How Hot is Ukraine Gonna Get?

[Machor]

6 hours ago, FancyCat said:

Was this posted yet? I can't recall if it's the same footage. Posting it anyway, whyyy are they doing this. The morale of those units must be nothing, no wonder the Kharkov front broke.

 

I actually feel sorry for these guys, knowing most of them are conscripts. Here, an LNR battalion withdrawing from the Kharkiv oblast has been waiting out in the open for two days outside the Russian border, since they are not being allowed to cross the border into Russia:

 

[chuckdyke]

9 minutes ago, Calamine Waffles said:

This has been known since the Chechen Wars. Once they removed spare ammunition, the survivability significantly improved.

The good thing is they won't have many veterans from this war to teach the next generation of tankers. The T72 was a good tank in 1972 but obsolete now. Like the Centurion and M60 meeting the first generation of ATGMs. Warning bells for the Abrams and Leos? Information Operations will be decisive combined with instant communications. 

[chuckdyke]

12 hours ago, Raptor341 said:

There has never been a better time to deliver a major strategic defeat to the Russians - whatever it takes to keep Ukraine intact (and victorious) and Europe united will paid dividends in the long run. 
 

Strike while the iron is hot. Don't let them get away with it. Already been said putin is not somebody we can seriously dialog with. Neither his united Russia party. 

[Calamine Waffles]

9 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

The good thing is they won't have many veterans from this war to teach the next generation of tankers. The T72 was a good tank in 1972 but obsolete now. Like the Centurion and M60 meeting the first generation of ATGMs. Warning bells for the Abrams and Leos? Information Operations will be decisive combined with instant communications. 

The thing about the Russian military is that they've never been very good at taking in feedback from the lower levels and then disseminating that and preserving it as institutional knowledge. It's a byproduct of their very hierarchical, top-down military structure.

[Offshoot]

11 hours ago, Battlefront.com said:

Seems BLUE was sunk by yet another artillery strike.  However, it seems intact enough that at least tracked vehicles could use it.  The question is... WHY?!?  Except to evacuate, what's the point?  The last reports I saw was the bridgehead forces were eliminated without having made any gains.

Lunacy.

Here's a thread by a retired Australian major general. He starts by giving a rundown on the steps for a successful river crossing, describing how difficult they are.

He then proposes, given their difficulty, that the Russians were heavily invested in converting this into a major axis of attack, which would explain why they kept coming back. Perhaps this point is rather obvious, though he has said other commentators have missed it.

What alternatives do the Russians now have for this advance? Are they trying to hurry things up because they are worried about the impact the new weaponry (especially artillery) now arriving in Ukraine will now have?

An important aspect of assault river crossings is that they are only undertaken if absolutely necessary...
Therefore, such operations normally only occur on an axis of advance that is a main effort (or about to become the main effort)...
the Russians clearly intended to invest in this axis and throw a lot of combat power down it...
defeating this assault river crossing has probably denied the Russians an axis of advance they clearly thought was going to be productive for them in their eastern offensive.
 

 

[chrisl]

2 hours ago, acrashb said:

Everyone here is surprised by this war and is (mentally) preparing to fight the next as though it will look like this one - just as this one was supposed to look like the last one.  Yes the Russians are incompetent, but there's more going on and the revolution will continue.

In this war the CM group-mind is thinking hard about ISR.  Just found an article by Robert Zubrin from 2015 on space supremacy, which we see here to some degree in the ISR from commercial and 'spy' satellites.  Zubrin takes it a step further into the LEO, MEO and GEO domains with destruction and defence of space-borne ISR and GPS assets.  While I don't know Zubrin his credentials are interesting (e.g., he invented the awesome nuclear salt-water rocket).

And he includes this prescient line: "Eastern and Central Europe is now so weakly defended as to virtually invite invasion."  And here we are.

U.S. Space Supremacy Now Critical (spacenews.com)

I'm familiar with him, and actually sat next to his former book agent on a plane a week or so before this past xmas (by dumb luck).  We didn't talk about Zubrin, but I think we did talk about space.

