How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[The Steppenwulf]

24 minutes ago, Zveroboy1 said:

And instead they have shifted their advance eastward on the north side of the Dniepr?

Those "retreating Rus forces" repositioned to form a shoulder against UA 17th Tank Batt. @sross112source suggests that this is Rus 10th Spec Forces and has moved in to occupy key forward areas in anticipation of a other Rus forces arriving for a northerly attack.

This could be wrong though, my take on situation is that the 10th Spec Forces moved recently to impede potentially dangerous counter attack thrust of 17th Tank Batt since Rus forces surrounding Mykolaiv in past few days would have found themselves cut off.    

Edited March 20, 2022 by The Steppenwulf

[DesertFox]

We will see...

 

 

[BeondTheGrave]

Welcome to 300 boys! 

[sburke]

Russian Priest Defends Calling Ukraine Conflict a 'War' After $330 Fine (msn.com)

[The Steppenwulf]

21 minutes ago, BeondTheGrave said:

Welcome to 300 boys! 

This is a warning to slow down! Once a thread reaches 999 pages the entire BF forum will become quickly unstable and descend into an irreversible crash.... this will spell a terrible omen for the world!

Edited March 20, 2022 by The Steppenwulf

[LongLeftFlank]

13 hours ago, The_Capt said:

I think Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) may be appropriate here.  It is a term that had cache back in the late 90s/early 00's and then lost it because it never really showed up, or at least we could not see it as we got bogged down in one COIN action after another.  But RMAs rarely happen overnight, we might realize them overnight, but they take decades to build up to.  Take WW1, which is an easy example, the hints of what that conflict was likely to turn into go back as far as the US Civil War (entrenching, tunneling around Richmond).  The impact of a group of technologies - long range smoke-less rifles, the machine gun, rapid indirect fire artillery, naval gunnery, info-over-wire, railway technology and canning/food preservation - all took decades to create but when pulled together led to a complete breakdown of military doctrine of the day.

In the modern era, it has been information and AI.  These technologies have been rapidly evolving over the last 20 years into modern C4ISR, long range and highly lethal smart-munitions, unmanned and what looks like crowd-sourced warfare.  We are seeing them being all pulled together in Ukraine and the result has been jarring, especially for the Russians.

I think the term "sharp smart mass" may best describe what the UA has managed to do.  They have highlighted a method, again that we will be studying for years, that looks like a digital jump but is in fact been on a long journey since about 1991. I mean the fact that we have Haiduk, in Kyiv right now, able to push us information directly from the field through social media, is mind blowing. 

One way or another, this will be a "Moneyball moment" for military affairs as we all try and figure out what just happened.  Because by any traditional metric the Russian military should have sliced through the UA and be smashing Kyiv to bits by now instead of bordering on collapse.  We can (and will) put a lot of this on the Russian doorstep; however, we should also be thinking how the UA approach would have faired against western military doctrine and how we might have to adapt our own methods.

"Crowd sourced warfare" - that's a keeper!!!!!

[Kinophile]

300 pages of women & children being murdered by ignorant fools, led by an utterly amoral officer corp, directed by a geriatric sociopath and his sycophants.

Edited March 20, 2022 by Kinophile

[DesertFox]

49 minutes ago, Zveroboy1 said:

Yes not only Liveuamap, even the wikipedia map which is usually fairly conservative and probably always 2-3 days behind events is showing quite a lot of changes

 

Try @War_Mapper instead:

 

 

[Zveroboy1]

Mariupol needs to hold because if/when it falls, it will free up a lot of forces the Russians can use to threaten the whole Donbas in conjunction with the taking of Izyum. Would we see broad sweeping advances? Doubtful. More likely the same slow grind with heavy attrition, but it would still put the JFO in the Donbas area in a precarious position.

Actually the same pattern could be occurring in the north east with the partial encirclements of Sumy and Chernihiv. These are thorns in the Russian's side, which as we have seen can't simply be bypassed, that force them to commit lots of units to secure their supply lines, with catastrophic results so far. But potentially there are lots of forces that could be spared here.

Obviously that wouldn't change the overall strategic or geopolitical picture much.

[Zveroboy1]

14 minutes ago, DesertFox said:

Try @War_Mapper instead:

Yeah there are lots of different takes on it with either small subtle differences or quite major ones. Some are clearly pro Russian maps, some pro Ukrainian. Depending on which one you are looking it at, it definitely changes the assessment one can make of the whole situation.

[Battlefront.com]

47 minutes ago, BeondTheGrave said:

Welcome to 300 boys! 

