How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[FancyCat]

Algeria was considered a core part of France until it wasn't. 

[Beleg85]

1 hour ago, billbindc said:

It's pretty important to note...as commentators with a lot of experience in Russia always remind us...is that there is a virtually bottomless well of cynicism in modern Russian culture. Will Russians say that Crimea is an unbreakable part of the Russia soul? Sure...when they think somebody is listening. What most of them really think is that this is way above their heads, that they can't control it and that they aren't going to be like those fools who got arrested protesting it.

+1. However, when comes to this specific case (Crimea) I think a lot of them are genuine. Of course common people do not care about strategic postures, maritime shelf resources etc. What they know is their parents (or even themselves) spend vacation in this "Russian Greece" with nice beaches and warm weather. And that significant part of their culture (movies, books etc.) is taking place in this imagined environment. This is all in all quite powerful historical imaginarium. So would they send their own sons into meatgrinder in order to hold it/ take it back? Very unlikely. If they would send their neighbours' sons? Yes, they would.

I am not sure about Donbas, though. Perhaps several years of non-stop hurrapatriotic zombification will do enough damage to their brains in the end, but it seems they are collectivelly not there yet. Putin could probably sell entire Donbas and several islands in the Far East before this war started, and if he only shared money with enough people they would propbably accept it. Reality is so malleable there, including this nationalistic zeal.

Edited February 6, 2023 by Beleg85

[The_Capt]

13 hours ago, Khalerick said:

Yes, the Russian army's artillery fire support is excellent. It's not as good as the Americans, but it is good. 

My assumptions are based upon fighting on the backfoot in a fixed position against vast volumes of enemy artillery fire. They're based upon Bakhmut being dangerously close to operational encirclement for weeks now which means established bases of fire are attacking from multiple angles. They're also based upon the occasional murmur of intel coming through that Ukrainian losses are really bad. 

My strategy is to fight in more open ground. 

Dogwalked into static, attritional warfare.

Ok, well you have already been pretty badly beat up on just about all your comments and positions with respect to military assessment.  This is not a bar, posting some credible references or something, anything that supports your position may be an idea as we move forward.  But it is a free country and that comes with all the good and bad in the end.

So lets talk about "Russian Advantage", because that is what this all comes down to in the end.  In line with the Russian Economic Advantage, what is the Russian Military Advantage and how does that translate into future outcomes etc?  Well the obvious one, from those who deeply study warfare, is capacity.  Russia, as has been shown on infographics since day one of this war, has got mountains of steel and an ocean of fighting aged males to throw at a poor huddling Ukraine as it just barely manages to hang on.  There is some truth to this although I personally think it has been over emphasized to a large extent as Russian willpower to actually spend all that steel and blood is clearly not a "done deal" with respect to this war.  If it was, Putin would have fully mobilized at the terrifying scope and scale the Russian Bear is capable of as demonstrated by so many Hollywood movies and myth.  Ok, lets not quibble, the RA is a big ol beast, with a large industry behind it...got it.

So does size still matter?  Does it matter in this environment?  Does it become a liability in this environment?  And finally, why has Russia largely failed on the battlefields of Ukraine if size and attrition were the critical factors in this war?  Why has Russia largely failed on the battlefields of Ukraine when they also had advantage in manoeuvre?

What I do not get from the "Russia is going to win" crowd, is what is their explanation of the exceptionally poor battlefield performance of the RA, which has led Russia into what is now a morass and quagmire (if this was a US war, people would be all over those words)?

And Russian performance - outstanding gunners and all - has been abysmal.  Pulling from the RUIS preliminary report:

https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/preliminary-lessons-conventional-warfighting-russias-invasion-ukraine-february-july-2022

Russia had enormous mass advantage in Phase I of this war.  12:1 of mechanized forces north of Ukraine (pg 1).  By all traditional military metrics that is an overwhelming force ration advantage.  They were stopped cold.  Worse, after a month of mooing like cows in column while getting pounded they had to withdraw from 2 out of the 6 major operational axis of advance, many of those units reportedly at 20-30% strength after a month of being cut up and hammered by UA "tiny" artillery.  So that was the first really bad sign, again if the US had suffered a similar setback in 2003 south of Bagdad people would have lost their minds - or gleefully celebrated the downfall of US power in the region, whichever their leaning.  Ukrainian War Phase I - this is done, it is fact.

