How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, DesertFox said:

Sure there is. Dunno why you cant see the pile.

There is something there, but we don't know what it is.  And if it's bombs, there isn't 1600 of them.  The guy is wrong.

Steve

[dan/california]

Its not gone well....

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, Beleg85 said:

Ok, so basically we can now call it false alarm:

 

Well... to me it sounds a lot like "it was a safety accident".  Belarus would not want to admit they just got stomped by Ukraine.  That would create some difficulties for sure.  So why not lie about it just like Russia does?

Not saying it's one way or the other, but for sure I don't have much trust of statements out of the Belarus MoD.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, Homo_Ferricus said:

Anybody else playing the drinking game, "Have a drink every time Steve misspells the name of a weapons system"? 

I may need to go to the hospital soon 

I've been trying VERY hard to go with Hrim instead of Grim.  That I have an excuse for as there's several names.  However, there is no excuse for Hirm

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, DesertFox said:

Nah. We are not talking about 1.500 bombs. We are talking about a software (NUKEMAP) which calculates blast effect based on kiloton equivalents of HE and explosion height. Big difference! Look at the screen.

I don't get it.  The effects calculated are based on a unit of measurement, in this case kiloton of explosives.  So what does that not relate to if not the amount of explosives in kilotons being detonated?

Not that any of this matters.  There's already enough evidence to suggest what hit those three spots.  Not HIRMAS, not SOF, not Neptune, not suicide drones, and not anything else Ukraine is already known to have used.  And whatever was used was BIG.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Beleg85 said:

He did everything in his power to avoid being dragged into the war. So far he was sucessful, thus it has zero sense from Kyiv perspective to put him into corner by any additional strikes. Of course, from point of view of morality and war law, UA is fully liable to hit targets inside Belarus- especially bases from which RUAF operates. But it is politically pointless and inflamatory. On the other side, perhaps UA sees so good opportunity to eliminate large cluster of enemy troops it simply can't handle...but I doubt it.

Yes, but just like the airbase in Crimea takes Russian capabilities over the Black Sea out of the equation, knocking Russian airforces in Belarus restricts what it can do over Western Ukraine.  And what is Belarus going to do about it?  Attack Ukraine because Russian forces are using it as a base for an illegal war?  I think not.  And what's Russia going to do about it?  Learn how to fight a war?  I also think not.

All the conditions that kept Belarus out of the war remain.  In fact, they might even be increased.  Pressure could be put on Lukashenko to limit what Russia does on its territory so it won't get hit again by Ukraine.

If Ukraine struck Russia's primary airbase in Belarus (a big if at the moment), I think it is very smart as well as very legal.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

20 minutes ago, dan/california said:

Its not gone well....

This is a perfect example of why Combat Mission's TacAI is too good.  In real life tank drivers can't always know for sure what is on the other side of a bush.  Even when not panicking.  So the next time I hear someone whine about their tanks bogging "not realistic" because they think they should know ahead of time if they're going to bog I'm going to point to this video and say "we can make it more realistic, but know it's going to complain even more if we do"

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

I've only skimmed a couple of these, but they are interesting.  Official correspondence from the Russian military prosecutor's office were hacked and are now available to Bellingcat and The Insider.  It's pretty grim stuff showing how aware some portion of the Russian population is to the horrors of this war:

https://theins-ru.translate.goog/politika/252097?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

Video of the Kakhovskaya damn's state of repair, though I don't know when the footage was taken.  The rail portion is non-functional, the road portion is usable with a bit of inefficiency.  It's also likely being used more heavily now that the primary route is out of action:

 

[Homo_Ferricus]

57 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

...HIRMAS...

Steve

You, sir, are either taking the piss. Or you are badly in need of sleep. 

edit: and I'm beginning to drink a bit too much.

Edited August 11, 2022 by Homo_Ferricus

[Battlefront.com]

1 minute ago, Homo_Ferricus said:

You, sir, are either taking the piss. Or you are badly in need of sleep. 

edit: and I'm beginning to drink a bit too much.

Nah, that's my dyslexia talking for me.  Which, come to think of it, does get a bit worse when I haven't had enough sleep

Steve

[chrisl]

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

I don't get it.  The effects calculated are based on a unit of measurement, in this case kiloton of explosives.  So what does that not relate to if not the amount of explosives in kilotons being detonated?