Russia is probably 40-ish years behind in space ISR assets, much like they're behind in things like microelectronics and NVG.  Most of it has the same root in the Soviet Union failing to try to copy Silicon Valley from the 70's on (and probably earlier).  The USSR and later Russia were/are fine at building big things made of lots of metal that spit out fire - tanks, missiles, rockets.   But without microelectronics they can't keep up with the kind of data volume that you can collect and integrate if you have relatively cheap high performance sensors and cheap, fast computers.  They've been able to buy some of those things to an extent, like the Thales targeting systems, and presumably microcontrollers for various things, but they can't do the kind of mass production that makes fancy chips appallingly cheap.

I came across an article (linky here) a while ago about when the big divergence between US and USSR capability happened in space. It's by one of the space journalists who figured out the capabilities of the first KH-11 in 1977 (launched in 1976) and sat on it for a year until a spy sold the details to the Soviets.  KH-11 can do about 10 cm (4 inch) resolution on  the ground, and there are 5 of the latest few versions in space right now.  And the NRO is giving away telescopes that size to other agencies, because they presumably have better. One of the things that the Aviation Week journalists held off  on publishing even longer was the existence of a second satellite network whose sole purpose was to be able to relay images in realtime from the KH-11.  So the US had realtime 10 cm resolution on the ground in 1977.  Russia was still returning film capsules in 2016.

And "New Space" has changed things drastically - commercial companies can give you multiple daily revisits of any location on earth at resolutions between 20 cm and 3 m.  Basically, kids in a garage in the US can make and launch cube sats cheap enough to do 3 m resolution more or less hourly.  If you have several billion dollars you could do half meter resolution that often, and there's probably a commercial market for it.  The stuff you need to do that is export controlled, and just about all the high res imaging companies are US based for that reason. The USG is the largest customer for those data.

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is becoming comparably cheap and there are multiple companies doing that, too. And it can see through clouds.  And those companies also tend to be US based for similar reasons to the optical imagers.

There were some twitter posts early on about likely degradation of GPS over Ukraine, figured out from looking at the errors reported on ADS-B data.  There was speculation that it was Russia doing it, but it seems more likely that it was the US/NATO.  Ukrainians know where they are and have maps, but the Russians appear to have lousy mapping and were using some commercial GPS units, so even being able to mess them up by putting them a couple roads over from where they were supposed to be could help UA.

And that doesn't even get into the SIGINT and ELINT stuff.  But three things are happening to ISR from space right now - the cost of launch is going down fast, the cost of making stuff to launch is going down fast, and the size of the electronics you need to make that stuff work is going down fast.  So the west has tons of space ISR going on, both commercial and government.  And Russia, well, doesn't.  They have two optical satellites that are getting old and probably don't have anywhere near comparable performance to western stuff.  They probably have some SIGINT and ELINT satellites, but the lack of a microelectronics base makes it likely that those are very limited in capability.

All of which leads to the Russian anti-satellite test in November.  There was speculation at the time that it was intended to produce a ton of debris to blind the west so that they could do exactly what they did.  They did succeed in making a mess, but didn't take out any significant satellites.  And even if they took out a few, there are so many that they wouldn't be likely get them all, and the three letter agencies tend to keep some sitting around on the ground for launch-on-demand, so they could launch above the debris if they needed to.

edit: here's where Russia is with ELINT/SIGINT satellites and SAR, which is basicaly nowhere:

Quote

All things considered, Russia’s space-based SIGINT effort is lagging far behind that of the United States and China. Long delays in the Liana program are severely impacting Russia’s ability to collect accurate targeting data for its latest generation of anti-ship missiles and a replacement system (Akvarel) is likely still many years away from deployment. The Liana system does not appear to have a significant (if any) COMINT capability, a situation that will not be rectified until the first Repei satellites are launched in the coming years. In addition to that, Russia is relying on a pair of aging satellites for optical reconnaissance and currently does not have any radar reconnaissance satellites in orbit that can see through cloud cover and make nighttime observations.[30] All this leaves the country’s present space-based intelligence gathering capability in a state that leaves much to be desired.

 

Edited May 14, 2022 by chrisl

[Calamine Waffles]

2 minutes ago, Offshoot said:

He then proposes, given their difficulty, that the Russians were heavily invested in converting this into a major axis of attack, which would explain why they kept coming back. Perhaps this point is rather obvious, though he has said other commentators have missed it.

With the failure of the Kharkiv offensive and the attack from Izyum now under threat, the only area where they are having reasonable success is near Siverodonetsk. If they can take that and Lysychansk, they will have mostly pushed out the Ukrainian army from Luhansk oblast, which would allow them to claim *some* success.

