2022-2024 Russo-Ukrainian War

[Officer of Engineers]

First time I've seen a hint of this counter-offensive size, 20K troops. A lot smaller than I would have thought. Defenitely not an attrition force.

[Ironduke]

Do you really think Croats taking Serb controlled Krajina under UNPROFOR CANBAT R22eR protection would have happened with an American no-go?

Serbia wasn't a nuclear armed power. Apples-to-oranges.

And the Americans couldn't care less when Israelis started killing Soviets.

?

No, she can't. There is noway in hell the Ukrainians can outbleed the Russians.

Current rates of personnel losses aren't going to see Ukraine lose the war.

You do understand that these countries' military strategy was to outbleed the opposition. And I will counter with England over Scotland, the Russians over the Golden Horde, China over Vietnam, Genghis Khan over Afghanistan. The counter to outbleeding the opposition is to bleed the locals white ... and if you haven't noticed, Russia has zero qualms about targetting the civilian population. Come winter, you will see this in full. The Russians ain't going to burn the civilians to death, they're going to drive them out into the snow. Chechnya 2.

I'm not sure what wars that took place in the 1300s or 1500s have to do with a modern conflict.

The idea that Ukraine should come to a peace agreement with Russia, re-arm and re-equip with American support alone, and launch a second land war against a nuclear neighbor?

Really?

Nobody is considering that, nor will it happen. So why talk about it?

[Ironduke]

Interesting video.

Proof That Russia Shelled Enerhodar Today

[Officer of Engineers]

Serbia wasn't a nuclear armed power. Apples-to-oranges.

The point is the only go-no-go that matters is the US.

?

The point is that we allowed the Israelis to attack a nuclear armed Soviet force.

Current rates of personnel losses aren't going to see Ukraine lose the war.

Doesn't mean she's going to win either. She's not going to get DNR, LNR, and Crimea back. The best she's going to do is somewhere close to 24 Feb 2022.

I'm not sure what wars that took place in the 1300s or 1500s have to do with a modern conflict.

Same military axiom since the days of the caveman. Kill the enemy. You gave examples where modern inusurgencies overcame superior military force. The answer to this is and was simple. Kill the enemy. Kill all of them. BTW, China over Vietnma was 1984 to 1995.

The idea that Ukraine should come to a peace agreement with Russia, re-arm and re-equip with American support alone, and launch a second land war against a nuclear neighbor?

Really?

Nobody is considering that, nor will it happen. So why talk about it?

Because there will be a round 3. Either Keiv launches a war to recover LNR, DNR, and possibly Crimea or the Russians come for Keiv again. Every professional military observer is foreeing this. I rather Keiv launches it before the Russians come again.

[Ironduke]

Every professional military observer is foreeing this. I rather Keiv launches it before the Russians come again.

Can you provide some analysis from these professional military observers that:

1) Russia and Ukraine will come to a peace agreement
2) Ukraine will launch a second war at America's instigation after this peace agreement has been reached.

I look forward to seeing this analysis.

[Officer of Engineers]

You don't need professional observers for #1. Simple exhaustion will give you that. NATO has already reached that point where we exhausted whatever spares we can give the Ukrainians. The next set of resupplies will come from the manufacturers, not our war stockiles. And it will not be a peace agreement per say but a truce in every sense of the word. Both sides WILL need TIME AND SPACE to rebuild their armies. Neither side will honour what will be written on paper. Neither side did for the 2014 Agreement.

As for #2, I don't have to give military observers. Keiv has been very clear about recovering LNR, and DNR. What everyone has agreed upon and that includes Putin is that he wants Keiv.

[TopHatter]

US: Russian military facing 'severe manpower shortages'

WASHINGTON (AP) — Russia is suffering “severe manpower shortages” in its 6-month-old war with Ukraine and has become more desperate in its efforts to find new troops to send to the front lines, according to a new American intelligence finding disclosed Wednesday.

Russia is looking to address the shortage of troops in part by compelling soldiers wounded earlier in the war to return to combat, recruiting personnel from private security companies and even recruiting from prisons, according to a U.S. official who spoke to the AP on the condition of anonymity to discuss the downgraded intelligence finding.

The official added that the intelligence community has determined that one step that Russia’s Defense Ministry is expected to take soon is recruiting convicted criminals to enlist “in exchange for pardons and financial compensation.”

The U.S. government highlighted its finding as Russian President Vladimir Putin last week ordered the Russian military to increase the number of troops by 137,000 to a total of 1.15 million.

