launches with JDAM-ER kits would be the preferable tactic. Looks like fixed RU defense positions will become less useful...

 

Now that is actually useful!

 

[billbindc]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

I think we're veering way, way, off course.  You're talking about a scenario (Ukraine keeping nukes) that didn't happen and likely would never have been feasible.  So why build hypothetical on an unstable hypothetical premise?  It's like someone asking what Europe would be like in 2022 if Nazi Germany wasn't defeated in 1945.  It's an endless and rather pointless discussion because almost any opinion is valid, even when options are completely opposite of each other.

Steve

Happy to let it go.

[Huba]

6 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Now that is actually useful!

 

Not that "escalatory", as I imagine these will be mostly used for CAS, but indeed with a potential to make a difference when breaking these fortified defence positions. I mean, TOS-1 looks really scary, but a couple 2000lbs GBUs is scarier still.

With Patriot and now JDAM announced, and Biden's administration making it clear that they approve, and even encourage Western armor deliveries, I'm under the impression that after the election the gloves came off a little bit, don't you think?

Edited December 15, 2022 by Huba

[Beleg85]

52 minutes ago, paxromana said:

https://kyivindependent.com/news-feed/polish-parliament-recognizes-russia-as-sponsor-of-terrorism-says-kremlin-responsible-for-ex-presidents-death

Poles are ahead of the US/GER/FRA pack again ... declare Russia a State Sponsor of Terrorism.

Alos revise previous statements that the Russians WERE responsible for the plane crash that killed their President (the Wikipedia article previously cited as proof they didn't will probably need to be revised).

Not Poles nor their representatives, unfortunatelly- only PiS MP's voting into vacuum. It would be nice if KI would provide readers with this minor detail how it was voted. A tragic bill indeed- entire opposition simply left the chamber, outraged by breaking initiall compromise over not-including this absurd clause (initiall project would had 99% of votes in Sejm and would be firm, non-partisan response to Russia). Of course, Smoleńsk sectarians pushed the vote nonetheless, even against silent majority in PiS who know perfectly well all talks about "murder" is pure bull****.

Show you the way how Kaczyński handles state affairs, but here we are.

Edited December 15, 2022 by Beleg85

[Seminole]

8 hours ago, dan/california said:

Then let me repeat something I said months ago, and it is still true, if Ukraine can't push Russia all the way out. Whatever Ukraine doesn't have boots on when when the shooting stops, they need to just let the bleep go.

How far and hard can Ukraine be expected to push without western help?

Does that mean it is then up to 'the West' when the shooting stops, and thus where the new Iron Curtain falls?

[billbindc]

12 minutes ago, Huba said:

Not that "escalatory", as I imagine these will be mostly used for CAS, but indeed with a potential to make a difference when breaking these fortified defence positions. I mean, TOS-1 looks really scary, but a couple 2000lbs GBUs is scarier still.

With Patriot and now JDAM announced, and Biden's administration making it clear that they approve, and even encourage Western armor deliveries, I'm under the impression that after the election the gloves came off a little bit, don't you think?

Both a post-election and a pre-GOP House effect. They are freer to act now but will have a harder time come January.

[dan/california]

39 minutes ago, billbindc said:

Both a post-election and a pre-GOP House effect. They are freer to act now but will have a harder time come January.

My number one question is are their Patriot crews about to finish training? Or about to start training?

[Seminole]

6 hours ago, billbindc said:

To pretend that the collective West faced an easy decision in 2014 is as absurd as pretending that the collective West handled it perfectly.

To pretend that the West was acting 'collectively' in Ukraine in 2014 is pretty absurd too.

If you think that "F*** the EU" wasn't just an observation from Nuland, but part of the PNAC strategy in Ukraine, the actions then and since make more sense.

[Battlefront.com]

30 minutes ago, dan/california said:

My number one question is are their Patriot crews about to finish training? Or about to start training?

Patriot is going to be an interesting one to watch.  NYT had a piece on it today stating that there's not much in the way of spare inventory.  The impression I got is that all launch complexes are in use somewhere and extra missiles aren't sitting around unallocated.  Which makes sense as these things are massively expensive.  Yet another example of the West having all the cool toys, but no real plan in place for using them.

Then there is the training.  Pretty big effort needed for that.  They can't just be plopped down and turned on.  Unlike the S-300s that were given to Ukraine, all of this will be totally new to them.

Could be that by the time the first Patriot is up and running Russia will have been defeated or have run out of missiles.

Steve

[billbindc]

12 minutes ago, Seminole said:

To pretend that the West was acting 'collectively' in Ukraine in 2014 is pretty absurd too.

