How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[billbindc]

3 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Ok, back on the nukes.  My concern here is it would be within Putin’s playbook to fire off a battlefield nuke as a demonstration.  He could even target an empty grid square and fire off a warning shot.  This is right in line with Russian liminal warfare - edge up to the line and stick a toe over it, and hope we move the line.  My bet it would be if Crimea is threatened as losing that would likely trigger what Putin fears most - a Russian identity crisis.  I am getting the sense that after all these months that so long as Russians see the world as it was before Feb 22 - and again thanks to Haiduk for crystallizing that - then they will happily keep him in power and try to get on with the lives actively ignoring this war.  If things hit a point where the Russians have an identity crisis, very bad things will likely happen to Putin.  I am half way convinced that this is in fact the Russian centre of gravity (or at least one of them).

Russians will take the losses, they will even take mobilization but based on how Haiduk outlines what Russians need to “unlearn” about themselves, I suspect their internal trigger point lies there.  And in this war, my guess is that trigger is Crimea.

It's a bit of a worst case scenario. An authoritarian who still depends on public opinion to maintain power and maintaining power is how he stays alive. Also, he has pretty much unfettered ability to launch a nuke. The incentives are....bad.

[dan/california]

25 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

Ok, hold up.  Is this confirmed?  Has the UA managed two river crossings?  In this environment?

There is a theory floating around that Putin is cutting bait on Northern Luhansk. Putin being Putin, and the Russian army being a sad excuse for poop, that is resulting in the encirclement of most of the remaining forces there, instead of a competent retreat. The train carrying what looked like a whole battlegroup across the Kerch bridge, would be exhibit A for this theory. They really ought to be going Luhansk if the Russians were even trying to hold it.

 

Edit: Putin may have hoping to hold it with a flood of mobiks. There is a story they has already been something close to a banzai charge on the northernmost/easternmost AFU Oskil crossings. It didn't go well.

Edited October 1, 2022 by dan/california

[sburke]

A Russian Regiment, Currently Surrounded In Eastern Ukraine, Has A Tragic History Of Defeat (msn.com)

[LongLeftFlank]

4 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

I agree.  It's already in the works.

However, we're also going to see UGVs with drones very soon.  This is a prototype from 3 years ago.  It has 4 drones standard.  Dismounts would need to recover them, but I've seen at least one design that has a recovery system included.

 

Plus ça change....

 

[akd]

Why not up-armor your tank with the water you need anyways?

 

[The_Capt]

36 minutes ago, billbindc said:

It's a bit of a worst case scenario. An authoritarian who still depends on public opinion to maintain power and maintaining power is how he stays alive. Also, he has pretty much unfettered ability to launch a nuke. The incentives are....bad.

Toss in a global pandemic shock and all we are missing is rivers turning to blood.

[LongLeftFlank]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Dear gawd, I cant keep up with this thread while on the road.  Ok back to war fighting - ok, so, when I talk about an “operational system” this is what I am talking about.  We employ a different one but they all have common elements.  The system is built around operational functions, we use:

Command

Act

Sense

Shield

Project and Sustain

Generate

These functions can be mapped against capabilities in both a quantitative and qualitative sense.  Together they creat a system that creates decisions (of all types) on the battlefield.  The sum of decision directly influence the strategic options spaces - along with political context and other forms of power.

So when The_Capt says “The UA stressed the entire Russian operational system” I am really talking about this.  Right now Russia is behind and failing on almost every function, nor are those functions coordinated or synchronized.  Back in Phase 2, there is an argument that they still had advantage in Act, and we all feared the Generate boogeyman.  They are now behind on that.  They are really only left with a defensive capability set, unless they have a magic rabbit somewhere.  The Generate spectre is turning out as expected - a hot mess of cannon fodder.

Question on the table is how long will the Russian system be able to function defensively - it failed offensively in Jul and has not recovered.  As to the conduct of the war right now - unless I missed something - we have a lot of offensive pressure being applied by the UA.  This is a clear demonstration that their system is healthy and likely getting healthier.

Regardless of nuclear sabre rattling, we are headed for a conventional warfare decision point(s) before the weather turns, and then I would not be surprised to see the UA stage a winter offensive.  Let Russian conscripts sit the cold for a bit and then hit them.  I expect the UA to keep chewing until the RA system fractures again, and then we will likely see some fast gains:  goes slow…until it’s fast.

Dry on Likes again, but many thanks for this, again.

They are really only left with a defensive capability set....

So as we are presently seeing in the Kherson bridgehead, their defensive capability appears to rest mainly on heavy artillery on call, just as it did when they were still on the offence in the summer.  And if the UA (or air force, hint hint) can find a way to disrupt that 'on call' part, the scheme largely collapses into isolated and doomed redoubts.

