How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[billbindc]

Just now, dan/california said:

Been saying this for months. Xi can attack Taiwan, destroy the world economy, and almost certainly the CCCP. Or he can bite off the easternmost quarter of Russia, say "sorry Vladimir" and be the toast of Davos, this shouldn't be a hard choice.

Um...Russian nukes don't evaporate east of the Ural mountains.

[dan/california]

1 hour ago, Elmar Bijlsma said:

Same as forehead, but with more brains behind it. It is gamer lingo.

Of course, if we take this punning to it's logical conclusion,we may infer the existence of the threehead. And I think I have found proof of it. Behold:

What did those poor MTLBs ever do to deserve that treatment?

It's just such a bad idea on many levels, I just cannot fathom what they were thinking. Except that someone either made a quick buck with this **** or the Russians don't have the number of BMP 2s and 3s that they'd like to have.

So does anything else in the Russian land forces use the same ammo as this thing? Or do they not expect them to live long enough to need reloading.

[danfrodo]

1 hour ago, chrisl said:

And you question the precision vs mass thing?  Here's the radio exchange:

UA Drone Operator: "Dude, wiggle your rifle so we know which one is you"

UA surrounded guy: (wiggles rifle).

UA Drone Operator: You're totally surrounded.  Don't move.

UA Done operator: On the way.......splash.....

Russians: (screaming).

That is the most amazing thing I have seen in ages, thx very much for sharing this. 

[chrisl]

1 minute ago, danfrodo said:

That is the most amazing thing I have seen in ages, thx very much for sharing this. 

You need to get out more.

[danfrodo]

Some thoughts:

1.  we talk about 800km of front.  But it's really not that right now for RU.  They only have to cover the roads right now.  When the ground dries, then all the factors that will (hopefully, probably) doom RU will come into play.  Lack of ISR, arty, bad troops w bad gear in bad defenses.

2.  As was mentioned above, China would probably not invade.  It would try to get regions to declare independence and then help those regions via recognition, weapons, ISR, etc.

ChrisL:  While I do need to get out more, I was just struck by the communication and combined arms involved in this.  Single soldier in what should be a death trap, talks to his friends who use drone.  He wiggles gun and the friends shoot up the orcs.  I was really impressed.  I've seen tons of videos of drone-directed work, but this one was so very specific to just one surrounded guy.

[akd]

4 minutes ago, dan/california said:

So does anything else in the Russian land forces use the same ammo as this thing? Or do they not expect them to live long enough to need reloading.

I don’t think anything in the Russian Navy still uses this ammo.  Possibly China still produces ammo for their Type 61 clone, but doubtful as this is a completely obsolete weapon.

[chrisl]

1 minute ago, akd said:

I don’t think anything in the Russian Navy still uses this ammo.  Possibly China still produces ammo for their Type 61 clone, but doubtful as this is a completely obsolete weapon.

But they can still roll them down hills at attackers coming up.

[dan/california]

2 minutes ago, billbindc said:

Um...Russian nukes don't evaporate east of the Ural mountains.

I merely doubt that most of them work, The Chinese may have very intentionally sold them some little bit of hardware they KNOW doesn't work. Given the level of general dysfunction Russia has displayed in Ukkraine, I simply don't believe even a fraction of the budget for the strategic rocket forces was actually spent on rockets. Reasoning is as follows. If I spend the money on rockets, and we use the rockets, I'm dead, if the rockets don't work, well I'm still dead, but I had a lot more fun first. All evidence points to only one possible answer to this question. The recent failure of the Sarmat test while Biden was in Kyiv being exhibit A.

[Probus]

25 minutes ago, billbindc said:

Um...Russian nukes don't evaporate east of the Ural mountains.

Can't China support a coup in one of the Russian states and take over that way?

[MSBoxer]

3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

IT Mission: The 3G Roll Out.  Ya know when you think about it…

30 years in IT, 20 of it in web development, information architecture, design & security.  Honestly could not take it anymore because it seems that everyone now knows how to design websites because they use a lot of sites and know what they like.  Of course what they typically like is not the best fit for the content, mission or brand.