[LongLeftFlank]

1 hour ago, Calamine Waffles said:

With the failure of the Kharkiv offensive and the attack from Izyum now under threat, the only area where they are having reasonable success is near Siverodonetsk. If they can take that and Lysychansk, they will have mostly pushed out the Ukrainian army from Luhansk oblast, which would allow them to claim *some* success.

Agreed, but if you look at maps of the area and reporting on prior pages, you'll see that that area is heavily fortified. This is a heavy industrial zone, liberally sprinkled with factories, refineries, quarries and whatnot, with Soviet era bomb shelters beneath. Heavier, taller buildings, not just farm villages. Shades of Mariupol (but different as well).

As I noted before, it's a bit like Germany giving up in the Ardennes in 1940 and instead punching down toward Metz to roll up the Maginot Line instead. Can the RA clear this zone, given time?  Sure.  Will they have anything left after to counterpunch against a UA offensive against Izyum or the (remoter) Kherson-Donetsk front?

Aye, there's the rub.

...I remain hopeful about the thesis of Steve @Battlefront.comand others here that the Russian army goes 'bankrupt' per Hemingway: 'In two ways. First slowly and then all at once.'

But until that collapse, it's also going to cost a lot of Ukrainian blood to make the Russians bleed out on those forward positions. They're going to be very hard to resupply -- this is where the RuAF is most active -- and there is a very real danger of isolation and sieges.

So I wouldn't be surprised if the UA finally evacuated the Donbass east of Seviersk. Hopefully with the idea of retaking it later, once it destroys another Russian army (Izyum, Kherson, Zaporizhe, pick one or maybe two. You know my vote....).

Edited May 14, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[Calamine Waffles]

25 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Agreed, but if you look at maps of the area and reporting on prior pages, you'll see that that area is heavily fortified. This is a heavy industrial zone, liberally sprinkled with factories, refineries, quarries and whatnot, with Soviet era bomb shelters beneath.  Not unlike Mariupol.....

As I noted before, it's a bit like Germany giving up in the Ardennes in 1940 and punching down to roll up the Maginot Line instead. Can they clear it, given time? Sure.  Will they have anything left after to counterpunch against a UA offensive against Izyum or the (remoter) Kherson-Donetsk front?

Aye, there's the rub.

...I remain hopeful about the thesis of Steve @Battlefront.comand others here that the Russian army goes 'bankrupt' per Hemingway: 'In two ways. First slowly and then all at once.'

But until that collapse, it's also going to cost a lot of Ukrainian blood to make the Russians bleed out on those forward positions. They're going to be hard to resupply and there is a very real danger of isolation, again, another Mariupol.

Most likely they are trying to bypass Sievierodonetsk and go for Lysychansk in order to encircle Sievierodonetsk.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FSn7myIaMAI6CI8?format=jpg&name=large

Whether they have enough forces to do so is another story.

Edited May 14, 2022 by Calamine Waffles

[LongLeftFlank]

14 minutes ago, Calamine Waffles said:

Most likely they are trying to bypass Siverodonetsk and go for Lysychansk in order to encircle Siverodonetsk.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FSn7myIaMAI6CI8?format=jpg&name=large

Yup, quite likely. They've been trying for 'cauldrons' since the start, of course (hell, back to 1928 lol).

And Stavka has got to be desperate to show some kind of offensive success, however limited. 'Facts on the ground'.

[Because, you know, securing the other half of yet another Rust Belt Superfund province (after blowing it to bits first) is just sooooo economically valuable!]

Edited May 14, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[danfrodo]

30 minutes ago, LongLeftFlank said:

Agreed, but if you look at maps of the area and reporting on prior pages, you'll see that that area is heavily fortified. This is a heavy industrial zone, liberally sprinkled with factories, refineries, quarries and whatnot, with Soviet era bomb shelters beneath. Heavier, taller buildings, not just farm villages. Shades of Mariupol (but different as well).

As I noted before, it's a bit like Germany giving up in the Ardennes in 1940 and punching down to roll up the Maginot Line instead. Can the RA clear this zone, given time?  Sure.  Will they have anything left after to counterpunch against a UA offensive against Izyum or the (remoter) Kherson-Donetsk front?

Aye, there's the rub.

...I remain hopeful about the thesis of Steve @Battlefront.comand others here that the Russian army goes 'bankrupt' per Hemingway: 'In two ways. First slowly and then all at once.'

