How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Huba]

Here's a little gem - a summary of conversation with Dutch guy who was stuck in Kherson city for last few months. I checked his twitter and it looks legit to me.. In short, there's supposed to be a hell of partisan activity there. Given that Kherson citizens were actively protesting the occupation since day 1, taking to the protest on main square for weeks until Russians started shooting at them, I find it quite believable. 

Also, reportedly Lavrov wasn't the most popular kid at the G20 meeting:

 

Edited July 8, 2022 by Huba

[FancyCat]

Twitter replies indicate this was stupid on the part of the Russian tank moving in the video. 

 

 

[chuckdyke]

1 hour ago, Huba said:

Also, reportedly Lavrov wasn't the most popular kid at the G20 meeting:

You know the difference between Lavrov and an IS2 tank? The armor of an IS2 tank is only 130mm thick. 

[Huba]

Just now, chuckdyke said:

You know the difference between Lavrov and an IS2 tank? The armor of an IS2 tank is only 130mm thick. 

I bet he doesn't care personally. The humiliation to the country he represent's is real though.

[Grigb]

Anonymous Ru nationalist linked to VKS discusses RU cope dispersion of warehouses and rear strikes from the point of view VKS.

Quote

Good text (https://t.me/vysokygovorit/8687 ). Correct. [Captain Obvious text about cope dispersion of warehouses and targeting UKR infrastructure]

But it won't be like that in this life.

I'm telling you why.
I won't say anything about splitting up warehouses, but it is clear that every small warehouse needs to be guarded and defended in the same way as a large one, and it is desirable that the warehouse be located in such buildings that would exclude the bang of the entire warehouse from being hit by mines, ATGMs or bimbs [Memetic alias for drone bomb] from a quadrocopter.

If you scatter planes on caponiers or just throughout the airfield, then you need to allocate a special and unique car for each plane called APA [truck-based generator], and for each APA you need to allocate a driver. And a tanker, oxygen, nitrogen, conder, oil can, etc., etc. would not hurt.
But, of course, you can urgently start building them all. And in a year or two...
and give birth to all the drivers for them somewhere.
They say that in Soviet times there was an organization that sawed [was constantly making] drivers for the army. DOSAAF, it seems, was called.

The same for canopies. It would be possible to build them not only in Khmeimim (because a canopy makes better not only protection and disguise, but also maintenance of equipment, its safety and serviceability). And to protect the same engineering staff.
[But] If we start building them right now, then I think we will build them in a year or two.
But this is not accurate. (c)[RU meme - means statement above is very rough estimation and likely wrong]
So it is unlikely that anyone will deal with them now.
Of course, it would be necessary to allocate reconnaissance and sabotage groups [to target UKR long range weapons systems], and it was necessary to do this from the first day of the war, but all saboteurs are in the infantry. And the infantry has more important goals. For example, the village of Verkhny Bzdysh [means unknown and unimportant village], which needs to be taken or held. Therefore, scouts and saboteurs are busy with the Bzdysh, they do not care about Buks and Tochkas in the enemy's rear.

Bridges.
Still even now we can only hit bridges with "long-range missiles".
There is military science. (!!!) [he is upset being captain obvious]
It is called "Calculation of the outfit of forces and means to defeat the object." Few people have heard about it, and even fewer commanders are guided by it, but it is there.
There, according to special formulas, you need to calculate how much you need to break down, for example, a bridge, depending on various conditions.
Here, depending on the epicness and monumentality of the bridge, 8-10 missiles are needed to ensure the destruction of the average lousy bridge. And all of them should get into the bridge. So it is necessary to throw 2-3 more missiles in case of "nipopal" [bad miss]. **** what kind of missiles. Even Iskanders, even Calibers, even Bastions.
Plus, it is necessary to throw 5-6 more missiles in case of failures of these very missiles and the impact of enemy air defense on these very missiles.
Total on the bridge turns out ...
If we had the necessary supply of cruise missiles for the fifth month of the war, I am sure that all bridges, substations, tracks, decision-making centers, tunnels and enemy warehouses would have been destroyed long ago.