[sburke]

Court sentences Russian pilot to 12 years in prison for dropping bombs on Kharkiv TV tower (yahoo.com)

Quote

 

The SBU said the convict was the deputy commander of a military unit of the 6th Army of the Air and Air Defense Forces of Russia’s Western Military District.

He crossed the state border of Ukraine in a Russian Su-34 combat aircraft and bombed a radio and television station in Kharkiv on March 6, 2022.

The investigation found that the pilot used eight FAB-500 aircraft bombs with a total weight of 2.5 tons of TNT equivalent to conduct the air attack.

Read also: Russian pilot who changed lives of Chernihiv residents.

The pilot was shot down by the Ukrainian military immediately after he dropped the bombs. He was detained after ejecting and landing.

The court found him guilty under Part 2 of Article 28 and Part 1 of Article 438 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (violation of the laws and customs of war).

The Prosecutor General's Office added that the court also satisfied the civil claims of the victims — three organizations — worth a total of more than UAH 1.1 million ($29,741).

Prosecutors proved that the Russian pilot had received a combat order to destroy a civilian object and did not refuse to execute it, knowing that it was a criminal act.

 

now broadcast that on hacked Russian TV and call his family to let them know visiting hours etc

[Battlefront.com]

38 minutes ago, sburke said:

Court sentences Russian pilot to 12 years in prison for dropping bombs on Kharkiv TV tower (yahoo.com)

now broadcast that on hacked Russian TV and call his family to let them know visiting hours etc

I like this quite a bit.  Don't wait for The Hague, prosecute the perpetrators for what they can when they can.  Kinda like getting Al Capone on tax evasion.

Another example of identifying and going after potential traitors.  In this case a Russian Orthodox priest spying for the Russian military:

https://news.yahoo.com/sbu-detains-moscow-church-priest-162000063.html
 

Steve

[poesel]

In a corrupt system, you know what you can touch and what not. If you don't, you do not survive very long.

The nukes were/are THE safety net for the USSR and Russia. These are important for the boss, and you don't touch that.

To think that those nukes might not work and somebody wouldn't have leaked that information by now is silly on both accounts.

[sross112]

1 hour ago, Probus said:

Can't China support a coup in one of the Russian states and take over that way?

Or just hold a referendum? You know, fair and impartial like the ones in Ukraine. There is a significant Chinese population in their old territory that houses Vladivostok. Would also actually play very well to the Chinese population. My understanding, not an expert, is there is still a pretty sore spot among the Chinese about the unequal treaties forced on them by western powers. This could be Xi's chance to rectify one. 

It would be so fulfilling to see Russia's games turned against them. I get all giggly just thinking about it.  

[dan/california]

2 minutes ago, poesel said:

In a corrupt system, you know what you can touch and what not. If you don't, you do not survive very long.

The nukes were/are THE safety net for the USSR and Russia. These are important for the boss, and you don't touch that.

To think that those nukes might not work and somebody wouldn't have leaked that information by now is silly on both accounts.

We thought similar things about a number of Russian units that have been called on to do some actual fighting in Ukraine. By and large they are carbon residue on insta-rusted metal now. The First Guards Tank Army comes immediately to mind. 

[chrisl]

4 minutes ago, poesel said:

In a corrupt system, you know what you can touch and what not. If you don't, you do not survive very long.

The nukes were/are THE safety net for the USSR and Russia. These are important for the boss, and you don't touch that.

To think that those nukes might not work and somebody wouldn't have leaked that information by now is silly on both accounts.

Given that they couldn't even pull off a successful propaganda launch, I gotta disagree on that.

How would they even know the nukes won't work?  When was the last time they did a test?  All the people who developed them are dead or work in the west now.

Even if they're not terribly complicated to design, they take regular maintenance, and stuff like that turns out to have a shelf life for all kinds of reasons that aren't and sometimes couldn't have been anticipated when they were first built.