While they've indeed made broad use of mines, the famed (historical) Russian ability to dig in deeply and strongly without any special instruction to do so, and to stubbornly defend to the last man has been AWOL in this war* (Lyman/Yampil may be a recent exception).  They seem to act like a few hull down AFVs at the edge of a village equal a fortified position.

They should have been pouring cement like madmen all along the 'land bridge,' especially where the Dniepr doesn't present a barrier. But I'd think satellite imagery and OSINT mavens would pick it up were it happening.  I periodically search 'Volnovakha' and 'Polohy' and there's bupkis.

* Except on the Ukrainian side!

P.S.  If you stroll around Wikimapia in these steppelands, you frequently run across Курганы Могилы Рясные.... Scythian kurgan burial mounds, with the farm fields skirting arouund them.  Ancient history, visible from space.

Edited October 1, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[Offshoot]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

Ok, hold up.  Is this confirmed?  Has the UA managed two river crossings?  In this environment?

Maybe using captured Russian equipment (this is the guy who was involved in locating the original Russian attempts to cross the Siverskyi Donets oh so long ago)

 

[chris talpas]

8 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

 

On a serious note, I often think about how lucky I am that the country with the longest border with mine is Canada.  I absolutely could not ask for better neighbors.  Ukraine, on the other hand, has its longest border with Russia.  They absolutely could not have a worse neighbor.  I for one do not take my good fortune for granted.

Steve

As a Canadian, I feel the same way about the US.   

[Kraft]

Major uptick in videos of dead Russians scattered along foresty roads. I'd say more than when Izyum occupants were in the process of regrouping  seems despite Moskovites willingness to pay any price that not everyone wants to stay in Festung Lyman.

 

And hello again to the Nuke topic, how I did not miss you

 

Edited October 1, 2022 by Kraft

[LongLeftFlank]

3 minutes ago, chris talpas said:

As a Canadian, I feel the same way about the US.   

1.  So a dear but wiseass American friend, taking the piss (as ya do), once described Canada to me as "America's hat".

So what is America to Canada? I asked. Unwisely.

"Canada's pants."

Ouch.

2.  Another Yanqui friend shut some Brits up good and proper when they pompously razzed him about 'improper' American spelling.  He pointed out that the original Latin words 'labor' and 'color' did not in fact contain 'u' and that all they were really doing was advertising that a thousand years ago they lost a war.... to the French.

Touché.

(yes, fine, Normans, but it was rather clever)

[sburke]

China Trying to Rescue Russia From Ukraine Debacle | Opinion (msn.com)

[chuckdyke]

China should realize that putin's Russia is a country that democratic European countries can't do business with. First take putin out of Russia before they start talking.

[chuckdyke]

This man sees it crystal clear.

 

[LongLeftFlank]

3 hours ago, H1nd said:

My latest thread on twitter. Its in Finnish, but the twitter translation function seems to work rather decently. I will probably translate it in english at some point if I have the time. 

Cheers!

-H1nd/Pasi Paroinen

Great work, thanks for sharing!

HeliosRunner is also back on task, and I am studying the NE quadrant of his latest topo together with your map here to try to visualise a credible Russian defensive line along the Krasna river (Svatove-Kreminna).

But all I can see are yet more isolated village hedgehogs, dominated by higher ground on the west bank, and readily bypassed /  infiltrated via the ubiquitous ravines and gullies. 

Others speak up, please, but the only way you make this kind of defence work, even temporarily, is with firebases (efficient medium artillery) backstopped by air strikes.  And even then, you lose eventually if you don't have your own infantry platoons out there aggressively contesting the infiltration.

Otherwise, it just gets chopped systematically into pieces and the next fallback river line is at Misky.  Same bloody thing.

FWIW, I dislike maps visually dominated by big red and blue front lines and giant Arrows of Doom.  It all implies some kind of contiguous trench line or front which has nothing at all to do with the tactical realities of this war since Day 1 except maybe on the 2014 Donetsk line.

@Grigb does a much better job IMHO of showing the realities of the situation, with controlled/contested towns and roads uppermost.

Even worse are the Giant Red Zone vs Giant Blue Zone maps, as if total acreage under 'control' is some kind of relevant scorecard of 'who's winning' (looking at you, ISW and sometimes DefMon3). 

Edited October 1, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[BletchleyGeek]

14 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Others speak up, please, but the only way you make this kind of defence work, even temporarily, is with firebases (efficient medium artillery) backstopped by air strikes.  And even then, you lose eventually if you don't have your own infantry platoons out there aggressively contesting the infiltration.

Otherwise, it just gets chopped systematically into pieces and the next fallback river line is at Misky.  Same bloody thing.