But, yes. Good text. Correct.

 

[Grigb]

Anonymous Ru nationalist linked to VKS discusses Gefest aka SVP-24 (general VKS approach to air strikes)

Before war Gefest was called by RU propaganda a wonder weapon. Only dumb yanks need guided bombs and missiles. With Gefest glorious RU VKS can do everything yanks can do but better because Gefest works with cheap dumb bombs. However, in reality...

Quote

One of the useless things that proved to be excellent in the war with flea [barbarians] armed with sticks and spears, but turned out to be meaningless in the war with an enemy armed with a tolerable air defense system, was a system that made an attack drone out of any aircraft supporting this system.
He becomes a drone, of course, not at will. The crew's functions were reduced to pinching the BC [start button] at the right point, the coordinates of which he received in the air.
In theory it worked fire. And it sounded stylish, fashionable, youthful.

Network-centric wars.

However, apparently, in each country this word is understood differently.

Chieftain [commander] somewhere in the CP, in the capital, looking at a picture from some Searcher [drone], poked finger into a God-forsaken shed and after a couple of minutes a pithton [big] bomb flew into this shed.
The idea went down the p*ssy [went very badly] as the flight crews expected and unexpectedly for everyone else who has been working on it all these years.
There are several reasons.

I will omit the point that this system is basically stillborn, because it was built in the hope that the enemy is a complete idiot and will not be able to drown out satellites, and it is impossible to find such idiots today even in backward countries.

To deliver an effective air strike (even on a ****ing barn), you need to have complete information about all threats to the strike group. Information is needed for each (!!) carefully hidden SAM installation, their number, the affected area and, of course, their location at the time of operation. Their place is not two hours ago, but right at the moment of impact. The same information is needed about enemy fighters, albeit to a lesser extent.
We need information about the characteristics of the target, based on which the outfit of forces and means, the necessary ammunition and the necessary fuse installations are selected, and safe conditions for their use are calculated.

Based on all the information, the tactics of the strike group and the forces providing the work are determined. How to fly, when is it better to fly, from what course, from what height. Where to put the jammers, how to work fighter cover, how special air defense suppression groups will ensure the defeat of these SAMs with the right probability.
Where to put the PSS [Rescue] helicopters that will try to lift downed crews if some link of this system fails.

And suddenly it turned out that it was impossible to launch this system by simply pointing a finger at the shed, even if the coordinates of the finger would instantly appear in the cockpit of the crew, which was already in the air.
It turned out that preparation was needed.
Well, or put a d*ck on all these difficulties, network-centrically poke finger into the shed and lose one - two-ten planes or helicopters for the sake of a beautifully burning shed.

 

[hcrof]

20 minutes ago, Grigb said:

Anonymous Ru nationalist linked to VKS discusses RU cope dispersion of warehouses and rear strikes from the point of view VKS.

 

This is a really good point, and feeds back into the earlier discussions on mass. Russia is in a dilemma - mass the ammo/planes and watch them blow up or disperse them and watch their massed-army structure struggle to perform as intended. I thought himars was a bit of a gimmick before this war but I am happy to be wrong!

[Huba]

18 minutes ago, Grigb said:

I won't say anything about splitting up warehouses, but it is clear that every small warehouse needs to be guarded and defended in the same way as a large one, and it is desirable that the warehouse be located in such buildings that would exclude the bang of the entire warehouse from being hit by mines, ATGMs or bimbs [Memetic alias for drone bomb] from a quadrocopter.

 

Sorry, had to

19 minutes ago, Grigb said:

ridges.
Still even now we can only hit bridges with "long-range missiles".
There is military science. (!!!) [he is upset being captain obvious]
It is called "Calculation of the outfit of forces and means to defeat the object." Few people have heard about it, and even fewer commanders are guided by it, but it is there.
There, according to special formulas, you need to calculate how much you need to break down, for example, a bridge, depending on various conditions.
Here, depending on the epicness and monumentality of the bridge, 8-10 missiles are needed to ensure the destruction of the average lousy bridge. And all of them should get into the bridge. So it is necessary to throw 2-3 more missiles in case of "nipopal" [bad miss]. **** what kind of missiles. Even Iskanders, even Calibers, even Bastions.
Plus, it is necessary to throw 5-6 more missiles in case of failures of these very missiles and the impact of enemy air defense on these very missiles.
Total on the bridge turns out ...
If we had the necessary supply of cruise missiles for the fifth month of the war, I am sure that all bridges, substations, tracks, decision-making centers, tunnels and enemy warehouses would have been destroyed long ago.