If you think that "F*** the EU" wasn't just an observation from Nuland, but part of the PNAC strategy in Ukraine, the actions then and since make more sense.

Are we pretending now that PNAC was within miles of the Obama administration's foreign policy apparatus in 2014?

Really?

(pro tip: that's a ridiculous assertion)

Also, the EU/US/Canada/etc actually began imposing sanctions in 2014 and went through several rounds of increasing sanction before the 2022 invasion in concert and consultation with each other.

I can get being unhappy with the level of response, the particulars, etc but we either talk about the actual facts of what happened or it becomes a useless exercise in spleen venting. 

[The_Capt]

12 hours ago, Haiduk said:

We thank you but we never will infratiatingly dance in front of West, like this did former president. And we consider West does in part of our military supply much less than could be. 

Maybe you can't hear other side of true, that not only evil Putin led to this war.  Western elites with own "real politic" and "don't bozzer the bear" toward Russia led to this war too. So, we have a right not to ASK support, but to DEMAND. From you, guarantors of our sovereignty, who gave us toilet paper of Budapesht Memorandum in exchange on our disarming. 

We really can't understand why US piss off in Iraq hundreds of Abrams, Strikers, Humvees, which fell in the ISIS hands, but Ukraine have to beg each dozen of M113 or M777. We can't understand words of western politics during "Phase 1" that "Western weapon too complicated for Ukrainians, we should give them old Soviet systems". As if we some tumba-yumba tribe, which never seen more complicated weapon than a bow. We can't understand speed  of decisions making, when even about Gepards were more month of discussions. And only now we at last (after 7-8 months of war) we have been receiveing first modern AD complexes. And thanks God and US, Patriots in the way. Patriots, wich we beg since first days. What your politics wait theese months? Have been shaking and scaring of "escalation"? 

So, if I hear tunes "how dare theese unpleasant Ukies to demand more weapon? We can just stop it if you don't like something!" my reaction will be the same. Beacause there is imagination West already more afraid of Russian defeat, than Russian "escalation" and because of this supports us only to stop Russian advance and replenish our losses, but not to maintain our fast and decisive victory.     

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

Is this what we are talking about?  Not a treaty and nothing in there about western intervention in case of violation.  Russia was a signatory too and clearly violated the agreement - for the West there is no agreement outside the UNSC.  But hey you made your point  and position very clear - this war is as much the West’s, US specifically, fault and we owe you whatever you want like some wartime concierge while you bash us on a regular basis for not moving fast enough - good luck with that.  

Edit: billindc beat me to it.  Thank god Ukrainian political leadership more sense than whatever this forum thread is becoming.

Edited December 15, 2022 by The_Capt

[The_Capt]

23 hours ago, holoween said:

Yea ill call bs on that.
At least on a Leo2 teaching a crew the essentials of using and maintaining the tank takes maybe a week.
And even if were talking full training were way below your mark. It takes 3 weeks to train a driver fully.
For gunner/loader it takes 6 weeks max. 
And for the tc getting proficient at their station shouldnt take more than a week with the overall training time just being determined by how much tactics they have to be tought.

Higher level maintenance obviously takes longer but that doesnt really matter much since you can simply do it like its currently done with western systems. ship them back and have proper repair shops outside ukraine.

And you are basing this one what?  I was an armoured engineer troop commander on the Leo 1 chassis for two years and these are conscript timelines.  The Leo 1 drivers course was nearly six months to get a qualified crewman, gunners even longer.  You send crews out with level of training and they will be a dead crew pretty quick because you haven’t even given them time together to learn to fight the vehicle.  

A week?  What gong show military did you serve in where that was the standard?  And how long in your professional opinion to get these incredibly poorly trained crews battle ready?  A weekend?  A qualified TC in a week?  To fight a troop of Leo 2s?   Hey let’s just do levels 3-7 in CM and roll out the Bn.  Even if these were trained tank crews, say on T-72s, the Leo 2 has an entirely different FCS and fighting them with Soviet tactics won’t work.

Utter amateur nonsense.

Edited December 15, 2022 by The_Capt

[The_Capt]

6 hours ago, holoween said:

Ive given you the time i was trained on the leo2 by the german army condensed to actual training on the tank. So no youre not going to stand up a brigade from scratch in a few weeks but thats a matter of the command structure not the equipment. A platoon you can make function by the time the training on the equipment is done. add a few more weeks per company and you have a fairly powerful unit you can slot into existing structures.

The German Army? You were told you were a trained tank crewman on the Leo 2 in a week, by the German Army?  And you were told a tank platoon is ready when the crew are basically capable of not running over each other?

