How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Beleg85]

1 minute ago, Kraft said:

Poland and baltics, anyone else who may be a possibility?

I would read it as attempt puting diplomatic pressure on hesitant members for now, not statement of any intent to actually keep troops. Article and Rasmussen remakrs may be part of manouvering before the summit.

[DesertFox]

13 minutes ago, dan/california said:

They bleeping need one, I ranted about this months ago at length.

https://www.facebook.com/RaytheonIntel/videos/890101412410337/

I think every single prototype laser armed Stryker ought to be in Ukraine parked next to things like Iris-T radars

Skynex might do the trick. 

https://mezha.media/en/2023/04/27/ukraine-has-already-received-rheinmetall-skynex-short-range-air-defense-systems/

https://root-nation.com/de/ua/articles-ua/weapons-ua/ua-skynex-rheinmetall/

[cesmonkey]

Further update from Rybar. Says the Ukrainians were turned back.
https://t.me/rybar/48195
 

Quote

During today's attack, Ukrainian units lost more than 15 armored vehicles , including more than seven tanks, and more than 100 people were killed and wounded. At the same time, as the South Wind correctly noted , the Armed Forces of Ukraine still did not use the brigades of the 9th and 10th army corps that make up the strategic reserve. Now the concentration of the enemy is noted near Kamensky and in the area of Stepovoe, and forces are being transferred from the Kherson region to Zaporozhye. So in the next 24 hours, we should expect another attempt to storm the positions of the RF Armed Forces.

 

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, DesertFox said:

Tokmak axis. Best summary I have found so far.

 

 

Some good stuff here.

Based on my prior (albeit quick) strategic study, I would have thought that the Velyka Novoselivka bulge to be both a tougher nut to crack and harder to establish a sustained deep penetration.

Whatever the situation is, I think it's still unclear what Ukraine's main effort looks like.  With the typical few days of information delay, I don't know if we'll have any more clarification until this weekend.

Steve

[DesertFox]

43 minutes ago, Kraft said:

Poland and baltics, anyone else who may be a possibility?

Yep. But IMHO it isn't going to happen before the airspace hasn't been cleansed from vermin.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/07/nato-members-may-send-troops-to-ukraine-warns-former-alliance-chief

 

Edited June 7, 2023 by DesertFox

[Centurian52]

18 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

I hadn't thought that a specific apartment in that building might have been deliberately targeted.

That is interesting. That might explain the small or absent explosives in the drones. The kinetic energy of a drone smashing into a VIP's apartment might be enough to kill the occupant while minimizing the risk of unintended victims in neighboring apartments getting killed.

[dan/california]

18 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:

That is interesting. That might explain the small or absent explosives in the drones. The kinetic energy of a drone smashing into a VIP's apartment might be enough to kill the occupant while minimizing the risk of unintended victims in neighboring apartments getting killed.

They weren't trying to kill anybody, it was pure messaging.

 

[Centurian52]

1 minute ago, dan/california said:

They weren't trying to kill anybody, it was pure messaging.

 

You are probably right. But someone had posted RUMINT that the targets were the residences of Russian intelligence officers. It seemed like an interesting suggestion to me, and is one scenario which would make sense of the apparent lack of explosives on the drones. Perhaps being unarmed would make it possible for the drones to precision strike the apartment of a single intelligence officer, without risking serious collateral damage to the neighboring apartments in the same building.

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, cesmonkey said:

Further update from Rybar. Says the Ukrainians were turned back.
https://t.me/rybar/48195
 

 

Rybar is, of course, one of the more reliable sources of information.  Couple unreliability of the source with standard FoW information gathering problems, I'd take his Ukraine loss estimates and halve them.  However, I'd presume the accounts of where the attacks happened and what the results were as being more accurate than not.

So what we're seeing is a bunch of very small probes.  Probably not more than company sized each, but I suspect more like reinforced platoons at this stage.

However, for the sake of argument we take the Rybar casualty details at face value and presume each probe consisted of 2x Mech Plt with 1x Tank Platoon.  Four attacks total would be 24x APC/IFV and 12x Tank with roughly 280 personnel total.  That means roughly 30% casualties in both vehicles and men.  Much higher if the probes were smaller.

Plausible?  Sadly, yes.  Possible?  Also, yes.  Likely?  I'm going to say no.

Also, Rybar did not provide even a characterization of losses, therefore we have no way to put these supposedly losses into context.  Did Russia lose one guy named Yuri, or did they lose a regiment?  No way to know, but the latter is far more likely than the former.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

15 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:

You are probably right. But someone had posted RUMINT that the targets were the residences of Russian intelligence officers. It seemed like an interesting suggestion to me, and is one scenario which would make sense of the apparent lack of explosives on the drones. Perhaps being unarmed would make it possible for the drones to precision strike the apartment of a single intelligence officer, without risking serious collateral damage to the neighboring apartments in the same building.

