[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.

Politico EU's reporting that Hungary is set to approve Finland joining NATO and is quoting a statement Hungary's ruling Fidesz party put out on Facebook saying they'll support Finland's bid. Fidesz controls 116 out of the National Assembly's 199 seats (135 with its coalition partner, KDNP).

Hungary's parliament has a ratification vote scheduled on March 27th.

Orban may admire Putin but I think he's got the fear of NATO in him.

Robear wrote:

Orban may admire Putin but I think he's got the fear of NATO in him.

There is only so much room on the deck of a sinking ship.

Paleocon wrote:
Robear wrote:

Orban may admire Putin but I think he's got the fear of NATO in him.

There is only so much room on the deck of a sinking ship.

Instead making people walk the plank, they just installed windows for them to accidentally fall out of.

Windows are so dangerous man!

Avoid the tea, too.

For all the talk about the Wagner Group and what Russia is doing on the battlefield, it shouldn't be missed that their "adoption" and "re-education" of Ukrainian children is some of the most blisteringly evil sh*t imaginable.

Prederick wrote:

For all the talk about the Wagner Group and what Russia is doing on the battlefield, it shouldn't be missed that their "adoption" and "re-education" of Ukrainian children is some of the most blisteringly evil sh*t imaginable.

It's one of the top reasons we should be doing as much as possible to get UKR the W and end this thing. It's actual genocide going on.

The Putinites are already ramping up the information campaign about how the British are introducing "nuclear weapons" to Ukraine by providing tanks armed with depleted uranium projectiles. For those who don't know, DU rounds use rods of spent uranium with radiation lower than in natural state. They are incapable of nuclear fission and are useful because of their mass. There are a lot of conspiracy videos about how that stuff is "nuclear", but that is all right up there with flat earth and chemtrail sh*t. And considering all the shady sh*t they have pulled, this is obviously just an attempt to "both sides" sh*t.

I don't why Russia's upset that Ukraine's getting DU sabot rounds when they're mobilizing tanks that are so old and outdated they can be frontally penetrated by AT-4s and RPG-7s.

The Conflict Intelligence Team, another OSINT group, just published pictures of Russian T-54s and T-55s from the 1295th Central Tank Repair and Storage Base near Vladivostok being transported west.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/SDQlH96.jpg)

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/1dcEkuj.png)

This follows on reports from earlier this month that the precursor to the ancient BMP-1--the BTR-50--were spotted in occupied Ukraine.

It might be fair to say that Russia has a bit of an equipment availability problem going on.

Paleocon wrote:

The Putinites are already ramping up the information campaign about how the British are introducing "nuclear weapons" to Ukraine by providing tanks armed with depleted uranium projectiles. For those who don't know, DU rounds use rods of spent uranium with radiation lower than in natural state. They are incapable of nuclear fission and are useful because of their mass. There are a lot of conspiracy videos about how that stuff is "nuclear", but that is all right up there with flat earth and chemtrail sh*t. And considering all the shady sh*t they have pulled, this is obviously just an attempt to "both sides" sh*t.

Depleted Uranium weapons *are* a very bad thing to be using, they're just not nuclear weapons by any means.

Stengah wrote:
Paleocon wrote:

The Putinites are already ramping up the information campaign about how the British are introducing "nuclear weapons" to Ukraine by providing tanks armed with depleted uranium projectiles. For those who don't know, DU rounds use rods of spent uranium with radiation lower than in natural state. They are incapable of nuclear fission and are useful because of their mass. There are a lot of conspiracy videos about how that stuff is "nuclear", but that is all right up there with flat earth and chemtrail sh*t. And considering all the shady sh*t they have pulled, this is obviously just an attempt to "both sides" sh*t.

Depleted Uranium weapons *are* a very bad thing to be using, they're just not nuclear weapons by any means.

It is worth noting that Russia has been arming their tanks with depleted uranium rounds for at least the last ten years.

OG_slinger wrote:

It might be fair to say that Russia has a bit of an equipment availability problem going on.

Concave wrote:

This is giving me an idea for an RTS where you start with a full tech tree but then lose it over time.

