How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, c3k said:

I'm speaking out of my depth here, but I listened to an interesting report about Chinese finances. Their property bubble is a huge issue. Apparently, the burgeoning (hell, "explosive") growth in Chinese middle class has fueled a speculation bubble. With their newfound excess income, they had to invest in something. They cannot invest in traditional western/capitalist forms. The primary place to invest (for retirement, growth, etc.) has been pretty limited to just real estate. 

This is a big problem for the CCP. (Let alone the individuals/families who will see years/decades of wealth accumulation and savings just evaporate.)

Again, a bit out of my depth, so take with a few pinches of salt.

Not my area of expertise in detail either, but I have been (somewhat) paying attention to this for some months now.  Fun listening to the BBC at 3 in the morning when plowing snow

We lived through a massive housing bubble bursting not all that long ago and we know how bad it was for everybody.  The thought of the scale of economic disruption when things implode in China's market... yeah, not good for anybody.

Steve

[akd]

@sburke @Kinophile

Major Yury Belitchenko, Flight Commander in 55th Separate Helicopter Regiment, SMD (I think).

Looks five other dead guys memorialized on the rockets as well.

[Machor]

Claimed to be a TB2 shot down 70 km inside Russia in Kursk, and speculated to have participated in the attack on Bryansk (no missiles):

1 hour ago, c3k said:

Their property bubble is a huge issue.

You may want to check out what's happening up north here. 

[c3k]

 

14 minutes ago, Machor said:

 

You may want to check out what's happening up north here. 

^^^

The above was in reference to a statement about the Chinese housing bubble. (Embedded quotes don't seem to carry over.)

Yeah, the US housing bubble is the one I'm familiar with. Not sure about other nations' and their bubbles. The difference is that the Chinese bubble is more like our housing bubble, their personal 401k, and privately held stocks...all wrapped up in a single, non-diversified, investment. Because that's what it is.  The societal effects on China should this collapse as it is feared to...will be epic.

[Vacillator]

Perhaps a day when we're discussing housing bubbles on the 'Ukraine thread' is not such a bad day ?

[Battlefront.com]

Another story about large scale refusal to fight in Ukraine.  100 Chechens, two of which were shot to death to set the record straight about who is in control:

 

[dan/california]

Real economic support for Ukraine.

[akd]

Oh look, they’re expropriating the Ukrainian harvest again:

 

Edited April 27, 2022 by akd

[Fenris]

That was quick, announced yesterday, already on the plane.  M777's from AU.

 

 

[LongLeftFlank]

On 4/23/2022 at 5:31 AM, Combatintman said:

Dovhenke is certainly useful if you want to motor down the main road into Slovyansk but indirectly.  It sits in dead ground to that road so direct fires onto it are not possible but I see this as either an operation to secure the flanks for anything rolling down the road by denying a safe haven for shoot and scoot ATGM equipped parties or potentially using a covered approach to get into the wooded feature east of the village which does offer LOS onto the road.  That then serves as a jumping off point to clear the woods SE and east.

This area of ground leapt out at me early on when I was doing the terrain analysis as either a potential Named Area of Interest (NAI) or a Target Area of Interest (TAI).  It is not a bad Engagement Area (EA) and sits between a battalion and company-sized defensive position.  If resources permit, the Ukrainians could bottle that road up comfortably with a battalion (see diagrams) and if resources are tighter, it is possibly doable with a company, particularly if supported by a reasonably swept up obstacle plan with some gunnery on priority call.  My instinct for the latter option would be to position the company where the southernmost company astride the road is located in the battalion laydown.

 

Fierce battles around Dovhenke, key to the Izyum-Sloviansk road, much as @Combatintman predicted.

"Dan" continues to piece together outstanding chronos of various key actions...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 28, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[gnarly]

2 hours ago, Hapless said:

Zooming down from 30k feet to about ten feet: apparently CCTV footage of the attack on the Transnistrian Ministry of State Security building (or whatever it's called).

https://www.reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/uddy8q/the_footage_of_the_shelling_of_the_building_of/

Doesn't exactly look professional: maybe it's not supposed to, maybe whoever it is is just crap.

I for one can't help but hear Benny Hill music when I watch the first guy trying to dodge the other two backblasts... and failing.

 

I swear shooter #3 walked right into the sight-picture of shooter #2...?

[LongLeftFlank]

Reposting Strelkov's 23 Apr, because we need to keep looking through the enemy's eyes.

 

 

 

And yeah, I still don't love @kraze's Orc theory, but if those iron shoes fit...

Uglúk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob búbhosh skai!

 

Edited April 28, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[Ultradave]

3 hours ago, c3k said:

I was never in procurement. However, I understand that some of the cost of military aircraft is that the USN/USAF also include a contractual clause that the production machinery needs to be stored even after the build is done.  At least, I know I read that about one specific (expensive) aircraft. That requirement was a large part of the per airframe cost.