I did a math a long while ago and given the average expenditure of RU missiles, came to the conclusion that they didn't have the means to reliably take out the Dnipro bridges, and keep UA from fixing them/ preparing pontoon crossings, and that's why they didn't even bother much to try. The same applies to meaningfully damaging the railroad infrastructure - it requires thousands upon thousands of hits  to really  affect the military logistics.

[Beleg85]

43 minutes ago, FancyCat said:

Twitter replies indicate this was stupid on the part of the Russian tank moving in the video. 

Interesting example of Russian tank tactics. Some day those Ukrainians will need to run out of mines... Strong 41' vibes.

10 hours ago, Chibot Mk IX said:

Try this one when you get a chance

CMBS Task Force Spartan Resolve v3.0

Thanks mate, I'll try this in the future.

 

https://twitter.com/konrad_muzyka/status/1545347152918052864

Really, those people does not think highly of themselves as society.

 

[Grigb]

Photos of typical (per RU claims) UKR bunkers (probably in Donbass area) FYI @Battlefront.com

[Grigb]

The same guy is discussing current issues of VKS

Quote

On the fifth month of SMO, a lot has changed in the tactics of both ours and the Ukrainians.
But the main problems we have (which were, are, and, I think, will remain for a very long time) are three.

First:
Prompt and reliable intelligence information about the location of important targets.
Now these are:
Locations of tactical missile systems.
Location of the SAM (S-300 and BUK).
Location of artillery batteries from 152mm and MLRS.
Aviation concentration at jump points [temporary airfields] and operational airfields.

Second:
Prompt decision-making to defeat the identified targets.

If more than an hour passes from the moment the target is detected to hitting it, then in most cases the strike is meaningless. The target will no longer be there.

Third:
There is a lack of the necessary reconnaissance and destruction equipment that allows you to quickly identify and hit targets at a distance above 20 km from the LBS [frontline].

As I see it, basically all these problems are being solved in our country by turning the terrain into a lunar landscape in front of our battle formations.

Well, if you drive slowly, you will get far ahead.

 

[paxromana]

1 hour ago, Huba said:

I did a math a long while ago and given the average expenditure of RU missiles, came to the conclusion that they didn't have the means to reliably take out the Dnipro bridges, and keep UA from fixing them/ preparing pontoon crossings, and that's why they didn't even bother much to try. The same applies to meaningfully damaging the railroad infrastructure - it requires thousands upon thousands of hits  to really  affect the military logistics.

How many hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs did it take the USAF to shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail?

Oh.

It couldn't. It failed.

Yeah. I know. the UA needs a lot more supplies than the VC did ... but there are so darn many rail lines in UKR and ISTR reading that UKR RR had done a massive modernisation and expansion in the years before the war broke out.

Cuts both ways, of course.

[Grigb]

Interesting percentage of RU aviation doing the work (from the same guy) - for scenario developers.

Quote

They ask me why there is such a preponderance of rotorcraft content, what happened?

I will answer. 70% of the combat work now lies on their shoulders, the remaining 20 on the shoulders of sturmoviks, and another 10% falls on everyone else.

[Grigb]

Civilian "Girkin" (Nesmyan) about RU agricultural victory

Quote

French fries will disappear in some restaurants of "Delicious — and that's the point" [network - it's renamed McDonalds network]. Village potatoes [Potato wedges], according to the company, are also in danger. The reason lies in the potato crop failure in Russia last year. It is no longer possible to purchase the product from imported suppliers, so we will remain without potatoes.