Concave wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

It might be fair to say that Russia has a bit of an equipment availability problem going on.

Concave wrote:

This is giving me an idea for an RTS where you start with a full tech tree but then lose it over time.

There are Robotech games I have seen where you have a limited number of "pre war" missiles that hit with much greater accuracy.

In any event, this is precisely the sort of thing you see in wars where countries outstrip their industrial capacity.

Reminds me of the crap you saw being handed to Nazis at the end of WW2

IMAGE(https://i.pinimg.com/736x/aa/e5/02/aae502e46cd8055b0e2b544e91be718d--home-guard-old-men.jpg)

Do you even have to load that, for the breech to blow? That's definitely clamp and string territory...

So, Ryan McBeth had an explanation for why the T54's are showing up. As it turns out, the Iranians still manufacture 100mm HE rounds that will fire out of those T54/55 barrels. That and it looks like the Russians are running out of shells and usable barrels would dictate that they are probably going to use these as SP guns until the barrels burn out.

120 T-54s firing massed would be a very North Korean thing to do...

Robear wrote:

120 T-54s firing massed would be a very North Korean thing to do...

One vatnik I watched the other day tried to say that Russian artillery training was superior to that of the West because of how they emphasize direct fire ability. I had to blink a couple times and made the observation that if your artillery can see its target, its target can see your artillery.

It looks like this is right there in line with their philosophy, but it is a pretty piss poor way of utilizing armor.

In another discussion, a couple friends of mine and I were discussing Russian/Soviet tank development, the trial at 73 Easting, and what it says about strategy and design philosophy writ large when comparing the West and Russia.

I made the comment that when a tool evolves and adopts characteristics that fundamentally changes how it is employed, it may still share similar design roots, but is no longer the same tool. An F-16 Falcon is a "fighter" in the same sense that a Hawker Hurricane is, but they cannot be rationally considered the same weapon. They have not just different capabilities, but roles.

I posit that the same is true between Russian and Western tanks. Though they are both tracked, armored vehicles with main guns capable of penetrating armor, they are no more the same tool as a the aforementioned Falcon and Hurricane.

Every Russian tank irrespective of whatever vaporware T-number it has attached to it, is in essence, a T-54. Same engine. Same chassis. Perhaps a different armor package and a heavier gun, but otherwise unchanged since J.R.R. Tolkein's Fellowship of the Ring was first published. They still can't shoot accurately on the move. They still have no reliable sensor packages. They still have no inherent integration with other non-armor elements other than a radio. They can put whatever iterative kludges they want on it, but in the end, it is still the same mess with a Kharkiv model V-2, 38L diesel capable of putting out a pitiful 700hp and 1591lbs of torque. Compare that to a modern commercially available 38L Cummins diesel engine that puts out 1500hp at three times the torque (and you see pretty regularly in commercial fishing boats here in the Chesapeake Bay).

Western tanks now are not just armored big gun platforms, they are sensor rich, integrated with other elements, and networked to work seamlessly with a fabric of other complementary elements. They are the hardened core of your San Mai steel blade sandwich. The arrival of an unfriendly Abrams nearly necessarily means your day has taken a darker turn than you has hoped. Their capabilities are so outsized from Russian counterparts they might as well be spaceships.

ISW this morning articulates precisely what I have been saying about all this asinine "all wars end in negotiated settlements" bullsh*t.

The outcomes of wars often are, in fact, determined on the battlefield with negotiations that merely ratify military realities. Putin likely has one such example vividly in his mind—World War II in Europe. That war ended only when Allied forces had completely defeated the German military and Soviet troops stood in the wreckage of Berlin. Japan surrendered a few months later after the US had demonstrated what appeared to be the ability to destroy the country completely—and only after the Japanese military had lost the ability to do more than impose casualties on the US in the process of losing. Going further back in history the peaces that ended the three Wars of German Unification, the American Civil War, and the Napoleonic Wars also merely ratified realities created by decisive military victories. Even the most recently ended war adhered to this pattern. The US withdrawal from Afghanistan was followed by a decisive Taliban military victory that has ended that conflict (for now) without any formal treaty or accord ratifying this outcome. History offers many counter-examples, to be sure, including the Dayton Accords that ended the Bosnian conflict and the resolution of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. But it is simply not the case that all wars end in negotiated settlements, particularly if by “negotiated settlements” is meant mutual recognition of the impossibility of achieving desired aims through military force.

