How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Seminole]

3 hours ago, billbindc said:

What is your best assessment of what happens when/if Ukrainian *air* defenses get degraded as reported in the next few months? Is the Russia AF able to do FA? Will it gain some advantages at high altitude lobbing, etc but not much else? 

Taking at face value the usage rates that were discussed, new systems (Patriot) were coming, and the western based systems they’ve already received will keep getting resupplied with ammo.  
 

I think the last year has shown the Russian Air Force is a truly meager thing. 
 

MANPADS are generally <10,000ft threats, and we dealt with that in Iraq and Afghanistan by flying above that where there were no threats.  It would be interesting to see NATO SEAD take on Russian AD.  My sense is it would look about like it did in Iraqi hands.  I wouldn’t have made that assumption before this war, but I can’t help thinking most of their SAMs share a lot of operational and maintenance history with the Moskva.  

[Haiduk]

19 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Hopefully that helps

Thanks ) One more reason to use "as if" because it write itself short )))

[Haiduk]

9 hours ago, Bulletpoint said:

At 00:10 he throws a grenade into a foxhole and the Russian reaches out to throw the grenade out again, but the clip then for some reason cuts and there's an explosion but it seems to be in a different place? Lots of trickery going on in some of these videos.

This was a "preview". Full episode there is further.

[Centurian52]

I'm catching up on this weekend's ISW reports. The following passage is from the April 29 report:

"The Ukrainian General Staff reported that the Russian forces have increasingly refused to fight in the Marinka direction due to: significant manpower losses, lack of timely ammunition supply, lack of personal protective equipment, and orders to conduct assault operations without heavy equipment or artillery support."

I'm getting some real 1915 vibes here

[Haiduk]

15 hours ago, Centurian52 said:

Do all Russian trenches really look this bad?

This is former Ukrianian trench. It just was long time under shellings, rains, it was changing hands many times, so this one and many other can't look properly. 

Wagners dig only foxholes and use captured UKR fortifications. They havn't any engineer vehicles and havn't time to dig trenches. One of reason of enemy slow but successful advance according to our soldiers words - thrences, being dug hastly, often with shovels or battalion-level engineer equipment. If the command cared to build new line of really fortified positions, like it were near Kurdiumivka - Russians would suffered much more losses assaulting it.  

 

[Haiduk]

8 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:

I'm catching up on this weekend's ISW reports. The following passage is from the April 29 report:

"The Ukrainian General Staff reported that the Russian forces have increasingly refused to fight in the Marinka direction due to: significant manpower losses, lack of timely ammunition supply, lack of personal protective equipment, and orders to conduct assault operations without heavy equipment or artillery support."

I'm getting some real 1915 vibes here

I never take in serious our GS reports. Main interest is their reports were most significant actions took place. They already two weeks say about "heavy clashes in Bakhmut" and "minor advance of Russians on some streets", but in real UKR troops now controls last small SW part of the city. Though, todays GS report about some successfull counter-attack actions inside city confirmed by "trench news". But it's only because Wagners almost stop active assaults and now probably their commander await for new batch of meat - to bring a sign victory to Prigozhyn on 9th of May, that will strenghen his position in Kremlin "games of towers" 

[DesertFox]

LOL!

 

 

[Haiduk]

One more T-90M knocked out or damaged at least. Somewhere in Luhansk oblast

 

[BlackMoria]

9 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

LOL!

 

 

As Darth Putin has many times said...  "I remain a master strategist".   LOL

[Vanir Ausf B]

I don't expect to see many if any US forces stationed in Finland on a permanent basis. They would have to be pulled from elsewhere in Europe. Maybe a Patriot battery.

[Haiduk]

Occupied Zaporizhzhia oblast. Typical behavior of "liberators". Old women was kicked in jump with two legs in her back

 

[Kinophile]

1 hour ago, Haiduk said:

Thanks ) One more reason to use "as if" because it write itself short )))

"It seems that.."  is possibly what you're intending. 

[sburke]

24 minutes ago, BlackMoria said:

As Darth Putin has many times said...  "I remain a master strategist".   LOL

he is the very model of a modern major general

[dan/california]

 

Quote

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ukraine-the-latest/id1612424182?i=1000611281904

essentially the entire episode is by the authors of an NGO report on the Russian's use of torture, disappearances, and murder in the territories they took over, and it is even less pleasant than it sounds. Can't think of any commentary that wouldn't be grounds for a vacation, so i just won't make any.

[Haiduk]

Yesterday hit on Pavlohrad chemical plant

2 killed, 40 wounded. Damaged about 100 buildings, some of them (private houses) destroyed completely.