What you describe above sounds like what has been going on north of Lyman for the last week. Just unsure that the Russian forces have the infantry numbers and skills for that to work.

And definitely that river line you mention is what makes sense, would need more careful terrain analysis (like going down to the scale of a good tactical map).

Makes me wonder if the UKR command isn't thinking of a lunging towards Kremnina from the south of Torske as the Russian reinforcements (allegedly) try to jump into Zarichne - Torske to keep a route out of the Lyman pocket open.

5:30AM in Kiev, let's see what news come as the sun rises over Ukraine...

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, Kinophile said:

As I always say on set  -  even a bad plan is better than no plan at all. 

On a number of occasions I've had to say to some group of people "no plan is still a plan and it is usually the worst one possible".  Humans have this horrible tendency to think that not doing something means nothing happens.  No consequences.  Yeah, life just doesn't work like that.  I think I have a dent somewhere on my forehead from all the face palm slapping I've done over the years.

Steve

[fireship4]

3 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:

...I am studying the NE quadrant of his latest topo together with your map here to try to visualise a credible Russian defensive line along the Krasna river (Svatove-Kreminna)...

...FWIW, I dislike maps visually dominated by big red and blue front lines...

 

Quote

Using some live map information from the 24th onward and BMU height maps, imported into Google Earth.  Link for higher detail: https://postimg.cc/62F8C1m8

[Of course there's another Lyman just 90KM ENE]

 

Quote

[@DefMon3 Map dated 2022.09.30 overlaid upon something similar https://postimg.cc/67CkwMkd]

 

1 hour ago, Battlefront.com said:

"no plan is still a plan and it is usually the worst one possible"

For what it's worth:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/02/28/clever-lazy/

Edited October 1, 2022 by fireship4

[LongLeftFlank]

1 hour ago, fireship4 said:

 

Using some live map information from the 24th onward and BMU height maps, imported into Google Earth.  Link for higher detail: https://postimg.cc/62F8C1m8

Great, cheers, you can clearly see all those stream cuts. And they are deeply eroded (no wonder 'Board 5' in ASL Cross of Iron prominently featured 'gullies')

.... It seems clear that Zherebets river is already a dead letter as a defensive line, even with RU forces supposedly still clinging to the Oskil at Borova.

 

It looks like we can 'bank' the Lyman pocket as a win, ignoring RU hopium about 'relief thrusts' and look ahead to the next push. 

Strong probes into Kreminna from the forests are great, keeps them tied down, but it's hard to approach from the W/NW (very boggy ground).  So a left hook into north Luhansk oblast centered around Krasnorichenske (?) looks like it's the logical next phase. Already being set up?

Edited October 1, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[Battlefront.com]

3 hours ago, billbindc said:

It's a bit of a worst case scenario. An authoritarian who still depends on public opinion to maintain power and maintaining power is how he stays alive. Also, he has pretty much unfettered ability to launch a nuke. The incentives are....bad.

Yup.  Especially when you consider that he had a viable exit plan before the war.  Set up a protege to take over from him, live out the rest of his life in a mansion surrounded by the best security $100 billion can buy.  Gorbachev just died of natural causes, and Putin hated that guy's guts.  But the system says if you leave power without dying, you're supposed to be left alone.  Or something like that. 

Now, I don't think that option is available.  Assuming Putin somehow manages to get out of power without being murdered in the process (chances aren't great, but he does have $100 billion), what then?  It is highly unlikely that the West will allow Russia back into the world economy without Putin's head on a pike or handed over to the Hague.  Russia is going to be very difficult to govern without restoring the economy, which means giving the West what it wants.  Plus, how is the new Russian President going to loot the treasury if it's not got much flowing through it?

This means that whomever takes over for Putin, no matter how power is transitioned (other than Putin having a heart attack while falling out of a window onto a dozen bullets), that new guy will want the Putin problem solved as quickly as possible.  Since having Russia's ego can't possibly accept seeing him in the Hague, head on the spike will be the most likely outcome.

If we look at Serbia as the closest analogy, they put off handing Milošević over to the ICTY (who had a warrant out for his arrest) until he was outsted from power.  He probably would have stayed safe for quite a long while, but a brave move by the Prime Minster, got around the situation by (basically) kidnapping him and dumping him at a US military base.  Yugoslavia (not yet Serbia) received foreign aid assistance right afterwards.  Relations between the West and Serbia have steadily improved since then.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

7 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Strong probes into Kreminna from the forests are great, keeps them tied down, but it's hard to approach from the W/NW (very boggy ground).  So a left hook into north Luhansk oblast centered around Krasnorichenske (?) looks like it's the logical next phase. Already underway?

Kreminna's short term value to Ukraine is that it sits astride the main route to Lyman.  Since Lyman is already cut off further west, and the road cut somewhere in the Dibrova area, taking Kreminna is not important at the moment.