Then Russia did a political spin in quick order and re-drew the definitions of victory.  "The Northern Offensive as a feint" which is brutally laughable at those force ratios pointed at a capital city and seat of political power in nation you are invading.  They then re-set the official line as "The Donbas" and began a crushing and grinding assault on the region during Phase II of this war.  Recall the cauldrons and pincers with bold red arrows all over maps last Apr-May?  "Attrition against Russia will never work!" people cried..."Ukraine cannot win"..."Russia has reframed this war to their strengths."  Well turns out they were wrong then too.  Russia, at one point at Severodonetsk, has mounted over 900 guns in a density to rival the western front in WWI.  They turned entire fields in the Ukraine into moonscapes as they completely abandoned mechanized warfare and did a "blast-advance-repeat" older style of overwhelming firepower.  But what actually happened?

Well they did not achieve an operational level breakthrough - against a vastly outnumbered and gunned UA.  We did not see a single mechanized, or otherwise, break through - let alone break out - in that campaign.  We did see some horrific Russian river crossing attempts and casualty rates, but remember "Russian Bear!!"  The UA stood back and took it.  I recall the rumblings on social media of UA troops, under trained and equipped for this fight...it was only a matter of time.  But it went nowhere.  Russia managed to take Severodonetsk, and Lysychansk and advance a couple dozen kms towards Slovyanks - which I am sure as a "studier of warfare" you recognize as the obvious operational objective in the region. 

And then the RA stalled and ran out of gas.  No other way to put it.  At a strategic level Russia "mobilized" which is never a good sign for how things are going on the ground (see: conscription and Vietnam).  Russian attacks and firepower all waned.  Phase II was a poor outing that had high costs and yielded very few gains.  And then Phase III happened.  

The UA, who was supposed to be on the ropes and barely hanging on, went on the offensive.   We all knew Kherson was an operational objective but conditions were clearly set for Kharkiv as well.  My hypothesis is that the RA burned itself out so badly at Severodonetsk that the entire Kharkiv line eroded out.  So then we saw this:

https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/09/15/a-stunning-counter-offensive-by-ukraines-armed-forces

That is what a breakin, breakthrough and breakout battle looks like.  It does not look like what we are used to, but the UA managed to make the entire right flank of the RA collapse in about 30 days.  And then they were not done yet:

https://www.graphicnews.com/en/pages/43152/ukraine-kherson-counteroffensive

Now this was not Dunkirk that we wanted, but retaking the capital of a region that Russia just did a big show of annexing is nothing but a win in my books.

And so here we are, Winter 2023 and the "Ukraine can't win" crowd - who do have legitimate concerns, I will not take that away - are back.  So I am not going to dig into the current state of the RA or an assessment of their actual fighting capacity at this point based on what we are seeing - human wave attacks with weaker artillery is again not a good sign.  All the while the UA is getting larger and larger injects of greater capability.  Or how fundamental conditions like ISR, air power or sustainment have not actually changed.

What I am going to do is make the "Ukraine can't win crowd" do the actual work to prove their point.  Based on all of that above, and the progress of this war to date, you have two ways to go.   The UA and Ukraine are barely holding on and are going to break any second - lets call this the Macgregor school.  Or the "Russia is just getting started and has magic rabbits by the fuzzy buttload in hats".  Based on the progress of the war so far you are going to have to provide evidence and facts that support the idea that conditions have fundamentally changed.  That those changes will alter the current trajectory of this war.  This is something I have not seen one credible coherent argument put forward in this whole thing.

In fact, I will give you opportunity to take a shot, and then if I have time I might just try to do it for you, if I can. 

[Seminole]

15 minutes ago, The_Capt said:

What I am going to do is make the "Ukraine can't win crowd" do the actual work to prove their point. 