An analogy which springs to mind is any 4X - try to plead for peace in the middle of a hotly contested conflict never works. Why would either aggressor or defender accept peace when each thinks it might achieve its aims? That models human behaviour pretty well.

It's pretty clear to all and sundry this "special operation" was never intended to evolve into a slugfest. If full scale war was envisaged, you'd expect they would have refurbished the old 1950s tanks much earlier if for nothing more than SPG firepower. But telegraphing that level of conflict probably would have hastened the flow of Western materiel and training in UKR. So they're left with improvising a full scale conflict without the necessary instruments of war (or the right military doctrines and training) to push UKR into accepting a bitter loss.

Yeah. It is pretty clear that Putin had exactly one plan and that was that Ukraine would collapse upon witnessing the pure destructive power of the mighty Russian military. He had seen the Afghan army evaporate at the sight of the Taliban, so how was it possible that the Ukrainians (a fictional "nation" of mentally ill Russians) would resist the awesome military might of the Red Army? There was no Plan B. There were no contingencies for Ukrainian resistance. The idea that they would be anything other than bedwetting cowards who would recognize their natural position of subservience to Moscow was, in itself, treasonous.

Now, they are pot committed with the short stack. They are isolated from the world market and apparently unable to prosecute war with anything other than a strategy that requires 10x everything. 10x the troops, 10x the fuel, 10x the equipment, 10x the ammunition, and most importantly 10x the burn rate. Their defense industrial base even at its mobilized peak will still probably be smaller than that of South Korea's, so they are stuck with burning through its Soviet era stockpiles. They are not going to build their way to logistical sustainability. They cannot build enough vehicles, shells, rockets, trucks or anything to meet their current consumption rate, let alone the rate they will need for the 2 million man army they will need to actually take the rest of Lugansk. On a grand scale, they have culminated. The last, best army Russia will ever have died last Summer. From here on, it is only downhill.

There will never, ever be a Russian military equipped with hundreds of T-14 Armatas or SU-57 Fairydusts. T-90's will make rare, show appearances, but Russia's "elite" First Guards Tank Army will increasingly be equipped with kludged together, bespoke T-72's cobbled from cannibalized wrecks and field expedient modifications. In 20 years, if they are lucky, they might be equipped with Chinese tanks and aircraft they lease from their feudal masters at terms favorable to Beijing.

I keep hearing people point out how, "But Russia can just throw people at the problem," and I don't see how that works in modern complex systems.

Logistics, technology and maneuver warfare are crazy complicated. The days of, "Here's your gun, sort of make a line and charge!" are over. Everywhere and in nearly all human endeavors it takes a ton of institutional knowledge, a capacity for change, lots of support resources and alignment of leadership on down to the staff level.

Who is going to conceive of the idea to change?
Who will plan the change?
Who will hold people accountable for the change?
Who will assign (complex) tasks to be done by X date?
Who will champion the change in the face of resistance?
Who has the knowl dge of what does (and doesn't) need changing?

No org in a competitive arena can solve any problem by just, "Moar mouths."

And most importantly, you can't do any of the above in a nihilistic culture. Impossible.

I have been making similar observations to folks making that argument.

Another one I have used to consistently counter the "moar men" argument is that the weakest link in the Russian war machine has been demonstrated to be logistics. Their resupply ability has been proven to be inefficient, inflexible, incapable of adapting to new circumstances, and completely vulnerable to interdiction. Moreover, it has proven unable to adequately supply current efforts at current force levels. So why is it that anyone would think that the same system of logistics that are currently straining at its limits would suddenly and magically accommodate the needs of a force several times its current size? More men = a higher burn rate. Moreover, it creates a burn rate strain out of scale with any additional increase in combat power. The addition of 200k barely trained mobiks isn't going to make your 200k man force twice as effective, but it will burn easily twice the amount of resources. And creating critical shortages in multiple critical categories will result in cascades of systemic breakdowns.