The old timers here will remember the ancient version of this Forum where we would close up a thread when it hit 300 pages because the software had a tendency to crash after.  So we'd lock up at the magic 300 and then start up a new one.  Usually it was just the Peng thread, which oh-so-many wanted us to lock permanently.  Ah, those were the days.

Steve

[DesertFox]

Some insights about the truck problem the russians face, and it will get worse...

 

 

[Battlefront.com]

12 minutes ago, Zveroboy1 said:

Mariupol needs to hold because if/when it falls, it will free up a lot of forces the Russians can use to threaten the whole Donbas in conjunction with the taking of Izyum. Would we see broad sweeping advances? Doubtful. More likely the same slow grind with heavy attrition, but it would still put the JFO in the Donbas area in a precarious position.

ISW has some thoughts on that in the March 19th report.  Their thoughts are that the attacking forces are getting whittled down to combat ineffective already.  So even if they manage to take Mariupol, there won't be much left to throw into the fight.  They also don't think the timing will work out anyway because the front is already stalled and by the time Mariupol is decidedly cleared out the Russian's ability to regain offensive posture will likely be even worse than it is now.  I concur with these thoughts.

12 minutes ago, Zveroboy1 said:

Actually the same pattern could be occurring in the north east with the partial encirclements of Sumy and Chernihiv. These are thorns in the Russian's side, which as we have seen can't simply be bypassed, that force them to commit lots of units to secure their supply lines, with catastrophic results so far. But potentially there are lots of forces that could be spared here.

Yes, clearing up the border area would have more of a positive impact on Russian operations.  However, there's very little indication that the Russians have any hopes of doing this.

12 minutes ago, Zveroboy1 said:

Obviously that wouldn't change the overall strategic or geopolitical picture much.

Correct.  I'll post something about this in a few minutes.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Zveroboy1 said:

Yes not only Liveuamap, even the wikipedia map which is usually fairly conservative and probably always 2-3 days behind events is showing quite a lot of changes.

I stopped looking to Liveuamap more than a week ago for meaningful information about the frontline and pocket status.  I don't know why, but they've really not been keeping up with the coloring on a day to day basis.  The map updates they just did now reflect the way things were several days ago and not much has changed since.

1 hour ago, Zveroboy1 said:

People were cheering about Russians pulling back from Kherson but actually what seems to be happening is more likely them giving up their thrust to nowhere along a northern axis towards that nuclear plant. And instead they have shifted their advance eastward on the north side of the Dniepr?

The Russians pulled back from Mykolaiv, not Kherson.  They are still operating on the west side of the Dnepr, but headed north towards Kryvyi Rih instead of westward towards Odessa.  ISW, and others, don't think there's any chance of that attack doing anything.  That city is huge and extremely well fortified.  Russia simply doesn't have the numbers to surround it not to mention take it.

You might ask... "so why bother attacking towards it if there's no chance of taking it?".  A good question that apparently nobody in the Kremlin is asking.

1 hour ago, Zveroboy1 said:

And what about Chernihiv? Is it under siege? Similarly Sumy and Sievierodonetsk look almost encircled.

Chernihiv has been mostly surrounded since the war started.  Sumy has been surrounded since the war started.  Areas around Luhansk, on the other hand, are the most active part of the front.  Though even there Russian advances have stalled.

Steve

[Kinophile]

Im curious about the UKR mobilization.

My instinct tells me UKR must defeat/crunch the Kiev assaults - eastern arm first.

So I'm curious about the timing of UKR reserve units leaving refresher training and taking over lesser duties from front line regular UA units, allowing them to rest, recuperate and form an operational reserve for a true, large scale UKR counter attack.

Have we any ideas/info indicators of this?

Or are UKR feeding reserves into different battles as they grind down/stall the RUS advances?

 

 

 

[Vet 0369]

1 hour ago, Fenris said:

This sort of thing must be good for morale and motivation.  Something I really doubt the RF forces will ever see.  Another little factor favouring UKR in the equation.

 

The Norwegian people treated us the same way when we were there for NATO Operation Teamwork in September, 1976. It is an enormous morale boost to feel the population appreciates your presence. Not like SanFrancisco when I returned from Fleet Marine Force, Pacific (FMFPac) in 1971.

