[Discussion] Ukraine - Russian Invasion and Discussion

A place for aggregated discussions of a possible conflict, it’s implications and effects, news updates and personal accounts if any. If the expected conflict kicks off, I will change the title but the function will stay the same.

Probably assumed it would be destroyed in the conflagration. Or maybe they booby-trapped it...

Fascists gonna fascist.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/2Y3N90Z.png)

There are Jewish people left in Russia? Huh.

"If he had succeeded in overthrowing the government on January 6th, Putin would have driven into Ukraine himself".

She's not wrong.

Two Twitter threads about all the ammo dumps in Russian-controlled Ukraine that have been going boom lately and what it's going to mean for their war effort.

The TL;DR for one is that with HIMARS every Russian ammo dump within 85km+ of the front will eventually be blown up. Russia's current logistics system--which is to transport supplies and ammo by train to about 30 or 40km from the front and then manually transfer everything to trucks which take it to the front line--isn't going to function anymore. Those supply points are being systematically targeted and that means Russia's going to have to move them back about 100km from the front. And that means there's going to be a massive new strain on Russia resupply because every bullet and shell is going to have to be driven in trucks 90 or 100km.

The TL;DR for the other is that it's a revisit of a pre-invasion Russian logistics discussion that assumed Russian supply trucks could make three 70ish km supply runs a day to the front. This was before the pics of Russian trucks with flat tires, before 1,200+ trucks have been confirmed destroyed, damaged, abandoned, or captured, etc.

The new math--based on Ukraine's experience--is that Russians might be able to pull one 90km supply run a day, with that number going way, way down when those trucks have to pass through areas that either side has shelled into oblivion.

The new math also accounts for the fact that Russia's logistics are ancient and reliant on manpower. There are no pallets, containerized cargo, or forklifts. There's just shoddily made wooden boxes designed to be moved by hand.

And this is going to impact Russia's war effort because the only way it's been able to gain ground has been to stockpile insane amounts of shells and missiles 20 to 30km from the front and feeding that massive supply to its artillery. Now those close by supply dumps are exploding and the arty's shells and missiles will have to be trucked in from afar. Not only that, but Russia's manpower-light invasion force is going to need a lot more trucks and truck drivers (and fuel, and spare parts, and vehicle maintenance).

So, logistically, Russia is turning the front lines into a physical swamp that moves with them every time they advance...

Genius work Mr. Putin!

It is interesting watching the evolution of strategy and tactics on the Ukrainian side. The limitations on capabilities is really generating some serious innovation regarding things like the aforementioned logistics interdiction.

If Russia were fighting an actual NATO nation, the WW1 style massed artillery attacks would last less than 24 hours as those supply depots would all be vaporized in coordinated air and cruise missile strikes. Lacking that capability, the Ukrainians are still managing admirably.

Some sense of Russia's manpower shortage.

They're trying to raise a new volunteer tank battalion in Nizhny Novgorod. They're offering 200,000 ruble signing bonuses (about $3,200) and a monthly salary of 250,000 rubles a month (just shy of $4,000) for (at least) six month contracts. Volunteers also get combat veteran status and a host of government bennies for them and their families.

So that's 1.7 million rubles (just under $27,000) in an area where the average annual salary is less than a million rubles (about $17,000).

Employment might be a bit tough in the city. Its major employers are either heavily reliant on imported tech, components, or services that have been sanctioned--domestic auto and truck production (and associated suppliers), some export-based shipbuilding companies, an Intel software development center that was shut down in April, telecom equipment manufacturers, and engineered equipment for electrical, nuclear, and gas industries--or they produce expensive military equipment like fighter aircraft, submarines, and frigates which are also reliant on now sanctioned tech and components and are not remotely critical for the their invasion of Ukraine.

EDIT: And now there are reports that a pontoon bridge over the Oskil River in Kupiansk the Russians just finished building last month has been visited by the HIMARS fairy. Kupiansk fell to the Russians early in the invasion, but Ukrainian forced blew up the existing railroad bridge before retreating.

Killing off your skilled labor force? What could go wrong...?

That's the first thing that's gone wrong.

Robear wrote:

Killing off your skilled labor force? What could go wrong...?

Yeah. That's a real Hitleresque Gotterdammerung style move right there. It smacks of "There will be no need for a skilled workforce if we lose this war" bullsh*t.