I think everyone agrees 'Ukraine can't win'.

What most everyone is wondering, is how much help from the West will it take for Ukraine to win, and whether/when they're going to get it.

Is there an escalation that Russia has available that gets the West to not provide the requisite support?

Can that 'escalation' take the form of greater strategic patience?

I don't pretend to know.

I was in the crowd that thought Putin's Feb. build up was going to extract some concessions toward the Minsk agreements, because it was hard to calculate how a full scale war was worth the cost.  Made me remember I don't know what value the enemy puts on all the variables of this 'Drake's equation' of whether it is worth it to go to war.

[Zeleban]

Three Russian tanks destroyed near Ugledar. Attention at the beginning of the video is a burning Russian tanker

[Zeleban]

8 minutes ago, Seminole said:

I think everyone agrees 'Ukraine can't win'.

 

I disagree

[sburke]

6 minutes ago, Zeleban said:

I disagree

yeah I was wondering what in the world that comment meant when most here feel exactly the opposite.  My guess he meant that Russia would have occupied Ukraine in the absence of western support.  The problem with that is assuming that occupying meant Russia would win when the reality is Russia would have been stuck with a massive insurgency.  It may have taken much longer, but in the end Ukraine would still win.

[danfrodo]

11 hours ago, Twisk said:

Where does Ukraine retreat to that it has better odds?

This is a point I keep coming back to in my thinking.  When RU tries to advance, UKR will eventually have to actually stop them.  Thus far UKR has chosen to engage in flexible defense that heavily bleeds the enemy while possible and then falls back once the local defensive advantage no longer exists.  If Bakhmut becomes untenable, UKR will pull back.  But RU will then be again engaging them on the next line.  

14 minutes ago, Seminole said:

I think everyone agrees 'Ukraine can't win

No idea what this even means.  RU can fully lose or pull out some stalemate, but they can't win.  UKR can win or end in some stalemate.  Lose for UKR meant RU takes over the country.  Lose for RU means it has minimal gains at insane cost -- oh, wait, it already has the insane cost part.  They just need to lose some more territory.

Maneuver discussion above:  of course we want maneuver, but the ground over most of the country has been unsuitable for months.  This has allowed RU to concentrate force along the better roads.  It aint rocket science to know that you can't maneuver if you are mostly roadbound.  And when the ground is better UKR will still have to do some attrition to get to the maneuver stage since RU has had time to make a relatively continuous defensive line.  The line is easy to defend when there's only a few avenues of advance.  It'll be a harder to defend along +500km of line once the ground is dry.  There will be weak points and UKR will hopefully find & exploit them.  And then hopefully we see some maneuver.  I've given up hope of any major movement until the ground is solid.

RU can't really do maneuver warfare because it's now a mostly infantry force.

[Battlefront.com]

2 hours ago, The_Capt said:

But essentially we have debunked the entire “it is all about oil and gas” more than once.  Russia did not need those reserves, or in the case of the Black Sea, already had control of them.  And the costs of accessing them are going to exceed any gains for a very long time, maybe never at this rate.

Not to mention that Russia has long relied upon Western partnerships for such resource extraction.  As with so many things within the Russian economy, they went cheap and fast by outsourcing the difficult stuff so they could rake in easy profits.  Sanctions pretty much preclude Russia from getting anything out of these areas for the current regime's use.

Steve

[Bulletpoint]

Sorry if this has already been discussed, but why is the US dragging its feet about the Abrams, insisting that they order new ones fresh from the factory (which will take a long time since there are also other countries waiting for their deliveries, and Ukraine won't be given priority) instead of grabbing some of the thousands they already have in store?

[Seminole]

14 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

No idea what this even means.

If foreign support for Ukraine dries up tomorrow, who do you think would get the betting odds on the outcome?

I thought everyone agrees Ukraine can’t win alone, but instead the debate is how much support it will take, and for how long, and with that still requiring a decision on what constitutes a ‘win’.  
 

But alone, you don’t think Ukraine is going to ‘win’ this, do you?