[Old USSR Joke - Kolkhoz assembly:] There are two issues on the agenda: the repair of the cowshed and the fight against imperialism. Since there are no boards for repair, we go straight to the second question. ©

[Grigb]

Girkin assessment of the current situation

Quote

Kharkiv Front, Izyumsko-Slavyansk direction, Seversk-Soledar-Bakhmut front, Donetsk front - without significant changes. Local battles and the exchange of artillery/air strikes. The enemy continues to "nightmare" the rear warehouses and control points of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and the Armed Forces of the LDPR. Yesterday, another warehouse was destroyed in Shakhtersk (it is still burning down and detonating, judging by reports). In most cases, the successes of the enemy of this kind are based on the OUTSTANDING SLOPPINESS of the COMMAND, which did not consider it necessary either disguise or [implement] elementary security measures. Warehouses were created without any consideration of the enemy's space and aerial reconnaissance, crowded, without the construction of protective structures (and/or the use of numerous available ones) - that is, "[we will do] how [it is] convenient [for us], tyap-lyap [hurry-scurry]".

Of course, in justification of our military, we can say that they "did not expect that SMO would become war." But the fact that in the fifth month of the war, even elementary camouflage networks are almost completely absent in the units and subdivisions of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (whereas in many parts of the LDNR Armed Forces supplied by volunteers, they exist [do not underestimate hardcore volunteer units] ) - this fact alone deserves to be used to brought the entire leadership of the Rear Service of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation to the military tribunal.

Zaporozhye Front. - The situation is not quite clear to me. There is still unverified information about the activation and even offensive actions of the enemy. I am waiting for more accurate information. The enemy also delivers accurate missile strikes on the rear facilities of our troops.
Kherson Front. - Without significant changes. Enemy artillery periodically fires at Kherson, Novaya Kakhovka, and Skadovsk. Our artillery and aviation strikes back.

I will probably describe the situation in more detail in today's direct speech.

Clarification to today's summary:

In the Zaporozhye region, the enemy tried to organize offensive actions in the Gulyai-Pole area in the direction of Pologi. The attempt was thwarted by a massive artillery strike of the Russian Armed Forces with heavy losses for the AFU.

I do not have information about the alleged enemy advance south-east of Krivoy Rog in the area of the settlement of Potemkino yet. I'm clarifying.

 

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, hcrof said:

This is a really good point, and feeds back into the earlier discussions on mass. Russia is in a dilemma - mass the ammo/planes and watch them blow up or disperse them and watch their massed-army structure struggle to perform as intended. I thought himars was a bit of a gimmick before this war but I am happy to be wrong!

Funny, I was thinking exactly the same thing when I saw the latest video of another burning dump.

The issue is that if the enemy has the ability to hit something AND knows where it is, then you're screwed unless you have a counter system in place.  There are only so many AA missile systems to spread around and each has a limited area it can protect.  Spreading out stuff widely enough to offer some protection stresses this out.

It's the same thing with attempts to defend civilian infrastructure from terrorists.  It is impractical to harden every single bit of key infrastructure even if it can be concentrated.  And things like bridges, pump stations, electric lines, etc. stubbornly insist on being spread out.

The only solution is to remove one of the two ingredients that allows the enemy to strike.  Keeping the locations of dumps is obviously not going do well for Russia, which means they have to eliminate Ukraine's ability to hit stuff.  Every day this war goes on that is LESS likely.

This means Russia is either going to see more dumps blown up in the coming days and weeks or it is going to have to pull its logistics centers WELL behind the front and accept the reduction in offensive operations.  I don't see them doing that yet, so I expect to see more videos of big things burning bright.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

Regarding the discussion about Article 5 and Little Green Men, Tourists, or other Russian tricks to obfuscate their aggression, I don't see it as being practical any more.

First, Articles 4 and 5 make it clear that a nation can make a request based on any criteria it wishes to, but it is up to the rest of NATO to determine if it's valid enough to qualify for a response.  If NATO thinks it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck then it's a duck.  Doesn't matter how much Russia protests that it it's an elephant.