Not that any of this matters.  There's already enough evidence to suggest what hit those three spots.  Not HIRMAS, not SOF, not Neptune, not suicide drones, and not anything else Ukraine is already known to have used.  And whatever was used was BIG.

Steve

 

I'm guessing multiple thermobaric (I want to say 4) warheads, but I won't guess how they got there.  Probably some RU soldiers faffing around with holiday fireworks and they dropped one or somefink.

The things that bothers me about the pictures are:

a) there aren't any really *big* holes in the ground that would indicate one (or three) ginormous HE bombs.

b) all those planes surrounded by berms are just cooked, and only a few of them have visible craters within the view angle of their front opening. And most of the berms look pristine, even after the bomb.  Something came in from above and set them on fire without banging around.

c) there's no reports of steady barrage - it just went up, maybe from two hits.

d) big shock wave spread over a long distance says airburst, especially when there's not a ginormous hole in the ground.  A bomb that hit the ground will get too much of its energy directed back up by the dirt and not have as distant horizontal damage from the shock wave.  

e) the big fiery shock wave would have had enough energy to set off all the other holiday fireworks laying around to make all the little craters.

f) everything is burned.  planes burned.  building burned.  only thing not burned are the cement decoys.  I have some pink flamingos made of cement, and the aircraft that didn't burn are probably similar.

If I squint I can kind of guess the epicenters under where the bombs went off (extra black and charred)

I suppose you could get something similar if you have a half dozen UA SOF troops with big fans and cans of gasoline filling the area with vapor and firing in a flare.

Edited August 11, 2022 by chrisl

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, DesertFox said:

Significance of the Saki Strike:

 

 

Yup, this is huge (as discussed many pages ago) in terms of strategic shift in favor of Ukraine.  As with HIMARS, Russian defenses have proved incapable of dealing with Ukraine's deep strike capabilities.  It also shows that Crimea is now "in play".  Even more concerning for Russia is that this is only the beginning.  From ISW's August 10th report:

Quote

Ukrainian officials framed the August 9 attack in Crimea as the start of Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south, suggesting that the Ukrainian military expects intense fighting in August and September that could decide the outcome of the next phase of the war. A Ukrainian official told Politico on August 10 that “you can say this is it” when asked about the start of Ukraine’s planned counteroffensive. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vaguely noted on August 10 that the war “began with Crimea and must end with Crimea - with its liberation.”

Up until now Russia has been desperately trying to control the narrative and show everybody that it was on the way to winning the war on its terms.  Now it is going to have to switch gears and show that it isn't losing the war.  With no battlefield successes and high profile defeats starting to roll in... this is going to be tough to do.

Russian morale is going to take a serious hit from all of this.  Not just from the news, but also due to the impacts of not having air support as it did before.  HARM attacks are also going to continually degrade Russia's ability to stop Ukraine's airforces from hitting their positions, which is not going to improve Russian morale any.  Ukrainian morale, on the other hand, gets another boost.

Now that Ukraine effectively controls the waters and airspace off its coast of the Black Sea, things are going to become much more difficult for Russia.  Obviously offensive activities against Ukraine are going to be very limited.  Defensively, it's now got a lot more to worry about.  Especially if it wants to keep it's surface fleet from being whacked.  I wonder how vulnerable Russia's S-400 positions are to partisan attacks?

Steve

[Calamine Waffles]

7 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

 I wonder how vulnerable Russia's S-400 positions are to partisan attacks?

Assuming the tubes are not armoured, just like the S-300, probably pretty vulnerable to a few bullets.
 

 

[Battlefront.com]

I've reexamined the videos and images.  Here's what I make of all of it.  Geolocating the various videos might help clear up details, but I'm too tired to do it. 

First image is just prior to the strike, second image is after strike.

 

Red circles correspond with craters, both in terms of location and size.  Numbered 1, 2, 3A, and 3B.  I couldn't see a distinct crater mark for 3B so I made a guess as best I could.

The Green outlines indicate secondary explosions, numbered S1, S2, and S3.  The visual evidence of when these went up is poor so far.  Minor secondary items, such as things on the tarmac that aren't aircraft, are not noted.