But until that collapse, it's also going to cost a lot of Ukrainian blood to make the Russians bleed out on those forward positions. They're going to be very hard to resupply -- this is where the RuAF is most active -- and there is a very real danger of isolation and sieges.

So I wouldn't be surprised if the UA finally evacuated the Donbass east of Seviersk. Hopefully with the idea of retaking it later, once it destroys another Russian army (Izyum, Kherson, Zaporizhe, pick one or maybe two).

These Russian thrusts aren't really all that strong or deep.  So UKR, I think, has intention of delay & fighting withdrawal, whittling down RA strength at relatively low cost (not to say 'low cost' on someone's life).  Which brings up the question:  where is the strength of the UKR forces?  If it's not being used here then it must be somewhere else planned for something else..... Putin does know that, right?  He's putting his best forces farther and farther into a position where they can't easily pull back to repel an attack on Kupiansk or elsewhere behind his lines?  Crossing that river might be just about the dumbest thing he could do.

Edited May 14, 2022 by danfrodo
typo

[Calamine Waffles]

Well, this Oesterreichs Bundesheer Col. explains fairly well what the Russians have been trying to do in Donbas (basically what the Germans tried at Kursk).

(Video has English subs)
 

The problem for the Russians is that the Ukrainians have had 8 years to prepare the defences in the JFO, as opposed to the 1-2 months the Soviets had at Kursk.

Edited May 14, 2022 by Calamine Waffles

[dan/california]

With the sadly notable exception of Mariupol every single Russian attempt at an encirclement of anything bigger than a platoon has ended in disaster for them. They just don't seem to be able to deal with the logistics. And even in Mariupol the Russians have suffered a massive strategic defeat, even if they eventually do clear the steel plant. Having ten plus BTGs tied up there for months, and then leaving to broken to do much of anything else was one of the many stakes driven into this zombie excuse for a plan.

[LongLeftFlank]

2 minutes ago, danfrodo said:

Which brings up the question:  where is the strength of the UKR forces?  If it's not being used here then it must be somewhere else planned for something else..... Putin does know that, right?  He's putting his best forces farther and farther into a position where they can't easily pull back to repel an attack on Kupiansk or elsewhere behind his lines?  Crossing that river might be just about the dumbest thing he could.

'Defeat in detail', the favourite of the Great Captains of history, straight back to Megiddo.

... But I am concerned also about the condition of the local Ukrainian forces. Based on that Polish gent's operational summary cited above, it looks like 17th Brigade is their local mech reserve (speak up if I'm wrong), and took quite a beating from the RU barrage all along the river frontage they had to hold over the past week.

So their victory has come at a price.

Edited May 14, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[Calamine Waffles]

I strongly suspect the Ukrainian Southern command messed up big time and/or was internally compromised. But specifically for Mariupol, this situation was apparently wargamed a lot and it was pretty much inevitable that Mariupol would be encircled.

At this point, though, Mariupol has held out longer than the "hero city" Brest did in June 1941.

[Battlefront.com]

1 hour ago, Offshoot said:

Here's a thread by a retired Australian major general. He starts by giving a rundown on the steps for a successful river crossing, describing how difficult they are.

He then proposes, given their difficulty, that the Russians were heavily invested in converting this into a major axis of attack, which would explain why they kept coming back. Perhaps this point is rather obvious, though he has said other commentators have missed it.

That was a good read by the retired Aussie general.  So here's the rub...

It is pretty obvious that Russia did not intend this as a diversion, rather a major component of a larger offensive plan.  I get that.  But there's the issues with how this was executed that I'll keep coming back to probably every time I look at this fiasco:

1. a major operational strike should not be done hastily against a well prepared and proven capable defender.  That's just nuts no matter what the scenario is.  But trying to do a large scale river crossing against a prepared defender in a hasty way is purely incompetent.
2. if the mission was important, then get all capabilities organized and brought into the fight.  Many pages ago I mentioned things like smoke generation to mask against drones, noise to mask boats/engineer sounds, working/moving at night to avoid drones, plastering enemy defense with artillery to pin them down, etc.  From what we can tell pretty much none of this happened, likely because the whole thing was rushed.
3. once the crossing was struck with artillery the first time some sort of corrective action should have happened.  Picking another location for example.  SOMETHING other than just trying again and hoping for a better result.
4. more than one crossing should have been attempted concurrently.
5. the bridgehead should have been established and expanded with infantry to the fullest extent possible. 