[chuckdyke]

6 hours ago, womble said:

Just in case anyone else needs reminding, this is a misapprehension of the facts. What were given and accepted were "assurances", which anyone in diplomatic circles including the Ukrainians knows mean very little. But that was the price of having others clear up the mess they couldn't maintain and contain themselves.

Yes, when it comes to reneging, humans are very good in that. The US just would lose credibility if they did in case of the Ukraine. Prisons are full with people who had all sorts of excuses when they reneged on assurances. But in diplomatic circles they have the excuse oh it is not for us we are diplomats. 

[Battlefront.com]

Business Insider article on the problems Russia faces with the decimation of its "elite" forces:

https://news.yahoo.com/putins-top-troops-being-decimated-201803358.html

This touches on something I don't think we've explicitly discussed here.  I'll use a quote from The_Capt's recent postings to frame it:

5 hours ago, The_Capt said:

The RA did not simply “over-extend” they were made to be “over-extended” by cutting up their entire military system front to back.  Even if they dig in - and based on the ground they have to cover, it will be shallow - they are not immune to whatever this thing is.  All those minefield are useless if the guns covering them are dead or cannot get ammo.  Nor can the RA plug holes if their C2 is slow (it is) their LOCs visible and hittable (they are) and they do not have robust logistics to sustain a counter move (they do not).

All of these problems are compounded by fundamental flaws in the entire Russian concept of force generation.

Prior to this war Russia knew it didn't have the resources to invest in a military sufficiently skilled and scaled for the tasks of challenging NATO, intimidating neighbors, and occasionally launching a decent sized military operation.  The Kremlin's solution was to disproportionally invest resources into a small number of units that were reasonably well equipped and trained to carry out basic military functions.  The rest of the military was designed to do little more than occupy space and look intimidating.

This concept allowed Russia to rapidly seize Crimea and inflict pain on the Ukrainian forces fighting for the Donbas in 2014/2015 with the "elites" while the rest sat around trying to look intimidating.  After the "elites" (sorry, I can't use this word in context without quotes!) did their thing the regular forces moved in to try and look intimidating in a new place.  The "elites" then went back to breaking bricks over their heads and dancing around in striped undershirts for TikTok viewers until the next time they were needed.

This strategy worked pretty well until last year when they ran into an opponent that was too good at fighting, too big to crush with the standing forces, and too well resourced to defeat in a war of attrition.  Ukraine fook'd up Russia strategy from top to bottom.  Now the Russians have to hold the terrain that they seized against a very active opponent motivated to take it back.  And what do they have to cover all this terrain?  Their "elite" units are only marginally better than the average prewar unit, the average prewar unit is now barely functional.  The exceptions, such as BARS and Wagner, are too small in number to cover 800km of frontage.  So far Russia has shown no ability to improve this reality, in fact it has shown the opposite.

Whatever offensive stuff Russia tried this winter failed and that should hammer that point home that offensive activity is out of the question for the near term.  If the MoD accepts this reality (and it might not), then it will need to switch into defensive mentality and try to retain a very long border against a very capable adversary.  If Russia is to have any hope of doing this the MoD will need to revisit its entire military doctrine, from top to bottom, so that it is tailored to the reality of its forces today instead of what they were a year ago.  What are the chances they are are able to do that?

Steve

[Kinophile]

55 minutes ago, dan/california said:

We thought similar things about a number of Russian units that have been called on to do some actual fighting in Ukraine. By and large they are carbon residue on insta-rusted metal now. The First Guards Tank Army comes immediately to mind. 

You missed the point.  He's talking about a criminal mindset within a mafia structure. Putin does not care about the average Russian Army soldier, so corruption runs rampant and the Mobil at the bottom gets shafted. 

He very much does care about the Nuclear Deterrent.  Mess with something important to the Capo di Capo and you buy yourself a parabolic sightseeing trip out the nearest window. 

It's wishfull thinking to put the Russian strategic nuclear deterrent in the same bracket as the Russian Army. Sure there will be maintenance and upkeep issues, but nukes and missiles are old hat to the Russian MIC. 