RUMINT or not, the targeting was definitely Russians of high privilege.  Going after high ranking people directly responsible for the war seems to make the most amount of sense, especially since the other groups (political and economic) appear to already be in fear for their lives without any help from Ukraine.

Steve

[Kraft]

14 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

However, for the sake of argument we take the Rybar casualty details at face value and presume each probe consisted of 2x Mech Plt with 1x Tank Platoon.  Four attacks total would be 24x APC/IFV and 12x Tank with roughly 280 personnel total.  That means roughly 30% casualties in both vehicles and men.  Much higher if the probes were smaller.

Plausible?  Sadly, yes.  Possible?  Also, yes.  Likely?  I'm going to say no.

Also, Rybar did not provide even a characterization of losses, therefore we have no way to put these supposedly losses into context.  Did Russia lose one guy named Yuri, or did they lose a regiment?  No way to know, but the latter is far more likely than the former.

Steve

Best case, 7/8 not yet out:

lacking AMX, though, there has only been a still from a drone as far as Im away, no troops nearby/actual wrecks

Edited June 7, 2023 by Kraft

[Centurian52]

7 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

No thanks.  I've watched enough Scott Ritter to satisfy my curiosity of how closely linked mental illness and the pro-Russian point of view are.

You just saved 32 minutes of my life. I don't know who Scott Ritter is, so I had opened the video in another tab to get to later (that tab has since been closed). I will gladly trust your word that he isn't worth my time.

[Ultradave]

16 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:

You just saved 32 minutes of my life. I don't know who Scott Ritter is, so I had opened the video in another tab to get to later (that tab has since been closed). I will gladly trust your word that he isn't worth my time.

He really went off the rails after doing some pretty good work in Iraq on WMD searches. His book about the struggles of weapons inspections in Saddam's Iraq to try to prove or disprove WMDs is good reading, and was written before he went bat**** whacko.

Dave

[Beleg85]

"We have numbers"- motto of Russian armies for last several centuries...

[FancyCat]

Excerpts, truly, Russia should burn for its crimes.

Also, if Russia intended on staying in the region and holding a defense line, they wouldn't be only allowing Russian passport holders to flee, and would actually be undertaking evacuation efforts and efforts to aid the populace. 

Quote

The victims' attempts to escape by boat or otherwise were thwarted by Russian forces, who wouldn't let anyone leave if they didn't have a Russian passport. Numerous people even reported being fired upon when they tried to escape the flooded areas.

Politico reported that Russian forces blocked people who tried to flee immediately after the dam's destruction, forcing them to wait at home for an official list of evacuees that would be bussed out of the area.

Worse, the Russians allegedly destroyed people's means of escape. Serhiy's parents told him the Russians went through the town and rounded up or destroyed all the boats they could find in the weeks before triggering the explosion that caused Ukraine's most lurid catastrophe in decades.

"They stole the boats before all this... all the landings, they carried out all the boats," said Serhiy, paraphrasing what his parents told him. "It's like they were preparing for this to specially create a situation so that no one could escape."

"We thought they were looting. Now I understand that there was a specific command to remove all means of flotation so that people couldn't save themselves."

Oleh said that his aunt told him a similar story.

"They (the boats) were taken away," he said, quoting her. "People whose houses were locked kept their boats. The ones on the pier were smashed, shot up, or taken away."

The occupation authorities themselves have vanished from Oleshky, Serhiy said. But civilians trying to flee were blocked from doing so.

"Yesterday, people tried to escape, so (the Russians) fired assault rifles in the air, and didn't allow anyone to leave," Oleh said.

Only people with Russian passports were being allowed to leave, multiple people confirmed.

Even Russian volunteers, who arrived to help people from Crimea, were halted at the Russian checkpoints, according to Ukrainian volunteer Andriy Kniga, whose family members are in the disaster area.

 

 

[Battlefront.com]

15 minutes ago, Centurian52 said:

You just saved 32 minutes of my life. I don't know who Scott Ritter is, so I had opened the video in another tab to get to later (that tab has since been closed). I will gladly trust your word that he isn't worth my time.

It is worth Googling him or checking out previous comments about him in this thread.  It's important to understand how Russian disinformation works in the Western media, in particular US media.