Well if this is true then maybe Germany should be scared witless by Russia because their troop quality/training may be worse than the RA by now.

[FancyCat]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

Could be that by the time the first Patriot is up and running Russia will have been defeated or have run out of missiles.

Steve

Not if Russia gets Iran to sign on the dotted line. Anyone had on their bingo card Iranian ballistic missiles being launched from Russia into Ukraine?

I'm hoping I'm wrong and Russia is truly nearing defeat but I'm not encouraged by Putin doubling down like this.

[The_Capt]

11 hours ago, FancyCat said:

Recall in 2014 the failure of the West to stand up to Russia and support Ukraine, which extended to weapons and equipment support refusals beyond 2014 till very recently. In hindsight, had the West pushed back on Russia, this invasion, the deaths and suffering in this invasion, and the worldwide effects and instability caused by this war might have all been avoided.

So the 2014 - it is all the West’s fault argument. Well first of all Ukraine’s faltering democracy was not on us, high levels of corruption and one helluva crappy military did not really make Ukraine a sound investment to be brutally honest.  Second, the West did what it could - provide assistance to Ukraine on many levels and helped them rebuild their military to pretty much do what is is  doing now.

Beyond that, not sure what else we were supposed to do besides sanctions - which definitely could have been more robust but there you go.  Look basically Ukraine was not that important to the West in 2014, most couldn’t find it on the map. We were dealing with ISIL and the Arab Spring.  Russia kept enough ambiguity in its little dance to keep us divided on response - and in the end we were ticked off and made symbolic gestures and angry noises.

I am not sure what you would be looking for, airstrikes?  I mean Russia’s actions were illegal and a challenge to the global order but not enough to really get us going.  In fact if they had played it cool we likely would have simply forgotten about the whole Crimea thing and Donbas looked like a domestic situation.  And then Putin went all Saddam H in 2022.

[quakerparrot67]

10 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

And then what? He emerges, 73 years old, to a nuclear wasteland?

no, that's for everyone else.  he'll most likely be dead by then-  that's why it's only 2 years for him.

 

cheers,

rob

 

[MikeyD]

I recall coincident with the 2014 sanctions the price of oil on the world market abruptly dropped by more than half. It so neatly dove-tailed with sanctions on Russia that I wondered at the time of the price plunge had somehow been orchestrated by the US to put the economic screws to Russia. But more likely, it was just a concidence.

[billbindc]

11 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

So the 2014 - it is all the West’s fault argument. Well first of all Ukraine’s faltering democracy was not on us, high levels of corruption and one helluva crappy military did not really make Ukraine a sound investment to be brutally honest.  Second, the West did what it could - provide assistance to Ukraine on many levels and helped them rebuild their military to pretty much do what is is  doing now.

Beyond that, not sure what else we were supposed to do besides sanctions - which definitely could have been more robust but there you go.  Look basically Ukraine was not that important to the West in 2014, most couldn’t find it on the map. We were dealing with ISIL and the Arab Spring.  Russia kept enough ambiguity in its little dance to keep us divided on response - and in the end we were ticked off and made symbolic gestures and angry noises.

I am not sure what you would be looking for, airstrikes?  I mean Russia’s actions were illegal and a challenge to the global order but not enough to really get us going.  In fact if they had played it cool we likely would have simply forgotten about the whole Crimea thing and Donbas looked like a domestic situation.  And then Putin went all Saddam H in 2022.

And what we *did* significantly degraded Russian power before the decision to invade. Putin had been effectively conducting a grey zone war against Western interests. What he got for that was Maydan and a strategically devastating loss of influence in Ukraine. And if you don't think the US was seriously involved in that turning point, boy do I have a Georgian civil society instructor to sell you. 

[Battlefront.com]

Let's keep the tone respectful, eh?

The West owes it to the world to help clean up the mess it helped create through it's self serving support for the Putin regime.  The West has been loving all the illicit Russian money and influence peddling over the years, the cheap gas for industry and heating, and lucrative consumer markets.  Nations have grown fat on Russian money and have bent over backwards in the face of Russia's repeated acts of violence towards Western diplomats, assassinations on Western soil, ignoring international law, weaponizing energy, war crimes in Syria, kidnapping Western nationals, worsening Human Rights record at home, repeated threats to NATO airspace and shipping, undermining democratic institutions abroad, hacking, industrial espionage. and the list goes on and on and on.  Russia needed dealing with long before this war, but the money was just too good for it to rock the boat too much.  Thankfully, it seems Russia has finally crossed a line and the West is committed to taking Russia down.