Does that thought even compute for Putin, tho?

He's been on the My Dictator Life tip for so long, he's not actually interested in governing, just accumulating "power" and exercising it over others. He doesn't care that RUS is a backwater...it's that its his backwater. He doesn't even think about whether the education system is working or if the people are growing their skills. The goal is to grift and get money in the bank to buy your way out of problems.

He's not Bismarck. He's Saddam North.

He's not Bismarck. He's Saddam North.

With nukes!

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FXEY33mUsAIWehu?format=jpg&name=medium)

Lol

Weird how the poster doesn't mention the parts where your commanding officers are going to steal your salary when you're a recruit, force you to build their dachas, and literally whore you out and then you'll be shipped to a warzone without adequate equipment or training because the officers sold your gear and embezzled your training funds.

EDIT: And I go from writing that to seeing on Twitter that Russian prisoners with combat experience are being recruited from penal colonies by the government and Wagner PMC. They're offering amnesty, 200k rubles for a six month contract, and five million rubles for their families if they don't survive.

The kicker was the description of how the prisoner/soldiers would be used:

They told a relative of mine like this: “The Nazis are very difficult to detect there, and they are very well trained. You will go in the vanguard, help to detect the Nazis, so not everyone will return.” At first they said that about 20% would return. Then - that “almost no one will return,” one of the interlocutors explained.

But at least you won't be still looking for a job at 23!

OG_slinger wrote:

Weird how the poster doesn't mention the parts where your commanding officers are going to steal your salary when you're a recruit, force you to build their dachas, and literally whore you out and then you'll be shipped to a warzone without adequate equipment or training because the officers sold your gear and embezzled your training funds.

EDIT: And I go from writing that to seeing on Twitter that Russian prisoners with combat experience are being recruited from penal colonies by the government and Wagner PMC. They're offering amnesty, 200k rubles for a six month contract, and five million rubles for their families if they don't survive.

The kicker was the description of how the prisoner/soldiers would be used:

They told a relative of mine like this: “The Nazis are very difficult to detect there, and they are very well trained. You will go in the vanguard, help to detect the Nazis, so not everyone will return.” At first they said that about 20% would return. Then - that “almost no one will return,” one of the interlocutors explained.

Yup. Sounds like the dirlewangers all over again

The state of the war from the Russian perspective in two pics.

The first is an intercepted call from a Russian solider marveling at the quantity and quality of basic equipment Ukrainians soldiers are given (and that he had to purchase himself).

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/ZHAUTGK.png)

And the second is from a state produced video chronicling the formation of a new volunteer "Tigr" battalion that will deploy to Ukraine as part of the Pacific Fleet's 155th Naval Infantry Brigade. The gear is shiny and new, the soldiers not so much.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/9wpBlIE.png)

Fight for democracy and the freedom of Ukraine!

https://www.npr.org/2022/07/08/11105...

No not like that!

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/09/w...

OK yes, like that.

The country invading them is literally trying to infiltrate their government and media… Seems plausible they might take extreme measures in a crisis like this.

I mean Lincoln did some sh*t during the Civil War, including censoring the hell out the media (and telegrams and even the mail).

Couple thoughts based on how things have been going last few months:

Putin doesn't seem to want to fully mobilize. There are indications he's surreptitiously trying to get industry to support a long war and there are all kinds of shenanigans going on with paying convicts and press-ganging low-status folks (poor, uneducated in eastern RUS; people in occupied areas) into service.

The casualties seem to be disproportionately happening among all the irregular RUS troops being used. This doesn't seem to be the full RUS army, it's a hodgepodge of National Guard, some paratroopers, some Naval infantry, and then lots of Wagner, lots of folks from occupied UKR being forced to carry a Mosin-Nagant bolter, and maybe a handful of Chechens acting as a rear-guard to keep deserters in line. Maybe?

UKR seems to be tired, suffering huge casualties. This doesn't mean they're going to lose, but they're certainly not smashing RUS on the southern front and still have to continue putting forces into a grinder to push RUS to waste resources.

Can UKR amass enough offensive mobility to do combined arms to take back land OR are they fighting to wear out RUS to the point where RUS has to withdraw from exhaustion? I don't see how RUS is going to be able to handle occupation AND defend a huge frontline where their enemy is going to have better weapons.