[JonS]

@Bulletpoint secret sauce armour cant be exported

Edited February 6, 2023 by JonS

[Kraft]

33 minutes ago, Zeleban said:

Three Russian tanks destroyed near Ugledar. Attention at the beginning of the video is a burning Russian tanker

With the losses they are cumulating there I get the feeling this is already more than a probe. So far it doesnt seem like the attacks really paid off, despite giving Oryx some more work.

[Butschi]

11 minutes ago, Bulletpoint said:

Sorry if this has already been discussed, but why is the US dragging its feet about the Abrams, insisting that they order new ones fresh from the factory (which will take a long time since there are also other countries waiting for their deliveries, and Ukraine won't be given priority) instead of grabbing some of the thousands they already have in store?

You thought only Scholz can scholz?

[Bulletpoint]

3 minutes ago, JonS said:

@Bulletpoint secret sauce armour cant be exported

I was thinking maybe it was something about that, but don't they also have loads of older, less saucy models in store?

Edited February 6, 2023 by Bulletpoint

[Battlefront.com]

15 minutes ago, sburke said:

yeah I was wondering what in the world that comment meant when most here feel exactly the opposite.  My guess he meant that Russia would have occupied Ukraine in the absence of western support.  The problem with that is assuming that occupying meant Russia would win when the reality is Russia would have been stuck with a massive insurgency.  It may have taken much longer, but in the end Ukraine would still win.

This is the premise I had been working with before this war happened.  It went something like this:

1.  Russia would invade with a huge force

2.  Ukraine would successfully savage it for a couple of weeks, but ultimately the conventional war east of the Dnipro would be lost with the exception of Kyiv as Russia wouldn't have the resources to take it.

3.  The surviving conventional forces would be forced to the western side of the Dnipro, where Russia would be unable to pursue them for practical reasons.  Kyiv would be sealed off and bombarded, but not directly assaulted until consolidation of seized territories was secured enough to free up forces.

4.  The seized territories would never be subdued.  Too much territory to secure and too much motivation for Ukraine to resist would mean a major headache for Russia right from the get-go.

5.  The West would flood Ukraine with weapons and aid to rebuild its conventional forces and continue the partisan struggle.

6.  Ukraine's conventional forces would continue to pose serious problems for Russia long term.

7.  Eventually Russia would be worn out from sanctions and a never ending war.  It would take many years for this to happen, but like Afghanistan it would eventually come to the same end for the Kremlin.

 

I think the evidence from this war supports this premise if Russia hadn't sucked at war to the extent it does.  But it does and so that's why this scenario didn't unfold.

Steve

[Zeleban]

3 minutes ago, Seminole said:

If foreign support for Ukraine dries up tomorrow, who do you think would get the betting odds on the outcome?

I thought everyone agrees Ukraine can’t win alone, but instead the debate is how much support it will take, and for how long, and with that still requiring a decision on what constitutes a ‘win’.  
 

But alone, you don’t think Ukraine is going to ‘win’ this, do you?

 

Actually, Chechnya managed to win in 1996 without foreign support

[danfrodo]

2 minutes ago, Seminole said:

If foreign support for Ukraine dries up tomorrow, who do you think would get the betting odds on the outcome?

I thought everyone agrees Ukraine can’t win alone, but instead the debate is how much support it will take, and for how long, and with that still requiring a decision on what constitutes a ‘win’.  
 

But alone, you don’t think Ukraine is going to ‘win’ this, do you?

ohhhh, that's what you meant, thanks for clarifying.  I think a lot of folks here were wondering because you normally don't post things that makes folks wonder.  Yes, UKR alone would be in serious trouble and thankfully they aint alone.

[pintere]

1 hour ago, The_Capt said:

The UA and Ukraine are barely holding on and are going to break any second - lets call this the Macgregor school.  Or the "Russia is just getting started and has magic rabbits by the fuzzy buttload in hats". 

Bearing in mind that, if anything, it’s the Ukrainians who’ve shown far more talent in pulling rabbits out of hats in this war.