Here's a possible series of events.  I don't know how much time passed between start and finish, but I'd guess 10-15 minutes in total based on the smoke with perhaps 2-5 minutes between each of the Strikes.

1. Single strike all on its own, probably #1 location.  Pretty good sized explosion put a tall, but not very wide, gray smoke plume high up into the air.  Of the 4 strikes this is the target area with the least amount of visible ammo, therefore the least impressive initial explosion/smoke.
2. The explosion and tall smoke plume caught people's attention and that started the cameras rolling.  All the video and pictures I've seen of this one show the plume already in the air, not what started it.  There were also secondary fires already going for some of the shots, though one video seems to be just the primary detonation and no secondaries yet.
3. It seems logical that #1 set off S1 (aircraft) as it was only 50m away and nothing lay inbetween them.  S2 (~250m) and S3 (~400m) might also have been touched off by #1, though S3 maybe was touched off by #3B (~375m), indirectly after fire swept the area, or as a result of some different type of strike.  Fire spread amongst the grass in this area too.
4. If there were any more planes on the tarmac they don't appear to have exploded.  Either way, they are not seen in the BDA images and there are no signs they blew up.
5. Sometime later Strike #2 appears to hit the other open air dump.  This produced a very large, wide fireball followed by thick black smoke. For sure this took out a couple of the protected aircraft as well. 
6. Strikes #3A and #3B happened simultaneously and they were HUGE.  Based on the distance between them and the fact that their locations were the two largest and sheltered, I think it's a good bet that these paired together.  The presence of very large, thick smoke when the strikes landed indicate these came last.
7. Fires spread northward across the grass, but unclear at one point and what extent the grasses started to burn.

There is one mystery video, though.  It looks like it happened sometime after Strike #1 and before Strike #2.  It could be that this was S3 going up as there's a burn pattern downwind and the explosion was upwind of Strike #1.  The interesting thing about this is there's a very clear small explosion close to the ground, a brief pause, then a huge secondary fireball explosion.  So either something was cooking off and triggered a much larger explosion *or* something different than the others strikes (much smaller) exploded.  I don't think it was S2 as there doesn't appear to be signs of a dramatic fireball.

Well, that's all I got.  For now at least

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Calamine Waffles said:

Assuming the tubes are not armoured, just like the S-300, probably pretty vulnerable to a few bullets.

I meant in terms of the vulnerability of the positions.  Are these systems sitting around with minimal protection from ground or drone attacks?  If the answer is "they're sitting on their own with some berms around them" that would invite SOF ops.  If the answer is "there's a battalion guarding each and every one" then not so much.  I'm guessing more the former than the latter, which means Ukraine should be using whomever it has on Crimean soil to blow these things up.

Steve

[Grigb]

10 hours ago, Beleg85 said:

 UA claimed 9 destroyed, but I swear on both photos there are more. Also, hard to tell the level of destruction on those still standing. Curiously, the one aircraft standing directly against left-most detroyed shack seems to be largely ok.

 

Now, i wait for Russian milcommentators reactions. Meltdown will be priceless.

Just started to check. So far, my first impression is too quet - they are trying to process it and calm down repeating this is war, the war means loses, we need to get used to that.

Propagandists started to sugarcoat the losses:

Quote

On one of the parking lots, the skeletons of 4 Su-24M bombers and 4 new multifunctional Su-30SM fighters are visible. According to some reports, some of these Su-24s were practically not flying and were ready to be scrapped.

In another parking lot, the skeletons of 3 more Su-24M bombers are visible. There are no traces of three Su-30SM standing nearby before the impact: most likely, they managed to be towed away after the fire started.

There are no pictures of damage in other parts of the airfield. The runway also looks intact, as do the planes standing in other parts of the airfield.

Several craters are visible near one of the parking lots, similar to traces of a hit of ammunition. However, the quality of the image and the absence of photos from the seats does not allow us to reliably say whether this is a consequence of the [missile] "arrival" or not.

As we have already written, the specific cause of the explosions is not the key issue right now. It is much more important to stop considering air bases as a deep rear and take a responsible attitude to the realities of wartime.