The obvious reason is to maintain an ability to restart production should the need arise.

About moldings, etc.: some market efficiencies will tend towards a single-source solution. Competitors will be winnowed away until only one is left. Having multiple vendors available should keep prices under control...and add resiliency to the supply chain.

Critical defense needs should have multiple domestic sources of production.  That costs money.

 It does indeed cost money. I can't describe much in specifics but we had a material we used, sole source vendor because no one else makes it. Also for obscure reasons they own the manufacturing process so other vendors had trouble (a LOT of trouble, like stuff catching fire) duplicating it. Sole source company had no incentive to let loose the process because this was 10% of their total sales.

It took YEARS of analysis and testing to find a new material that could be made (already was actually) by multiple vendors. The cost to qualify vendors though, was pretty eye-watering. For this it's actually a common material although not normally supplied to such stringent quality and consistency, for which there are very valid technical reasons, so not just the DOD being DOD-ish. In the end the sole source vendor wasn't put out because they also supply other material and this special material was a PIA for them, scheduling wise and tricky process.

It's simple for someone to say, "Well, just get another supplier" In practice that can be a huge long term effort, and there are good valid reasons for that.

Dave

[LongLeftFlank]

10 hours ago, Haiduk said:

About Yampil' information is contraversal. Now local source in Lyman writes Russians are still assaulting the town. 

This seems like excellent news, since the UA has time to pin out a nice deep killing zone in that open country in front of Kryva Luka.

...But let's make no mistake, the 79th lads in Yampil are buying that time with their blood.

I'll defer to those who do this for a living, but

1. my CM sense tells me the Russians are hemmed in by the Dibrova forest (there's a golf course lol!) on their right and the river (boggy ground) on their left. There's really just that *one road.* Nice bottleneck, with another fortified village (Kryva Luka) to fight through at the end of it.  Write off 1-1/2 more BTGs to get that done?

2. And then Ivan needs to cross the river.... on their current pattern, it could take them a week to even attempt it?

A quick look at the ground [loc. unconfirmed]. Note there are some elevation changes here (Seviersky Donets river valley?), in case anyone had mental pictures of featureless undulating steppelands....

 

Edited April 28, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[Kinophile]

9 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

I wonder if he was part of the leadership decapitation attempts in Kyiv.  IIRC they were still trying to do this up until the end of the 2nd week.

Steve

I read recently there have been eleven assassination attempts on Zelensky.

 

[Gpig]

Igor Girkin sounds like he’s been reading the forum, here.

[chrisl]

41 minutes ago, Ultradave said:

 It does indeed cost money. I can't describe much in specifics but we had a material we used, sole source vendor because no one else makes it. Also for obscure reasons they own the manufacturing process so other vendors had trouble (a LOT of trouble, like stuff catching fire) duplicating it. Sole source company had no incentive to let loose the process because this was 10% of their total sales.

It took YEARS of analysis and testing to find a new material that could be made (already was actually) by multiple vendors. The cost to qualify vendors though, was pretty eye-watering. For this it's actually a common material although not normally supplied to such stringent quality and consistency, for which there are very valid technical reasons, so not just the DOD being DOD-ish. In the end the sole source vendor wasn't put out because they also supply other material and this special material was a PIA for them, scheduling wise and tricky process.

It's simple for someone to say, "Well, just get another supplier" In practice that can be a huge long term effort, and there are good valid reasons for that.

Dave

And sometimes even the first (and only) vendor can barely make the material or product.  I'm dealing with that right now on a couple of non-defense projects at companies that do a lot of defense work for similar things.  If the primary company can barely manufacture it, it's going to be nearly impossible to second source, and that gets exacerbated by them treating what little they can do repeatably as the keys to the universe, which it is for them.  At best you can try to get them to set up an additional production setup somewhere away from the first facility, with no guarantee of success.  And if the wrong person retires or dies, then you sometimes lose part of the process with them.

For something like stingers, I'd suspect the hardest part is getting an IR detector as crummy as whatever they use. The original design predates personal computers by a few decades.  It's been updated a few times since then, but IR (and non IR) sensors have changed a *lot* since the last update. Even if they can't get more of whatever the computer is, it's probably possible to put in an overpowered FPGA or microcontroller and run a simulator of the chip it's supposed to have (assuming you can get any FPGAs or microcontrollers at all right now), but they also have to somehow work in some kind of modern IR sensor or get someone to dedicate some equipment to making the old ones and tweak things accordingly.

[G.I. Joe]

5 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Note that much of the fantasy talk about Russia being able to fight a "long war" is based on the presumption that oil/gas revenue will be sufficient to cover all economic expenses and those directly tied to the war.  Which is crazy talk right there, since it wasn't able to afford its military before the war and sanctions.  But even if we go with that divorced-from-reality concept, how does the "long war" look if just under half (42%) of their oil/gas revenue is eliminated?   And what happens when Russia's oil/gas machinery starts to break down without repair parts?