There's no other way to describe this crossing attempt as incompetent.  Even if the crossing was eventually decisive against the targeted Ukrainian positions, the losses were huge.  As the old saying goes "if we win a few more battles like this we'll lose the war".

Steve

[LongLeftFlank]

16 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

1. if the mission was important, then get all capabilities organized and brought into the fight.  Many pages ago I mentioned things like smoke generation to mask against drones, noise to mask boats/engineer sounds, working/moving at night to avoid drones, plastering enemy defense with artillery to pin them down, etc.  From what we can tell pretty much none of this happened, likely because the whole thing was rushed.
2. once the crossing was struck with artillery the first time some sort of corrective action should have happened.  Picking another location for example. SOMETHING other than just trying again and hoping for a better result.
3. more than one crossing should have been attempted concurrently.
4. the bridgehead should have been established and expanded with infantry to the fullest extent possible. 

There's no other way to describe this crossing attempt as incompetent.  Even if the crossing was eventually decisive against the targeted Ukrainian positions, the losses were huge.  As the old saying goes "if we win a few more battles like this we'll lose the war".

Steve

It looks like they indeed tried multiple crossings, smoke, maskirovka, saturation artillery prep, etc., as discussed above. Looks like they even let infantry lead for a change, and actually made some headway in expanding their tiny bridgehead!

 

But for some reason they then let vehicles pile up AFTER the crossing, 1941 style, instead of getting them to the front. They would have lost the pontoons anyway, but spared themselves the photo op of the half-drowned scrapyard.

Edited May 14, 2022 by LongLeftFlank

[dan/california]

8 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

There's no other way to describe this crossing attempt as incompetent.  Even if the crossing was eventually decisive against the targeted Ukrainian positions, the losses were huge.  As the old saying goes "if we win a few more battles like this we'll lose the war".

And when you LOSE the battles...... I am really starting to expect the Russians to just collapse and shatter any day now, An army just can't take this level of pointless failure for forever, or even all that long.

[Canada Guy]

I see this river crossing as proof the Russians are getting better. At that one airport, they landed helicopters in the same location 7 times to see them get hit each time, here they only attempted to cross 5 times. 

[chrisl]

9 minutes ago, Battlefront.com said:

That was a good read by the retired Aussie general.  So here's the rub...

It is pretty obvious that Russia did not intend this as a diversion, rather a major component of a larger offensive plan.  I get that.  But there's the issues with how this was executed that I'll keep coming back to probably every time I look at this fiasco:

1. a major operational strike should not be done hastily against a well prepared and proven capable defender.  That's just nuts no matter what the scenario is.  But trying to do a large scale river crossing against a prepared defender in a hasty way is purely incompetent.
2. if the mission was important, then get all capabilities organized and brought into the fight.  Many pages ago I mentioned things like smoke generation to mask against drones, noise to mask boats/engineer sounds, working/moving at night to avoid drones, plastering enemy defense with artillery to pin them down, etc.  From what we can tell pretty much none of this happened, likely because the whole thing was rushed.
3. once the crossing was struck with artillery the first time some sort of corrective action should have happened.  Picking another location for example.  SOMETHING other than just trying again and hoping for a better result.
4. more than one crossing should have been attempted concurrently.
5. the bridgehead should have been established and expanded with infantry to the fullest extent possible. 

There's no other way to describe this crossing attempt as incompetent.  Even if the crossing was eventually decisive against the targeted Ukrainian positions, the losses were huge.  As the old saying goes "if we win a few more battles like this we'll lose the war".

Steve

The smoke will hide you from some drones, but some with IR will see you just fine. And unless you can stage and bridge in a couple of hours between SAR satellite revisits, they're going to see exactly where you're putting the bridges.  

Attempting multiple sites would also have to be done with enough separation that a single battery can't hit both of them - at least it will slightly reduce the rate of shells coming in once they spot you from the sky.

Given the slowness of bridging, the availability of IR cameras, the revisit rate of SAR, and the range of modern artillery, they would almost be better off sending a couple battalions of very light infantry in canvas boats (after hiding them all in a warehouse and loading them into white vans that roll after the satellite passes) to get across and hike until they could find and neutralize all the UKR artillery.  And don't forget to fold up and hide all the boats under trees so the SAR doesn't see them.