Does the West owe something to Ukraine?  Morally, I think so.  More could have been done to head off this war before it started, but the West was too self absorbed and profit driven to do it.  However, ultimately Russia and Russia alone is responsible for this war.  It is not the West's fault.

Fortunately, I think the West is largely doing what it should be doing to help Ukraine.  It isn't everything that Ukraine asks for, but it for sure as Hell is way more than Russia can handle.  Ukraine will win this war and it will be a peaceful nation within the Western sphere.  It will not be easy and shortcuts are unlikely to wind up producing the best result.  This means Ukraine will continue to suffer until Russia collapses.  No amount of Leo2s or ATACMS will likely make it happen any quicker.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

6 minutes ago, billbindc said:

And what we *did* significantly degraded Russian power before the decision to invade. Putin had been effectively conducting a grey zone war against Western interests. What he got for that was Maydan and a strategically devastating loss of influence in Ukraine. And if you don't think the US was seriously involved in that turning point, boy do I have a Georgian civil society instructor to sell you. 

I know I've been one that's repeatedly stated that the West gets a bad rap for the 2014/2015 sanctions.  They have been called "toothless" and "weak", but the evidence is that they hurt Russia badly.  In fact, it could be that the sanctions were one of the reasons Putin decided he needed this war to keep his pathetic regime afloat.  We've seen that things in Kremlinland have been on a steady decline since 2014 in part thanks to sanctions.  The other part, of course, is Putin's incompetence and his regime's out of control corruption.

Could the West have done more?  Yes.  Should it have done more?  Yes.  As I said in my previous post, there were enough reasons for the West to deal with Russia's behavior completely separate from its imperialistic desires to crush Ukraine. 

Dealing with Russia is long overdue.

Steve

[Ithikial_AU]

10 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

The West owes it to the world to help clean up the mess it helped create through it's self serving support for the Putin regime.  The West has been loving all the illicit Russian money and influence peddling over the years, the cheap gas for industry and heating, and lucrative consumer markets.  Nations have grown fat on Russian money and have bent over backwards in the face of Russia's repeated acts of violence towards Western diplomats, assassinations on Western soil, ignoring international law, weaponizing energy, war crimes in Syria, kidnapping Western nationals, worsening Human Rights record at home, repeated threats to NATO airspace and shipping, undermining democratic institutions abroad, hacking, industrial espionage. and the list goes on and on and on.  Russia needed dealing with long before this war, but the money was just too good for it to rock the boat too much.  Thankfully, it seems Russia has finally crossed a line and the West is committed to taking Russia down.

Replace "Russia" with "China", replace "energy" with "manufacturing" and the paragraph sadly still makes a lot of sense.  and  .

[billbindc]

3 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

I know I've been one that's repeatedly stated that the West gets a bad rap for the 2014/2015 sanctions.  They have been called "toothless" and "weak", but the evidence is that they hurt Russia badly.  In fact, it could be that the sanctions were one of the reasons Putin decided he needed this war to keep his pathetic regime afloat.  We've seen that things in Kremlinland have been on a steady decline since 2014 in part thanks to sanctions.  The other part, of course, is Putin's incompetence and his regime's out of control corruption.

Could the West have done more?  Yes.  Should it have done more?  Yes.  As I said in my previous post, there were enough reasons for the West to deal with Russia's behavior completely separate from its imperialistic desires to crush Ukraine. 

Dealing with Russia is long overdue.

Steve

Agreed all around.

The general point I'm trying to get across is that looking back and saying "USA suxxxx!!!" or "the West betrayed Ukraine!!!!" or "Ukraine had it coming!!!" is absurd. Countries act within the envelope of what they can reasonably accomplish under given political, military and economic constraints. The US isn't magically able to go "poof, here's a military for you" or the EU couldn't wave a wand and easily get 28 countries to move in lockstep any more than Ukraine could have wished away its strategic position, limited resources or corruption issues. Instead, all of the above try pretty hard to do the best they can with what they've got and what they think they know. And conditions in any given day or year change and *matter*. 

Sorry to lecture but the above is pretty damn important folks if you prefer solid analysis to endorphin fueled venting.

[Battlefront.com]

19 minutes ago, Ithikial_AU said:

Replace "Russia" with "China", replace "energy" with "manufacturing" and the paragraph sadly still makes a lot of sense.  and  .

Don't I know it   The only thing that's saving the West is that China recognizes that it needs the West as much as the West needs China.  For now there's a sense that both China and the West appreciate the need to keep things (mostly) stable.  So in that sense, China isn't Russia.

Steve