Second, 2014 caused a big shakeup in NATO about the definition of a military threat.  The definitions were reconfigured to include the sorts of things Russia did in Crimea (specifically) and Ukraine (generally).  This makes it more likely that Russia wouldn't get very far with trying to pass things off as domestic NATO problems.

Third, if a nation's claim fails to rise to a standard acceptable to NATO individual nations can still respond on their own.  Unless the US gets an overtly pacifist/isolationist President, it is likely the US would respond directly.  If there is a pacifist/isolationist President then the US will respond in ways that are not as overt.  But it will respond.

Fourth, Russia had some degree of success in the Donbas of muddying the waters by having its proxy forces using weapons that plausibly could have been taken from Ukrainian Army and police stocks.  Russia doesn't have stocks of NATO weaponry to use.  Since none of NATO's forces use that sort of Soviet equipment any more, so a whole bunch of AKs, AT rockets, etc. showing up within a NATO country would be an instant red flag.

Fifth, while Russian sympathizers, useful idiots, agents, naive journalists, and otherwise pro-Russian people in the West might have been fooled by Russia's attempts to hide what it was doing, Western intelligence agencies knew exactly what was going on.  This would be even more true of something happening on its own turf.  That includes even small operations like assassinations.

Sixth, the country being targeted, at the very least, would likely act swiftly against an armed threat without much foot dragging.  The sort of mixed response from the 2008 and 2014 Russian actions would not happen.

When you look at this stuff all together, it seems to me that Russia has very few options to stir up armed trouble within NATO without a pretty serious risk of getting hammered for it.

Steve

[Butschi]

12 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Regarding the discussion about Article 5 and Little Green Men, Tourists, or other Russian tricks to obfuscate their aggression, I don't see it as being practical any more.

First, Articles 4 and 5 make it clear that a nation can make a request based on any criteria it wishes to, but it is up to the rest of NATO to determine if it's valid enough to qualify for a response.  If NATO thinks it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck then it's a duck.  Doesn't matter how much Russia protests that it it's an elephant.

Second, 2014 caused a big shakeup in NATO about the definition of a military threat.  The definitions were reconfigured to include the sorts of things Russia did in Crimea (specifically) and Ukraine (generally).  This makes it more likely that Russia wouldn't get very far with trying to pass things off as domestic NATO problems.

Third, if a nation's claim fails to rise to a standard acceptable to NATO individual nations can still respond on their own.  Unless the US gets an overtly pacifist/isolationist President, it is likely the US would respond directly.  If there is a pacifist/isolationist President then the US will respond in ways that are not as overt.  But it will respond.

Fourth, Russia had some degree of success in the Donbas of muddying the waters by having its proxy forces using weapons that plausibly could have been taken from Ukrainian Army and police stocks.  Russia doesn't have stocks of NATO weaponry to use.  Since none of NATO's forces use that sort of Soviet equipment any more, so a whole bunch of AKs, AT rockets, etc. showing up within a NATO country would be an instant red flag.

Fifth, while Russian sympathizers, useful idiots, agents, naive journalists, and otherwise pro-Russian people in the West might have been fooled by Russia's attempts to hide what it was doing, Western intelligence agencies knew exactly what was going on.  This would be even more true of something happening on its own turf.  That includes even small operations like assassinations.

Sixth, the country being targeted, at the very least, would likely act swiftly against an armed threat without much foot dragging.  The sort of mixed response from the 2008 and 2014 Russian actions would not happen.

When you look at this stuff all together, it seems to me that Russia has very few options to stir up armed trouble within NATO without a pretty serious risk of getting hammered for it.

Steve

Good points. In my very first post in this thread I speculated on whether Putin might try (after a successfull invasion of Ukraine...) to cut off the Baltics by establishing a corridor to Kaliningrad. And that if done quickly, enough NATO members might go "Mourir pour Vilnius?". By now we know that Russia doesn't have the (conventional) means to shock NATO into keeping quiet. Given the precedent of Afghanistan, where NATO invoked article 5 under (IMHO) much less clear circumstances than Little Green Men on Crimea and even Germany went along (under the same Gerhard Schröder/Joschka Fischer who later refused to go to Iraq) - no deal, NATO will intervene. Even our chancellor Mr. Scholz could not afford to stay out of it: He constantly keeps saying that we do everything in accordance with our allies, so not only the opposition would eat him alive but also his coalition, not to mention the press.