 

Edited May 1, 2023 by Haiduk

[quakerparrot67]

3 minutes ago, Haiduk said:

Yesterday hit on Pavlohrad chemical plant

 

wow.

[Haiduk]

Today in Briansk oblast in result of railway diversion, a fuel train went off rails

[quakerparrot67]

1 minute ago, quakerparrot67 said:

wow.

good thing we're covering ukraine with radiation sensors, because that visual could be misinterpreted pretty easily, i think, lol.   big blast.  jesus.

 

[Haiduk]

Girkin speaks (and bites Prigozhyn).

 

[Harmon Rabb]

South Africa warns Putin of threat of arrest should he attend BRICS Summit in person (Yahoo News)

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, Huba said:

Perhaps he meant the whole Donbas - in any case, these numbers are staggering.

 

Either way, the bulk of the fighting was around Bakhmut so even if the figure includes everything in Luhansk and Donetsk, that is still probably 80,000 in Bakhmut alone.

We saw a figure of between 40k and 50k prisoners used by Wagner.  We can presume that due to how they were handled most of them became casualties.  That still means somewhere around 50k in volunteers and mobiks.

I think we're definitely looking at 5:1 casualty ratio in favor of Ukraine.  20k seems plausible for Ukraine's losses.

Steve

[Haiduk]

Dummy Kh-555 missile wreck were found near Bydgoszcz city in Polland. It was nuclear missile, having inert charge in warhead and served as false target.

 

 

[danfrodo]

20 minutes ago, Harmon Rabb said:

South Africa warns Putin of threat of arrest should he attend BRICS Summit in person (Yahoo News)

I know that it won't happen, but what if Putin went somewhere and was arrested?  My first thought is "OMG Ru possible nuke!  Immediate war!"  Then I thought.... but who w access to the levers of power (FSB, military, other) wants him back??  They'd be way too busy fighting each other for power. 

Hilarious thought I had of Putin calling everyone he knows and no one will post bail. 

[Jiggathebauce]

As something of a companion piece to the article I shared last week that constructively criticized Ukr diplomacy in the global south, here is another that offers a rebuttal to pro Russian, so called 'anti imperialist' narratives regarding the positions taken by global south countries. Content warning that Commons expresses an explicitly left Ukrainian politics politics.  https://commons.com.ua/en/rosijsko-ukrayinska-vijna-imperski-ambiciyi/

Quote

Time and time again, we have been told that ‘the Global South’ – ie, the developing world consisting largely of former colonies – does not support Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s barbaric colonial invasion, or is even supportive of Russia. According to this rendition of reality, support for Ukraine is entirely a project of the imperial West, and this very fact is all the more reason that former colonies of western imperialist states do not want to be on the side of their former colonial masters.

 

Quite apart from the problematic mathematics involved – 140 countries voted to condemn the Russian invasion, the vast majority of which are in the Global South, and only 5 voted against – there is a more significant problem here: the conflation of ruling classes, governments and often dictatorships with the people of these countries, as if people being gunned down by some regime of exploiters would automatically have the same opinions as their oppressors, because they’re all ‘Global Southerners’. While such a boringly pedestrian assumption is normal in mainstream mass media and bourgeois political discourse, it ought to be second nature to anyone proclaiming some kind of socialist or even vaguely left or progressive ideology that such discourse is inconceivable nonsense.

 

“Only white nations are supporting Ukraine, the black and brown peoples of the world refuse to support ‘NATO’s war’ against Russia” I have been informed by western leftists, assuming to be speaking on behalf of several billion people in several continents, when in fact only speaking on behalf of their torturers.

 

This essay will first look at the facts of who voted what and why, and will note the largely sub-imperial nature of major states which either abstained on voting to condemn Russia, or formally voted to condemn but were in other respects pro-Russian in practice; and then will compare this to the overwhelmingly anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian views of their populations, belying the claims that these abstentions were “reflective” of alleged “anti-colonial” views among the peoples of the South. This will be done via examining a variety of surveys of popular opinion. While it is difficult to vouch for the validity and reliability of these surveys without much deeper research, nevertheless their variety itself, together with the largely similar results, suggests somewhat tentative conclusions can be drawn.

 

[Seminole]

3 hours ago, The_Capt said:

I guess we will have to see if the Ukrainian air defenses really do start to fold- and if they do shame on us.  It would be like investing in a car with only two wheels.  I mean you buy the whole damn car or what is the point? 

Presumes the ‘investor’ wants ‘the whole damn car’. 
If your goal was wrecking the Russian military, who cares if the car only has two wheels?  It’s just bait.  You never planned to drive it anywhere anyway.    
Admittedly, a cynical view.