Putin’s decree, which takes effect on Jan. 1, didn’t specify whether the military would beef up its ranks by drafting a bigger number of conscripts, increasing the number of volunteer soldiers or using a combination of both. But some Russian military analysts predicted it would rely heavily on volunteers, a cautious stand reflecting the Kremlin’s concerns about possible fallout from an attempt to increase the draft.

The presidential decree aims to boost the overall number of Russian military personnel to 2,039,758, including 1,150,628 troops. A previous order put the military’s numbers at 1,902,758 and 1,013,628, respectively, at the start of 2018.

Colin Kahl, the U.S. Defense Department undersecretary for policy, told reporters earlier in August that the U.S. estimates Russia took heavy casualties in the first months of the war.

“There’s a lot of fog in war, but I think it’s safe to suggest that the Russians have probably taken 70 or 80,000 casualties in the less than six months,” Kahl said. “Now, that is a combination of killed in action and wounded in action and that number might be a little lower, a little higher, but I think that’s kind of in the ballpark.”

The U.S. has frequently downgraded and unveiled intelligence findings over the course of the grinding war to highlight plans for Russian misinformation operations or to throw attention on Moscow's difficulties in prosecuting its war against Ukraine, whose smaller military has put up a stiff resistance against the militarily superior Russian forces.

The Biden administration unveiled findings earlier this week that Russia has faced technical problems with Iranian-made drones acquired from Tehran this month for use in its war with Ukraine.

Russia picked up Mohajer-6 and Shahed-series unmanned aerial vehicles over several days this month as part what the Biden administration says is likely part of a Russian plan to acquire hundreds of Iranian UAVs for use in Ukraine.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday that Russia has been having “some difficulties” and experiencing “the limits on some of the capabilities” of the Iranian drones since receiving them.
_______

[Officer of Engineers]

And we get the contradicting intel about 60,000 Russian volunteers heading towards the UKR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3rd_Army_Corps_(Russia)

AGAIN, FORGET EVERYTHING ELSE! LOOK AT WHAT THE REAL BATTLEFIELD IS LIKE!

I've got something to say about this Ukrainian counter-offensive but I'm waiting 5 days to confirm the intel. Again, the battlefield picture confirms the intel. Forget every other bullshit there is. I can't even believe supposedly independent thinking sites have fallen for Ukrainian propaganda. It does a disservice of not appreciating, and therefore, ignoring the real enemy!

[statquo]

It was good to read that the US wargamed with Ukraine before the counterattack to convince them to limit it over a broader counterattack across the country.

[Ironduke]

Looks like the lock span at Nova Kakhovka dam has finally been dropped.

[TopHatter]

Ukrainians and the West should not fall for Russian information operations portraying the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast as having failed almost instantly or that depict Ukraine as a helpless puppet of Western masters for launching it at this time.

The Russian Ministry of Defense began conducting an information operation to present Ukraine’s counteroffensive as decisively failed almost as soon as it was announced on August 29. Several prominent military bloggers—even bloggers who have historically been critical of the Kremlin—are promoting this message.[2] Other milbloggers are additionally promoting the narrative that Ukraine’s Western handlers pushed Ukraine to launch the counteroffensive prematurely and/or too late for “political” reasons and because the West expected a counteroffensive.[3] Kremlin media outlets have also centrally amplified allegations of civil-military conflict between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi to bolster the narrative that Zelensky sought to conduct a counteroffensive for inappropriate political reasons whereas Zaluzhnyi assessed Ukrainian forces were not militarily prepared to do so.

Military operations on the scale of this counteroffensive do not succeed or fail in a day or a week. Ukrainian officials have long acknowledged that they do not have the sheer mass of mechanized forces that would have been needed to conduct a blitzkrieg-like drive to destroy the Russian defenses in Kherson Oblast or anywhere. They have instead been setting conditions for months by attacking and disrupting Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs), Russian command and control, and Russian logistics systems throughout southwestern occupied Ukraine. The timing of the start of the counteroffensive is consistent with the observed degradation of Russian capabilities in western Kherson Oblast balanced against the need to start liberating occupied Ukrainian lands and people as soon as possible. There is no reason to suspect that the timing has been materially influenced by inappropriate considerations or tensions. Counteroffensive operations now underway will very likely unfold over the coming weeks and possibly months as Ukrainian forces take advantage of the conditions they have set to defeat particular sectors of the line they have identified as vulnerable while working to retake their cities and towns without destroying them in the process.