[Huba]

1 hour ago, paxromana said:

How many hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs did it take the USAF to shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail?

Oh.

It couldn't. It failed.

Yeah. I know. the UA needs a lot more supplies than the VC did ... but there are so darn many rail lines in UKR and ISTR reading that UKR RR had done a massive modernisation and expansion in the years before the war broke out.

Cuts both ways, of course.

German railways were still more or less working in early 1945 too. Idea that they could as much as make a dent on the overall picture without air dominance across the whole country is laughable, against a system that routinely moves millions of tons of stuff every month.

42 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

Funny, I was thinking exactly the same thing when I saw the latest video of another burning dump.

The issue is that if the enemy has the ability to hit something AND knows where it is, then you're screwed unless you have a counter system in place.  There are only so many AA missile systems to spread around and each has a limited area it can protect.  Spreading out stuff widely enough to offer some protection stresses this out.

It's the same thing with attempts to defend civilian infrastructure from terrorists.  It is impractical to harden every single bit of key infrastructure even if it can be concentrated.  And things like bridges, pump stations, electric lines, etc. stubbornly insist on being spread out.

The only solution is to remove one of the two ingredients that allows the enemy to strike.  Keeping the locations of dumps is obviously not going do well for Russia, which means they have to eliminate Ukraine's ability to hit stuff.  Every day this war goes on that is LESS likely.

This means Russia is either going to see more dumps blown up in the coming days and weeks or it is going to have to pull its logistics centers WELL behind the front and accept the reduction in offensive operations.  I don't see them doing that yet, so I expect to see more videos of big things burning bright.

Steve

What seems to be sure at this point is that RU has to seriously re-organize the way they do logistics before they will be able to continue what they were doing in Donbas in last 2 months. And it isn't clear that this change is even in the realm of possibility at this moment. Whats worth noting is that dispersing the depots without moving them further back will not make them technically harder to be hit, it will be a challenge for ISR only - and in this competition I'd put my money on the ISR guys  It also makes AA cover harder to provide, and requires much more manpower, just for guard duties. And moving bases back without dispersion is also asking for trouble further down the road. As long as the GMLRS supply is steady, I don't see the way out of this for the RU. One short term solution, as you suggested a while ago, will be to move the schwerpunkt to Kharkiv or somewhere in the north, and support it straight from depots in Russia itself.

 

 

 

[Probus]

Russia can sabre rattle all they want, but there is NO WAY they are going to do anything to escalate or risk getting NATO involved.  Heck, they can't even handle Ukraine.  In the words of the 3 Stooges, NATO would "murderize" them. 

I'm sure I missed it already, but how will Boris Johnson resigning affect support for Ukraine.  Can someone linky it for me?

[acrashb]

3 minutes ago, Probus said:

I'm sure I missed it already, but how will Boris Johnson resigning affect support for Ukraine.  Can someone linky it for me?

What does Boris Johnson’s resignation mean for Ukraine? (ukrainetoday.org)

I agree with the premises of the article.  

[hcrof]

4 minutes ago, acrashb said:

What does Boris Johnson’s resignation mean for Ukraine? (ukrainetoday.org)

I agree with the premises of the article.  

Yep, that article sums it up pretty well. The conservative party is pretty anti Russia at the moment and even the Opposition parties are not exactly fond of Russia either.

[The_MonkeyKing]

 

 

I am once again surprised how realistic the CM AI is...

[Battlefront.com]

3 minutes ago, hcrof said:

Yep, that article sums it up pretty well. The conservative party is pretty anti Russia at the moment and even the Opposition parties are not exactly fond of Russia either.

With Jeremy Corbyn out of the Labour leadership role, things are definitely better than they might have been a few years ago.

Steve

[Beleg85]

Interesting thread again about RU losses. BBC Russia usually have good sources, s worth reading.