No matter how incompetent the RU A is, their guns still fire,  shells still explode and they're still a very dangerous foe. And this is an instrument that Putin doesn't give two damp farts about. 

Edited March 4, 2023 by Kinophile

[sburke]

22 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

You missed the point.  He's talking about a criminal mindset within a mafia structure. Putin does not care about the average Russian Army soldier, so corruption runs rampant and the Mobil at the bottom gets shafted. 

He very much does care about the Nuclear Deterrent.  Mess with something important to the Capo di Capo and you buy yourself a parabolic sightseeing trip out the nearest window. 

It's wishfull thinking to put the Russian strategic nuclear deterrent in the same bracket as the Russian Army. Sure there will be maintenance and upkeep issues, but nukes and missiles are old hat to the Russian MIC. 

No matter how incompetent the RU A is, their guns still fire,  shells still explode and they're still a very dangerous foe. And this is an instrument that Putin doesn't give two damp farts about. 

More to the point, they could have a 90% failure rate and still fk things up royally. 

[chrisl]

38 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

You missed the point.  He's talking about a criminal mindset within a mafia structure. Putin does not care about the average Russian Army soldier, so corruption runs rampant and the Mobil at the bottom gets shafted. 

He very much does care about the Nuclear Deterrent.  Mess with something important to the Capo di Capo and you buy yourself a parabolic sightseeing trip out the nearest window. 

It's wishfull thinking to put the Russian strategic nuclear deterrent in the same bracket as the Russian Army. Sure there will be maintenance and upkeep issues, but nukes and missiles are old hat to the Russian MIC. 

No matter how incompetent the RU A is, their guns still fire,  shells still explode and they're still a very dangerous foe. And this is an instrument that Putin doesn't give two damp farts about. 

The Russian MIC is *not* the former Soviet MIC.  We're seeing that in the conventional systems, it happened in aerospace systems, and it happened in the nuclear forces.  In the early 1990s, everybody in the west who hires people with advanced technical degrees went on binges hiring from the former USSR.  They hired the experienced people and the younger ones came to the west as students and stayed.  So Russia lost the experienced ones and the people they would have trained.  They still try to do some development, but they really don't have the level of workforce they need to do the things that the USSR could do. And the USSR was already very behind in many technical areas when it disintegrated.  Given that they just blew a high profile propaganda launch, and the high profile hypersonic stuff is vaporware, you have to stay pretty skeptical.  

And that's just the launchers.  The bombs are a whole different story, and they're most effective if you aren't throwing them at someone in anger.  The instant you blow one up for something other than a test you lose deterrence because you just invited a response.  Knowing that they're never going to be used, and that if they're used and work you're dead, and they're used and they don't work you might or might not be dead, and that in all probability nobody is ever going to know if they work or not, the smart corrupt person spends the maintenance money on hookers and blow.

edit: We saw this in Iraq with WMD.  Cheney was sure there were WMD because he had sold parts and manufacturing equipment to them decades earlier.  Saddam probably thought he had WMD because that's what the powerpoints said.  But the powerpoints were made by people who were pretty sure they'd be imprisoned or killed if they didn't say they had WMD, so the powerpoints said he had WMD.  Cheney's own intel people took the Iraqi powerpoints at face value and had similar, if somewhat less extreme, incentives of their own.  So they said Iraq had WMD, too.

Edited March 4, 2023 by chrisl

[billbindc]

3 hours ago, dan/california said:

I merely doubt that most of them work, The Chinese may have very intentionally sold them some little bit of hardware they KNOW doesn't work. Given the level of general dysfunction Russia has displayed in Ukkraine, I simply don't believe even a fraction of the budget for the strategic rocket forces was actually spent on rockets. Reasoning is as follows. If I spend the money on rockets, and we use the rockets, I'm dead, if the rockets don't work, well I'm still dead, but I had a lot more fun first. All evidence points to only one possible answer to this question. The recent failure of the Sarmat test while Biden was in Kyiv being exhibit A.