Losses are few, and they were not flying anyway. The cause is not clear and anyway it is not important. Important is calm down and not to be nervous now when UKR are hitting our airfield in deep rear.

[DesertFox]

4 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

 So what does that not relate to if not the amount of explosives in kilotons being detonated?

Because the blast effect per kilogramm is dependant on the chemistry of the HE compound. Amatol is different to TNT, which is different to Dynamite, which is different to RDX or PETN. 

Example: A thermobaric device yields the equivalent of 44 tons of TNT using about seven tons of a new type of high explosive. [1]

So to gain a blast effect of 500 tons of HE (which was there according to the observed effects) you might not need those 1.300 FAB bombs piled on the tarmac.

Anyways, we will learn what device was used there, because I don´t think this will remain a singular event in this war.

[1]  "Trump Dropped Mother of All Bombs. But he Wasn't Expecting Russia to do This – Belair Daily". www.belairdaily.com. Archived from the original on 2017-05-17. Retrieved 2017-04-16

[Huba]

Hilarious trolling from Ukrainian MoD:

 

[Grossman]

8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

NYT is still leaning towards SOF op:

They're wrong.  The size of those craters is not something that could be generated by anything other than a very large missile or a very large bomb.  For sure nobody is saying Ukraine used an aircraft to strike the airport, therefore missile.  And of the possibilities we have to pick from only Hirm-2 fits that description.

Steve

The Wiki entry for Hrim 2 suggests delivery occurred at the end of 2021. Range 500km. Maybe there has been some guidance upgrades as those hits were super accurate. 

[Huba]

I missed out on most of the discussion on recent Crimea attack (apparently there's life outside the forum and Twitter...). After going through the thread and other analysis elsewhere I have some thoughts/ observations:

- there was a bushfire after the initial explosions that burned a few hectares of ground around the airfield

- there was some fuel storage hit. Videos of explosions indicate it, as well as the fact that a big paved area is charred.

- cratering on the ground is for sure a result of ammunition exploding. Simple reason for that is that any missile used in such attack would for sure be airbursting for maximum effect (unless aimed at the ammo storage itself, but then the point is moot anyway). BTW, if we assume it was indeed a Hrim, what about a possibility of a cluster warhead? Seems like an obvious choice for attacking an airbase, and the dispersion of damage might suggest it.

- this effect could be achieved by a drone swarm I think, but it would have to be quite big. UA hit RU refinery in Azov with kamikaze drone a month or two ago, there was a video going around. The distance would be similar if not shorter. It would be strange though that nobody spotted such swarm on the way (or  maybe they did and RU already knows, there just wasn't a video leaked on social media).

- SOF operation perhaps possible (with kamikaze drones)  but they would require quite many operators working simultaneously. I find it rather unlikely.

Photo edited to highlight the scale of fire that ensued:

Edited August 11, 2022 by Huba

[Holien]

33 minutes ago, Grossman said:

as those hits were super accurate. 

Not so sure as I can think of better places to hit within the airfield, but super accurate when compared vs Russian attacks.

[Holien]

5 hours ago, chrisl said:

everything is burned.  planes burned.  building burned.  only thing not burned are the cement decoys.  I have some pink flamingos made of cement, and the aircraft that didn't burn are probably similar.

Ok concrete would perhaps explain the lack of being affected by the blast. I will have to google to see some. The down side for conrete is they are a bitch to move around and any good analysis would see those planes never move...

Mind you based on the Russian half arse philosophy they might just go "good enough"...

Hmmm first hit on google...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/13/world/europe/russia-decoy-weapon.html

So these would just be destoyed...

Hmmm it gets better

https://www.smobserved.com/story/2022/04/22/politics/much-of-russias-air-force-appears-to-be-made-of-styrofoam-yes-thats-right-fake-planes/6691.html

So I am still puzzled why that jet has not been blown backward by the blast in front of it. I don't buy it was moved into area after blast...

Edited August 11, 2022 by Holien

[Hapless]

Krulak Centre's Brutecast tackles it, exploring some possible options:

 

[Holien]

 

Just edited image to show the planes I am just not understanding why they seem to be in better shape than the others...

 

Edited August 11, 2022 by Holien
Cause I can't share an image for the life of me!!