Ritter "went off the rails" some time ago, long before this 2022.  He has been one of the more high profile Kremlin shills since the war started.  He mostly was haunting the less mainstream extreme right wing venues as he has previously been disgraced for trying to have sex with a 16 year old (who turned out to be a cop).  Something that Fox News apparently missed at least once after he was released, but since 2015 had nothing to do with him as far as I can tell.

For fun I just Googled him to see what's up lately with this very sick man.  Well, guess who just did an almost month long book tour in Russia?  Yup, Scott Ritter:

Quote

Scott Ritter just spent 26 days touring Russia, where — predictably enough — he was asked what he thought of its president. 

“Vladimir Putin will go down in history as one of the greatest leaders of all time,” Ritter said, waiting patiently for a translator to convey his words. “It’s only because of Vladimir Putin that Russia exists today. But Russia doesn’t just exist — Russia thrives.”

Nobody who has been paying attention to Ritter since the invasion of Ukraine would be surprised by the answer. The former United Nations weapons inspector has emerged as a strident Putin defender who has compared Ukraine to a rabid dog that needs to be put down, and claims Russia’s invasion was an act of preemptive self-defense. 

https://www.timesunion.com/churchill/article/scott-ritter-finds-new-audience-putin-s-russia-18130243.php

The article is well written and is definitely worth reading.  WAY more worth spending time on than the trash he posts on YouTube. 

The more problematic Kremlin shill has been COL (R) Macgregor.  Unlike Ritter, Fox News and other mainstream right wing news sources, gave him center stage during the initial phase of the war before they figured out he was not in touch with reality.  The News side seems to have figured it out really quickly, including hostile confrontation with one anchor, but it took Tucker Carlson a few more months before he ceased being consulted for his opinion.

Here's one of many articles about Macgregor.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/douglas-macgregor-fox-news-tucker-carlson-russia-ukraine-1318143/

The two things these guys have in common is that they are mentally ill and are revered by people with extreme right wing viewpoints.  They are a danger to the democratic way of life as they are actively trying to have it crushed by the authoritarian alternative.

Steve

[kevinkin]

7 hours ago, Ales Dvorak said:

Can I ask you in what kind of "light" do you see Operation Chastise?

Good tactical point. But in the end the Western Europe re-build and thrived. 

Edited June 7, 2023 by kevinkin

[kevinkin]

Recon pull underway? Let's see. 

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/06/06/at-the-bleeding-edge-of-ukraines-counteroffensive-the-ukrainian-marine-corps-has-worked-out-new-infantry-tactics/?sh=72fccf35316e

[Battlefront.com]

23 minutes ago, Ultradave said:

He really went off the rails after doing some pretty good work in Iraq on WMD searches. His book about the struggles of weapons inspections in Saddam's Iraq to try to prove or disprove WMDs is good reading, and was written before he went bat**** whacko.

Dave

I saw one detailed analysis that he was actually not all that correct about the WMD.  His paranoia made him guess at all kinds of things and ONE of them turned out to be correct.  So he dropped all the things he was wrong about, focused on the one thing he was correctly onto, and rode that as long as he could with distortions in his favor. 

I've developed a theory about a certain type of personality that is often involved in intelligence work.  A small percentage have the intelligence and skills to keep their mental illness in check long enough to make a name for themselves, but by the time that happens they are at stage of illness that they increasingly find it difficult to keep under control.  So they tend to flame out of their profession and often reappear in conspiracy theory circles with the usual side issues of antisemitisim, white nationalism, and belief that autocracy is an ideal to aspire to.

Steve

[Bearstronaut]

30 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

 

I've developed a theory about a certain type of personality that is often involved in intelligence work.  A small percentage have the intelligence and skills to keep their mental illness in check long enough to make a name for themselves, but by the time that happens they are at stage of illness that they increasingly find it difficult to keep under control.  So they tend to flame out of their profession and often reappear in conspiracy theory circles with the usual side issues of antisemitisim, white nationalism, and belief that autocracy is an ideal to aspire to.

Steve

Mike Flynn

[sburke]

43 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

I've developed a theory about a certain type of personality that is often involved in intelligence work.  A small percentage have the intelligence and skills to keep their mental illness in check long enough to make a name for themselves

Steve

So the rest are unable to keep their mental illness in check?  

[FancyCat]

 

 

 

[Probus]

2500! Almost!

Edited June 8, 2023 by Probus

[MSBoxer]

2 minutes ago, Probus said:

2500! Almost!

Getting a little eager?

 

[DesertFox]

 

45 minutes ago, FancyCat said:

 

 

 

Yep. He will have a rude awaking. Just want to repost one participant "Wild Bill" in that thread who is on point. Nothing to add to that statement:

 

 

Edited June 8, 2023 by DesertFox