[dan/california]

If I may be permitted the notable sin of quoting myself, sort of. The amount of active ISR at every frequency from the ultraviolet to the furthermost point where microwaves start shading into plain old radio is enough to fry every egg in the Donbas. The passive ISR is looking at an even broader set of wavelengths, including ALL of the Russian communications, apparently. The river crossing was not going to work unless the Russians could suppress every Ukrainian artillery section that could range the pontoons, and the Russians provably suck at counter battery. It isn't clear they suppressed ANY of it, so they got hammered in to scrap metal with ugly caburized stains. The only conceivable reason Putin hasn't had this army pack up and leave is that he thinks it deserves to die for its inability to execute his grand plan.

[Battlefront.com]

7 hours ago, akd said:

Not sure if this is an elaborate fake…

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=5195940497095131&set=pcb.5195940560428458&type=3&theater

Count me as one of the guys that initially thought "fake" but am thinking it is real.  I looked at the image very closely and if it's a fake the person's skills with PhotoShop are fantastic.  It's difficult to blend parts of two images together and make it look like one.  Lighting, shadows, colors, etc. are all very difficult to fake.  I could see no signs of faking.  Plus, subtle things that a faker likely wouldn't bother with are consistent (tracks going into the water, for example).

This image seems to be the most recent of all the images we've seen.  Here's three images in their timeline order.  I will refer to them as Early, Mid, and Late for this post just to keep them straight:

In Early BLUE is incomplete, RED is partially sunk.  In Mid BLUE is complete and partially sunk, RED is mostly sunk.  In Late BLUE is about the same, RED is totally sunk.  For the most part the wrecks are consistent for all three.

The big difference in the crossings between Mid and Late is the track marks on the far side (defender side) of the river.  In Mid there is only one set of tracks to the right of the bridge, in Late there's many.

Another possible difference is that the trees between BLUE and RED, clearly seen in Early, were removed by the time Mid was taken.  It's difficult to say for sure, but it does seem to be the case.  Which is perhaps important to the next point.

Assuming the tanks in the water are real, it looks like they were trying to retreat from the far side back to the friendly near side.  As suggested elsewhere, turret facing to the rear with gun raised, perhaps to keep water out of the barrel and avoiding the gun digging into the anything.  It looks like the intention was to exit the river to the left and right of BLUE.  I'm guessing that Mid picture shows at least one tank successfully went into the water and came out to the right of BLUE on the other side.

The tanks that are in the water had something similar happen to all of them, which is why they are all in a line.  My guess is the river bottom composition and depth are consistent at that many meters out from the bank and that cause the tanks to get stuck at roughly the same point.  The tanks should have floated, but they didn't so that's interesting no matter what else happened.

The tanks might not have tried to cross all at once, but instead went into the water to the left or right of a tank that had already got stuck.  You can see the tank on the far left attempted to avoid both the sunken tanks and whatever caused them to sink.  It looks like there's a single set of tank tracks leading from the sandy area to the bank in a direction that is consistent with the sunken tank's hull position (assuming the turret was turned 180).  But whatever conditions caused the others to sink was present upstream too, so it sunk like the others.

The tank on the far right seems to have driven around to the right of the burned out wreck and aimed for the original YELLOW start point.  But it didn't get very far before suffering the same fate as the others.

I don't think artillery took out any of the tanks in the water.  Probably some combination of natural conditions (water depth + river bottom) and maintenance issues.

Steve

[chrisl]

Watch for a thread from Trent on poor maintenance of seals on Russian tanks.  Rubber does go bad over time and seals need to be replaced.  Fancy synthetics can last much longer.  Could water have leaked into the engine intakes all at the same rate so they all got the same distance in the water?  You'd think if the engine were running ok, you could be sitting in a lot of water leaking in and collecting at the bottom of the tank and still get across.  It might suck, and you might have a lot to clean later, but you'd have a decent chance of getting across.

[sburke]

Russian War Crime Suspects Featured in Card Decks Given to Ukrainian Army (msn.com)

[chrisl]

Found this site (link) that has all the stuff you have to prep to do a crossing deeper than 1.3 m but less than 1.8 m, so you can keep the hatch open and don't need snorkels.  There's a lot of stuff to do, and if they weren't well trained might have all missed the same thing or had the same thing fail (exhaust valves letting water in?)