Military forces that must conduct offensive operations without the numerical advantages normally required for success in such operations often rely on misdirections and feints to draw the defender away from the sectors of the line on which breakthrough and exploitation efforts will focus. The art of such feints is two-fold. First, they must be conducted with sufficient force to be believable. Since they are feints, however, rather than deliberate attacks expected to succeed, they often look like failures—the attacking units will fall back when they feel they have persuaded the defender of their seriousness. Second, they take time to have an effect. When the purpose of the feint is to draw the defender’s forces away from the intended breakthrough sectors, the attacker must wait until the defender has actually moved forces. There will thus likely be a delay between the initial feint operations and the start of decisive operations. The situation during that delay may well look like the attack has failed.

The Ukrainian military and government are repeating requests to avoid any reporting or forecasting of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, a measure that is essential if the counteroffensive includes feints or misdirections.It is of course possible that the counteroffensive will fail, that any particular breakthrough attempt that fails was not a feint, or that the Ukrainian military has made some error in planning, timing, or execution that will undermine the success of its operations. But the situation in which Ukraine finds itself calls for a shrewd and nuanced counteroffensive operation with considerable misdirection and careful and controlled advances. It is far more likely in these very early days, therefore, that a successful counteroffensive would appear to be stalling or unsuccessful for some time before its success became manifest.

ISW and other analysts studying this war have been appropriately cautious and circumspect in announcing the culmination or defeat of major Russian offensive operations. ISW will apply the same caution and circumspection to assessing the progress of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and exhorts others to do the same.
__________

[S2]

"Ukrainian officials directly stated on September 3 that the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive in southern Ukraine is an intentionally methodical operation to degrade Russian forces and logistics, rather than one aimed at immediately recapturing large swathes of territory. Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Oleksiy Arestovych told the Wall Street Journal on September 3 that the current goal of Ukrainian forces in the south is the “systemic grinding of Putin’s army and that Ukrainian troops are slowly and systematically uncovering and destroying Russia’s operational logistical supply system with artillery and precision weapon strikes.[1] Arestovych’s statement echoes ISW’s assessment that the ongoing counteroffensive will likely not result in immediate gains and that Ukrainian forces seek to disrupt key logistics nodes that support Russian operations in the south and chip away at Russian military capabilities..."

ISW-Sept. 3

In short-silence remains golden.

Think the Colonel's been looking for some massive rupture with follow-on forces exploiting deep, causing severe dislocation into the operational depth. I wondered that too but, in my very western mind, also wondered from where an exercised and capable armored corps of three heavy divisions would come, how it could be hidden to achieve operational surprise and how it might be used to achieve strategic results when, at best, penetrating the operational depth of, maybe, three operational directions.

I count eleven areas of consistent, daily combat- Kharkiv north, Kharkiv S.E., Slovyansk/Izyum, Siversk, Bakhmut, Donetsk/Avdiika, Zaporozhe/Melitopol, Krivoi Rog, Inhulets, Kherson and Mykolaiv.

Recapturing (and holding) Kherson Oblast would remove three of those operational areas from the contest. The Ukrainians are likely counting on the corrosive but cumulative effects of mid-grade stress along a logistically isolated front from, essentially, Dniepropetrovsk to the Inhulets, then Kherson northwest and, finally Mykolaiv. This method will be highly dependent upon creating bad options to isolated troops possessing poor or no contact with superiors along with limited supplies. Those things can certainly inject unease and deep uncertainty. Who know from there?

I've no doubt that these offensive operations are calibrated to minimize military and collateral casualties. Doubt anybody's charging a heavily defended hill or willfully driving into a known ATGW kill-zone. The focus, for the present, remains along the Kherson Oblast periphery but do wonder, like Monash, about the strategic possibilities a bit further east along the Zaporozhe-Melitopol axis. Might be a bridge too far for the U.A. given limited operational manuever force options.

[Ironduke]

HIMARS strike on the Antonivsky Bridge, filmed from a car on the ferry:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/com...view_from_the/

[Gun Grape]

Remember when I mentioned working with Former Soviet tanks and finding out that the ERA Blocks were just wood filled?

Guess what, nothing has changed, actually its gotten worse

https://twitter.com/igorsushko/statu...14498859974656

[Officer of Engineers]

HIMARS strike on the Antonivsky Bridge, filmed from a car on the ferry:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/com...view_from_the/

I would have liked to see that fireball filmed much closer ... as in up close and personal closer.