The Russian withdrawal from northern Ukraine? Sinking of Moskva? Surprise Kharkiv Counteroffensive? Kherson withdrawal? All these happened quite suddenly, and without (apparent) warning. Meanwhile almost every one of Russia‘s battlefield successes were both drawn out and very predictable.

[Battlefront.com]

12 minutes ago, Seminole said:

ut alone, you don’t think Ukraine is going to ‘win’ this, do you?

Absolutely.  See my previous post.  Even if the West didn't supply Ukraine with equipment there would be an insurgency and that insurgency doesn't need HIMARS or Abrams to defeat Russia.  A lack of Western support simply draws out the conflict much longer.

Plus, there are no realistic scenarios where the West doesn't help Ukraine in a significant way.  If there was, we'd already have seen it.  Support might slacken off in the coming years, but it will never go down to zero.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

2 minutes ago, Zeleban said:

 

Actually, Chechnya managed to win in 1996 without foreign support

Afghanistan mostly did as well.  The amount of aid flowing in from neighboring countries was helpful, not critical.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

3 minutes ago, pintere said:

Bearing in mind that, if anything, it’s the Ukrainians who’ve shown far more talent in pulling rabbits out of hats in this war.

The Russian withdrawal from northern Ukraine? Sinking of Moskva? Surprise Kharkiv Counteroffensive? Kherson withdrawal? All these happened quite suddenly, and without (apparent) warning. Meanwhile almost every one of Russia‘s battlefield successes were both drawn out and very predictable.

Exactly this.  So far the Russians have only surprised us by being so terrible at all the things they were supposed to be really good at.  Ukraine, on the other hand, keeps doing stuff that Western militaries are concerned someone might do to them (cough... China... cough).

Steve

[Butschi]

2 hours ago, Kraft said:

Just because Putin declared they consider some parts of Ukraine as Russian doesnt mean he will start ww3 for it.

It also doesn't mean that he doesn't.

2 hours ago, Kraft said:

In fact, there is ongoing and daily proof that Russia does not Nuke anyone even though they have lost and abandoned major parts of their "homeland".

Oh? Did I miss the news that AFU are now driving on Moscow? Or Sevastopol?

Seriously, I don't get this kind of "logic". Since when does the fact that something hasn't happened yet proof that it won't happen in the future?

What you make of this is entirely up to you but frankly just ignoring the fact that Russia does have nukes is plain foolish and it is a good thing that apparently none of our (i e. Western) political leaders takes it as lightly as you do.

Anyway, this part of the discussion is going round in circles.

Edited February 6, 2023 by Butschi

[Vanir Ausf B]

9 minutes ago, Bulletpoint said:

I was thinking maybe it was something about that, but don't they also have loads of older, less saucy models in store?

Export models have different armor. AFAIK there are none of those in storage.

[The_Capt]

20 minutes ago, Seminole said:

I think everyone agrees 'Ukraine can't win'.

What most everyone is wondering, is how much help from the West will it take for Ukraine to win, and whether/when they're going to get it.

Is there an escalation that Russia has available that gets the West to not provide the requisite support?

Can that 'escalation' take the form of greater strategic patience?

I don't pretend to know.

I was in the crowd that thought Putin's Feb. build up was going to extract some concessions toward the Minsk agreements, because it was hard to calculate how a full scale war was worth the cost.  Made me remember I don't know what value the enemy puts on all the variables of this 'Drake's equation' of whether it is worth it to go to war.

Did you mean "Ukraine can win?"  Because I do not think for a second that they "can't".  In fact in many ways they already have.  Now can Ukraine still lose?  Of course this is a war - an enormous collision of peoples.  All sides can win or lose depending on how those terms are defined.  The issue becomes one of probability.   History if full of wars that are over but we still cannot really tell who won or lost. 