Perun's latest (below) had a great discussion about the wear/tear on your artillery if you really are burning through 60k shells/day. That's a savage indictment of the crappiness of your dumb artillery and probably isn't sustainable because of the damage done to the barrels. RUS may already have peaked in terms of available combat power.

I don't know we can draw ALL the conclusions about the regular RUS army from this war. Would RUS regular army be this bad in an invasion against NATO? Would the planning have been this laughably bad against POL or the Baltics? I'd guess no. But would balance that with the fact that NATO countries will be exceedingly well-equipped in the air defense/offense areas and given that RUS simply cannot do combined arms, maybe things really would look like Kyiv all over again. Hopefully GER and others up their defense game and deter Putin and his successors from ever thinking about even peering west from the Kremlin again.

yeah, but don't forget how bad the Russians were in the sky. Lack of training and modern equipment shows how bad their forces really are.

Perun and others have made the very cogent point that the Russian massed artillery tactics would most likely not work in the event of an invasion of a NATO country because a US led NATO force would establish air supremacy quite quickly and turn artillery positions and ammunition/logistical depots into smoking holes in the ground. For obvious reasons, this sort of thing is not currently available to the armed forces of Ukraine.

He also stated that the effect of the handful of HIMARS units they have received come as close to "game changing" as anything he has seen yet. The ability to reach out and destroy logistics depots really does change the math when it comes to the WW1 style massed artillery attacks. And as others have pointed out, if you extend the amount of distance trucks have to travel, you squeeze off the tap when it comes to Russian supply.

I imagine there will be a lot of lessons learned from this conflict, but I think (as others have pointed out) there is a very real danger of learning some wrong ones as well. The declaration of the death of the tank, for instance, has been overstated and premature. The primacy of artillery is likely another one of them. This is a very specific conflict in a very specific space with very specific logistical and diplomatic constraints. If this was, as Putin insists, a war against NATO, I suspect you would be seeing a very different side of the effectiveness of air power and armor. It just wouldn't be Russian.

Iran is preparing to send several hundred drones to Russia, including some that can carry weapons.

Says quite a bit about Russia's military need and the state of their ability to manufacture drones domestically.

I suspect you are correct, but does anyone have any actual data about the performance of Iranian drones in, say, the Yemeni conflict? I would be curious if they had the clearly measurable impact that Turkish drones have in Nagorno Karabakh or Ukraine. I imagine that they aren't quite as capable because of the ongoing tech sanctions on Iran, but I would imagine that ghetto drone is still better than no drone.

Paleocon wrote:

I suspect you are correct, but does anyone have any actual data about the performance of Iranian drones in, say, the Yemeni conflict? I would be curious if they had the clearly measurable impact that Turkish drones have in Nagorno Karabakh or Ukraine. I imagine that they aren't quite as capable because of the ongoing tech sanctions on Iran, but I would imagine that ghetto drone is still better than no drone.

They had some success with kamikaze/loitering munitions-type drones in the conflict, targeting a Saudi airport and successfully killing a bunch of Saudi and Yemini military officials at a parade. I've seen articles that they've also been used to target Patriot batteries in Saudi Arabia back in the day, though pretty much by just ramming their search radars that were in a known location.

Their drone fleet seems to be a bit on the lower tech side--cheap and disposable--though they did introduce a "wide body" drone last year that has good range and endurance and that can carry stand-off precision weapons. It looks exactly like a Predator, which means Iran's claim a few years back that they captured one is very likely true.

The big demand for Russia, at least from the Russian mil blogger I've seen, is for reconnaissance drones that can be used to do spotting for Russian artillery. Bonus points for any drone that can be equipped with a laser designator for Russia's precision guided shells.

In other news, it's being reported that at least three Russian colonels were killed recently. The Commander of the 20th Motorized Rifle Division, the Chief of Staff of the 20th Motorized Rifle Division, and the Commander of the Black Sea Fleet's 810th Naval Infantry Brigade.

There was a HIMARS attack on the 20th Guards Motorized Rifle Division HQ in Kherson the other day.

Ukrainian reporters are also saying that along with the above the head of artillery for Russia's 20th Motorized Rifle Division and the Chief of Staff for the 22nd Army Corps were also killed.

Essentially the entire command staff for multiple battalions got hit and wiped out.