The Russian nuclear forces are not on the same maintenance and logistical regime that covers the rest of the Russian military. Everything I've seen suggests that they are well maintained and capable...if quite inaccurate by our standards.

[poesel]

2 minutes ago, chrisl said:

The Russian MIC is *not* the former Soviet MIC.  We're seeing that in the conventional systems, it happened in aerospace systems, and it happened in the nuclear forces. 

...

If you build something and test it and document it and write extensive maintenance manuals, then you don't need anyone clever anymore to maintain and use the thing.

Russians can read and are very good at following explicit orders. I'm pretty sure, the Soviets have written very, very extensive manuals when they built their nukes.

You can laugh all you want about Russian equipment. The engineers I've met were well-educated and resourceful, and quite clever in making things work with the (limited) stuff they had at hand.

[billbindc]

5 minutes ago, poesel said:

If you build something and test it and document it and write extensive maintenance manuals, then you don't need anyone clever anymore to maintain and use the thing.

Russians can read and are very good at following explicit orders. I'm pretty sure, the Soviets have written very, very extensive manuals when they built their nukes.

You can laugh all you want about Russian equipment. The engineers I've met were well-educated and resourceful, and quite clever in making things work with the (limited) stuff they had at hand.

That is supported by, inter alia, by people like Cheryl Rofer of Los Alamos fame. Nobody who really studies or has experience with Russian strategic forces (Rofer actually went on inspections) thinks they are not up to fighting a nuclear war. We shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that Russian fecklessness in conventional forces runs through their nuclear deterrence. There is no evidence that that is true.

[Kinophile]

21 minutes ago, chrisl said:

The Russian MIC is *not* the former Soviet MIC.  We're seeing that in the conventional systems, it happened in aerospace systems, and it happened in the nuclear forces.  In the early 1990s, everybody in the west who hires people with advanced technical degrees went on binges hiring from the former USSR.  They hired the experienced people and the younger ones came to the west as students and stayed.  So Russia lost the experienced ones and the people they would have trained.  They still try to do some development, but they really don't have the level of workforce they need to do the things that the USSR could do. And the USSR was already very behind in many technical areas when it disintegrated.  Given that they just blew a high profile propaganda launch, and the high profile hypersonic stuff is vaporware, you have to stay pretty skeptical.  

And that's just the launchers.  The bombs are a whole different story, and they're most effective if you aren't throwing them at someone in anger.  The instant you blow one up for something other than a test you lose deterrence because you just invited a response.  Knowing that they're never going to be used, and that if they're used and work you're dead, and they're used and they don't work you might or might not be dead, and that in all probability nobody is ever going to know if they work or not, the smart corrupt person spends the maintenance money on hookers and blow.

edit: We saw this in Iraq with WMD.  Cheney was sure there were WMD because he had sold parts and manufacturing equipment to them decades earlier.  Saddam probably thought he had WMD because that's what the powerpoints said.  But the powerpoints were made by people who were pretty sure they'd be imprisoned or killed if they didn't say they had WMD, so the powerpoints said he had WMD.  Cheney's own intel people took the Iraqi powerpoints at face value and had similar, if somewhat less extreme, incentives of their own.  So they said Iraq had WMD, too.

Yah but Cheney sold them tech is not the same as the dept of technical knowledge and sheer MIC size as the Sov/RUS MIC. Sure it's decrepit in many parts and essentially incompetent in actually fielding truly new ideas (the Armata is a perfectly sensible concept in isolation) but what it already knows how to build, it can still build. 

Nukes strapped to ICBMs are a very grandfathered-in technology that Russia needs absolutely no one else for to build them. 

Also, they have a whole insanity* of them so even if (and very possibly no "if")  they have widespead systemic issues,  they still have just so many that it would be daft to take a chance on them not working. 

I mean,  they fire one and Oh No it's a dud. So... Fire 5 more to make sure. Why not? 

 

*my personal answer to *"what is a  group of nuclear weapons called?" 

Edited March 4, 2023 by Kinophile