Right now the probability of a Russian loss is very high.  The probability of a Ukrainian 'win' - and here we need to carefully define things, is also high.  But winning is a spectrum.  There is "hey we are still an independent but occupied sovereign nation with a decades worth of western support behind us".  There is "we pushed them back to 2022 lines, but still have an open sore to deal with just like post 2014 - but we still have all the western support and pull."  And then there is "we drove the damned Russkies all the way back to their own borders, the peoples of Crimea and Donbas have seen the light and rejoined the nation - we are unified, the best armed military in eastern Europe, on our way to entering the EU and NATO."  And the spaces in between.  For the West there is a different calculus.  And then there is Russia.  All war is negotiation. 

Escalation.  It probably gets the most traction of any concept out there.  Escalation dominance, the ladder, controlled versus uncontrolled, nuclear/WMD escalation.  What we are really talking about is escalation deterrence.  Can either side deter the other through a threat of escalation?  Patience is not an escalation strategy - that is exhaustion but we can come back to this.  The escalation calculus in this war is complex - a lot of parties in play.  However, my sense is that the West currently has the escalatory high ground in this war - at least as far as hard metrics, soft is another story.  In the hard metrics of power, the West has barely taken their wallets out nor have they scratched the surface of what is on the menu.  For example, the US has about 365 M142s:

https://www.thedefensepost.com/2022/09/14/us-army-himars-2028/#:~:text=The US Army currently operates,US Marine Corps has 47.

And what looks to be about 1000 M270s (the HIMARs was the poor mans M270 remember):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M270_Multiple_Launch_Rocket_System

So far as I can tell they have given 20 to Ukraine:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/03/world/europe/himars-rockets-us-ukraine-war.html#:~:text=The United States has so,are made by Lockheed Martin.

And still has the ATACMs option.  So that is a LOT of conventional escalation room for a single system.   We have not even really started to unpack things like C4ISR, where I have no doubt there is room - like say inside Russia itself.

So the West had a significant qualitative and quantitative advantage in a lot of key areas.  Now as to Russia.  Well lets not get too up in our own supply.  Russia does still have a large defence industry, one of the largest in the world.  It also has conventional escalation room, but the problem for Russia has been the same one they have had since the start of this - they are tooled for the wrong war.  Russian defence, with the exception of some niche high-profile boutique capability, few of which have seen actual battlefield use (T-14 anyone?), is still built for competitive advantage through traditional mass.  This has been a fundamental problem for Russia in this war - their mass-advantage is not working. It has continually failed to deliver expected results throughout this entire thing.  So the outstanding question remains: can Russia out mass Ukraine and the West?  Followed by, can they "out mass" in a way that actually works?

Those are huge questions.  The second one is the most dangerous.  Because if they cannot, then they have to completely reorientate their strategic defence industry in the middle of a war.  They already are in many ways with the purchases from Iran.  So this would mean that the Russian escalation room in the conventional sphere is in effect rendered neutralized until they can make the shift, or prove that mass still does matter.  As far as we can see Russian mobilization of mass, has been pretty much what we thought it was going to be.  Large piles of poorly trained troops being thrown at a highly complex problem.  The single largest problem Russia has is ISR inferiority compared to the West (US specifically) - turns out the RMA and EBO guys were right after all.  And that is not something a military fixes in a year or two.

So outside the nuclear equation (and lets not go there again), the escalation calculus is actually pointing the other way.  The West can send in more high tech next gen equipment - hell we really sent the Ukraine last gen equipment.  The West can outspend Russia if they wish.  And we have not even scratched the surface of hard escalation - no fly zones, sea denial and cyber.  Let alone NATO troops on the ground.  All this for good reasons.  They are highly unlikely, in fact my bet is they are our next rungs up the ladder if Russia actually tries tactical WMDs - and Russia knows this.  That is escalation deterrence.

So it is Russia on the tightrope with respect to hard power, not us.  Now as to soft factors like morale, will and fatigue - well that is a different conversation.  Toughest thing to do in the post-modern era is to try and convince westerners that something more than 10kms away from where they live, or more than one election cycle out, is important.  Second toughest thing is to get at least two highly entitled generations to actually be willing to sacrifice anything.  So can Russia out-escalate us on a willpower dimension - well I guess we will see and kind of why we are all talking about it here.