[Battlefront.com]

Let's look at the Big Picture for a bit.  What were Putin's stated and implied strategic goals he sought to achieve when he launched the war?  Here's the ones most everybody who has studied Putin have come up with, many of them clearly stated by Putin himself:

• Ukraine made to be economically and politically under Moscow's thumb.  Permanently.  Not just the old Yanukovych type arrangement, but truly controlled by Russia.
• end of democracy in Ukraine.  It gives Russians and would be Russian victims ideas that are harmful to Putin's control
• make the 2014 seizure of Crimea recognized by the Ukrainian government (which is just a Moscow puppet of course)
• cede all of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts to Russia so that Ukraine is permanently weakened (which is debatable that it would be)
• no threat of NATO on Russia's southern border
• weakened NATO to the point where it might be possible to take the Baltics and conduct general mayhem wherever Russia wants to
• rupture the relationship between the US and NATO
• rupture the relationships between US and EU
• making the EU cower and stop trying to present people a better alternative to Russian economic relations
• score some seriously huge points with the Russian people so that the rumblings of discontent will quiet down
• generally speaking, make the world fear (aka "respect") Russia as a dominant power in the world, equal to the US and EU as it was back in the Soviet days

I might be forgetting some of the obvious goals, but I think that covers the majority of them.

Of this list, which of these things are still possible for Russia to achieve?  Almost none.  The ones they might still have some hope of achieving are slim chances and not likely to last for very long.  That's because Putin has weakened Russia in every way to an extent where there might not even be a Russia remaining which could benefit from whatever gains might be made.

All Russia can do is dig its own grave deeper and murder a lot of people in the process.

Steve

[THH149]

What's happened to the Ukr 1st Tank Brigade that seems to have been encircled around Chernihiv? How are they getting supplied?

[Battlefront.com]

10 minutes ago, Kinophile said:

Im curious about the UKR mobilization.

My instinct tells me UKR must defeat/crunch the Kiev assaults - eastern arm first.

So I'm curious about the timing of UKR reserve units leaving refresher training and taking over lesser duties from front line regular UA units, allowing them to rest, recuperate and form an operational reserve for a true, large scale UKR counter attack.

Have we any ideas/info indicators of this?

Or are UKR feeding reserves into different battles as they grind down/stall the RUS advances?

All very good questions.

My read on this is Ukraine is not rushing reserves into the fight before they are ready because they don't have to.  This is in contrast to 2014 when they didn't have time on their side at all.  Russia's fake separatist forces, backed by some Russian units, were making too many gains too quickly.  They had to throw everything at them and, fortunately, it worked because the quality of the proxies were terrible.

This should make Russia very, very nervous.  While Russia is scraping the bottom of the barrel to simply hold the rather modest amount of terrain they grabbed, the Ukrainians haven't even started to tap into their manpower.  Soon the Ukrainian forces in the fight will outnumber the Russians *and* they'll have more still to draw upon.

If Russia and/or Belarus goes into western Ukraine, then they'll be hit with the standing Army forces and the Territorial Defenders already deployed, and potentially over 100,000 new forces that are in the process of forming up.

Things will be ugly in the west for only a short time before Russia suffers an obvious defeat.

Steve

[THH149]

6 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

I might be forgetting some of the obvious goals,

Agree here, but I would add that blooding the Russian Forces will be an important outcome for the other things he wants to do vis Baltic states. Only real world experience can develop an armed force beyond a corrupt payday into something that can change facts on the ground with finality. Russian is learning a lot of lessons on how to fight, that the US learned in Iraq 1 and 2.

[Battlefront.com]

3 minutes ago, THH149 said:

What's happened to the Ukr 1st Tank Brigade that seems to have been encircled around Chernihiv? How are they getting supplied?

The forces there are NOT cut off.  The supply lines are difficult, but they exist.

Here's a map that appears to be more accurate than some of the ones out there:

[CAZmaj]

22 hours ago, LongLeftFlank said:

"Stop sending people to kill me. We've already captured five of them, one of them with a bomb and another with a rifle (...) If you don't stop sending killers, I'll send one to Moscow, and I won't have to send a second."

- Josip Broz Tito

There were many more than five.

[THH149]

2 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

[img]https://militaryland.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/day_23_fullmap-768x543.png[/img]

Sorry I couldnt access that...

 

[Battlefront.com]

5 minutes ago, THH149 said:

Agree here, but I would add that blooding the Russian Forces will be an important outcome for the other things he wants to do vis Baltic states. Only real world experience can develop an armed force beyond a corrupt payday into something that can change facts on the ground with finality. Russian is learning a lot of lessons on how to fight, that the US learned in Iraq 1 and 2.

The lessons that Russia is learning now are that Russia does not have the potential for threatening NATO in any meaningful way.  The reasons for that are not fixable.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

Just now, THH149 said:

Sorry I couldnt access that...

 

The UI for adding an image link didn't work so I tried the old way.  Apparently the IMG tags no longer function, so I downloaded and then uploaded the image.  That worked See previous post.

Steve