However, Kreminna is basically a gateway to the rest of Luhansk.  Take that and sky's the limit.  Don't take it and there's still Svatove to the north.  If the desire is to swing southward and put pressure on the Donbas front from its rear, Kreminna is critically important because fighting south from Svatove could be quite costly and arduous.

Although I agree with you about Kreminna having limited approaches from a terrain perspective, if there's nobody in Kreminna worth mentioning, then it might not matter.  Like a well built castle with a gate that isn't manned.

Steve

[LongLeftFlank]

Borova looks like it's being vacated soon, before it becomes another pocket.

More from that thread.... Move over, snow-eating-fog, and meet flesh-eating-tungsten!

 

 

 

Edited October 1, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[Battlefront.com]

6 hours ago, H1nd said:

My latest thread on twitter. Its in Finnish, but the twitter translation function seems to work rather decently. I will probably translate it in english at some point if I have the time. 

Cheers!

-H1nd/Pasi Paroinen

Thanks for your analysis.  I found it quite an interesting read.

To summarize your analysis, you feel Russia is going to fight more deliberately and effectively now that it's forced to.  Lyman being an example of this.  The primary intention is to rebuild and reinforce units on the eastern bank of the Oskil, stall the Ukrainian offensive (or have the weather do it!), build new defensive positions, and try to hold Ukraine there.

This all sounds like what the Russians are planning on doing, but I'm not sure that they can.  The major reason is manpower, which is something we have to completely guess at.

The question, therefore, is how much of the 1st GTA still exists?  It seems the answer is "not much".  That's a big problem as this was the backbone of the defense of the entire area.  From what I've seen in OSINT world, the 1st GTA was badly depleted even before the offensive kicked it out of its positions.  As you stated, a lot of their heavy and specialized equipment was left behind.  You also state that the 144th GMRD was badly mauled during the Kharkiv offensive.  Some OSINT I've seen has it effectively written off as a combat capable unit.  Not due to equipment as much as personnel.

The next question is about the LPR manpower status.  Putting aside whatever they are about to lose in Lyman, the OSINT on these units is not favorable.  Months of heavy losses has reduced their capabilities significantly, in some ways made worse by waves of unwilling mobilized men being forced into service.  ISW assesses that the inevitable and totally predictable has happened... LPR doesn't have any combat aged and conditioned men to throw into the fight any more.

On top of this, it appears that the Russian forces have lost a lot of men defending Lyman and they are about to lose a lot more in the conclusion of the fight.

The untrained Mobiks and limited BARS forces, plus whatever 3rd Army Corps units can be scraped together, is not apparently helping much.

What I sense is that Russia's manpower shortage in the area is acute.  Reorganization is not feasible when the forces in question are either forces to relocate or are expected to conduct military operations other than building defensive positions.  This appears to be what is happening.

As for Russia's plan to use the Oskil as it's new front line, this seems to be already seriously compromised by Ukraine pushing up between Zarichne and Kreminna, well behind the river.  It is also likely going to be directly threatened from the Kupyansk direction, which will likely link up with push north of Lyman.  It also seems that Ukraine has flanked the river to the far north too.

The next defensive line after that is Troitske-Svatove-Krasnorichenske-Kreminna.  Troitske might already be out of the equation, Kreminna is threatened.  Svatove and Krasnorichenske are not good defensive positions as they set at the bottom of a ridgeline that Ukraine is likely going to secure fairly soon.

 

In short... I don't think Russia has the manpower or the support it needs to hold the Oskil line or even the next logical line beyond it (Zherebets River), which is already itself compromised (Kreminna area).  All Russia can hope for is the weather turning terrible and/or Ukraine's forces being too tired to advance.  At some point that will happen, but it seems Ukraine is capable of doing a lot more damage before it is obligated to stop.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

11 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Borova looks like it's being vacated soon, before it becomes another pocket.

Man, it just goes to show how difficult it is to keep up with those pesky Ukrainians!  They get things moving faster than I can type.  And I type very fast

OK, so an addendum to my post... the Oskil line is now in that gray area between compromised and lost.  This means Ukraine will likely start directly threatening the next logical line of defense, which is the Zherebets River, from both the west (coming from Oskil direction) and from the south (coming from the Torske-Kreminna direction.

Factors that might slow this down may creep into the equations, especially weather and exhaustion, but inherently Ukraine will go into the winter season with Russia having rather poor defensive options.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

One for Haiduk and AKD:

Note the BTR on the right of the cameraman looks to have been on parade back in May.

The question I have is if these were dedicated parade vehicles?  I thought I read somewhere that they kept the parade vehicles separate to make sure they looked nice and didn't break down.  If true, then it's fun to see them at the front now.

Steve