The response from the "long war" crowd is that China will buy from Russia to make up for the loss of the EU and Chinese banks will lend the rest of what it needs.  More nonsense.

First, China is not going to purchase energy resources from Russia that it doesn't need or can get from its own sources (which are vastly more stable, mind you).  So unless it needs the same volume as Europe cuts off buying, then Russia will be worse off than when the war started.  More importantly, do you think China is going to pay market rate or will it force Russia into selling cheap?  Selling cheap, of course.  That means China would have to important proportionally MORE oil/gas than the EU did.

How is all this oil and gas going to get to China?  There is no existing infrastructure to make that happen.  Previous attempts at it failed due to horrible geographical conditions and expenses.  And China required that Russia foot the bill for the projects too.  Even if these issues are suddenly fixed, how many years will it take to get it up and running?  Put another way, how many years will Russia have to spend billions it doesn't have while at the same time not receiving any revenue until the project is complete?

As for financing... Chinese are very careful with their money.  Russia is a horribly risky investment without much direct benefit, and actually significant risk, to the Chinese state.  I for one don't expect Chinese banks to flood Russia with money.  And even if they did, any guess as to what the interest rate might be given the risk factors?  Yeah, pretty high.

So the "long war" folks need to figure out how all of these things just melt away, as if by magic, in order to keep up the fantasy that Russia can fight a "long war".

Steve

All very good points. I think another flaw with the "long war" scenario is that the Chinese leadership seem quite serious about climate change, at least no less so than the world's major democracies, and they have been pushing hard on nuclear, as well as renewable, power and electric vehicles. Even if we assume the worst and suppose that they'd sacrifice the environment for a short to medium term strategic advantage, it still makes the most economic sense to use all that infrastructure now that they've invested truckloads of money in it. I'm sure the demand for fossil fuels will be there in the PRC for a while, but if I'm not mistaken it's already trending downwards and I don't see them rolling that back just to bail Putin's regime out...

[chuckdyke]

Anybody following this channel?

 

[sross112]

11 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

Anybody following this channel?

 

Yep and a few others including Steve have referenced it.

[LongLeftFlank]

13 hours ago, Haiduk said:

From NW our forces withdrew behind Olexandrivka. Looks like Russsians have too big advantage in personnel and vehicles, so our General Staff decided to narrow the front

I expect you know this @Haiduk, but for the benefit of ignorant foreigners, this is what shields Sloviansk and Lyman on the north, and what 57th Bde is falling back on: Svyatohirsk! (the second tweet, not the first -- they only seem to post in pairs). Again, this is *not* windblown, featureless steppeland.

...Oh look! A caves monastery. You know how Russians just love to close assault caves.

EDIT:  A map from a few days back (Lyman-Zarichne-Svyatohirsk). Interesting feed, nice cartography. And if that 'red line' frontage (3 days old, RU sources so... salt) is accurate, 57 Bde. will need to evacuate its salient pronto because the road to Lyman is cut, or nearly.

 

Edited April 28, 2022 by LongLeftFlank
moved new map down from Yampil post

[LongLeftFlank]

16 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

Anybody following this channel?

 

Shouldn't all you guys be over on an "Eastern Front" / A3R gaming channel or something? You are all SOOOO macro.  China real estate, FFS??? This thread is a bloody bag of cats.

....Am I the only guy here still studying this thing at CM scale, where this war is actually being decided? The realtime analysis is out there, go find it.

I have a day job I'm neglecting. 

[/peptalk]

[dan/california]

That is a suicidal place to cross a river, even against an opponent that isn't nearly as well armed as the Ukrainians, Perfect places for the NLAW class missiles, perfect places for Javelins, perfect places for armor to hide and seek. and beautiful spots for mortars to completely hidden. Didn't someone say the Soviets try to push back against the Germans here in ~42 and got there heads handed to them?

[LongLeftFlank]

Just now, dan/california said:

That is a suicidal place to cross a river, even against an opponent that isn't nearly as well armed as the Ukrainians, Perfect places for the NLAW class missiles, perfect places for Javelins, perfect places for armor to hide and seek. and beautiful spots for mortars to completely hidden. Didn't someone say the Soviets try to push back against the Germans here in ~42 and got there heads handed to them?

I was thinking even more simply, bracket that effing road from end to end with 152mm.

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, sross112 said:

Yep and a few others including Steve have referenced it.

Yup, and overall I have found it to be quite reliable.  Until yesterday's post.  I don't know what he was talking about, but he put Ukrainian casualties at 15k and Russia at about the same amount.  Huh?  Official Ukrainian source on own casualties puts the total number of KIA/WIA somewhere around 10k.  Various Western government sources put the Russians at more than that in just KIA.  Ukraine puts the number about double and there was just a post about a supposed leak out of Russia that puts it even higher.  And the battlefield results seem to support the high losses for Russians, especially considering the confirmed vehicle kill ratio.

So... scratching my head on that comment of his.

Steve