This is a silly example, but I've been watching my local Target implode over the last couple years:

Can't keep shelves stocked or organized;
Long checkout lines totalling sometimes 30 (!!!) customers;
Never enough hand carts, despite time of day;
No one to unlock videogame case (regularly waiting 10-15 min);
Cleanliness through the floor.

That is a for-profit firm in the Capitalist Culture of the World that can't keep it's sh*t together.

What makes us think the RUS military institution is going to get the right parts to the right spot in the right amounts at the right time while under fire over the coming months?

It is really impossible to tell what the Russian "strategy" is right now from the efforts demonstrated in the last 6 months. The costly offensives in Pavlika, Avdivka, Bakhmut, and Vulhedar have produced nothing but failure and the continued terror campaigns using missiles and drones on civilians have continued to remind the West of the urgency of increased military aid to Ukraine.

If the Russians are trying, as they have stated, to complete the takeover of Lugansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson Oblasts, their efforts have been so woefully inadequate as to make a mockery of the very notion. And doing so has done nothing but further discredit the reputation of the Russian military, leadership, and defense industrial base.

If the Russians are, instead, preserving their forces in order to outlast Western resolve in the hopes that they can dictate terms favorable to themselves after the West runs out of political will, they are doing a sh*t job of that as well. Impaling themselves against entrenched positions along the front and, literally, driving hundreds of increasingly scarce armored vehicles into prepared ambushes and minefields is an.... interesting.... way of preserving one's force. And bombing civilians with Iranian buzz bombs is a great way of keeping Russian atrocities on the front pages of every Western newspaper.

This is a muddled, mush-mouthed, incoherent force projection policy. I imagine one day someone with insider knowledge might write a memoir about what Putin was thinking at this time, but until then, I am just going to have to assume he's a bigger idiot than I ever imagined.

Edit: it appears that Kofman agrees with me.

I think the elephant in the room is whether a) NY can get 45 arrested and disqualified from running in 2024 and b) would a non-45 GOP President abandon NATO and UKR when the US military industrial complex is printing money right now to offload old tech to make new munitions and next gen platforms?

Even so, that's not going to stop the EU and its allies from feeding UKR with weapons, training and intel as they fight a proxy war with RUS and de-fang the Red threat.

What's more, RUS might send hundreds of thousands of conscripts to the war but they're rolling out 1950s tanks to the Challengers Leopards. Yes they are small in number but they'll be outranging RUS mech forces and will punch holes in the stretched out lines.

This is like Civ where someone's sending their knights up against gunpowder/modern/information era units. It does not end well even if you spam outdated units.

Bfgp wrote:

I think the elephant in the room is whether a) NY can get 45 arrested and disqualified from running in 2024 and b) would a non-45 GOP President abandon NATO and UKR when the US military industrial complex is printing money right now to offload old tech to make new munitions and next gen platforms?

Even so, that's not going to stop the EU and its allies from feeding UKR with weapons, training and intel as they fight a proxy war with RUS and de-fang the Red threat.

What's more, RUS might send hundreds of thousands of conscripts to the war but they're rolling out 1950s tanks to the Challengers Leopards. Yes they are small in number but they'll be outranging RUS mech forces and will punch holes in the stretched out lines.

This is like Civ where someone's sending their knights up against gunpowder/modern/information era units. It does not end well even if you spam outdated units.

The second elephant in the room is whether or not China will put their thumb on the scale in a meaningful way.

Top_Shelf wrote:

I keep hearing people point out how, "But Russia can just throw people at the problem," and I don't see how that works in modern complex systems.

But Ukraine is losing troops too, right? Short of Russian troops resorting to sticks and rocks, they could theoretically throw people away at a 15:1 ratio and eventually "win", right? I don't know so asking, but I imagine that is what people mean when they say the above.

Montalban wrote:
Top_Shelf wrote:

I keep hearing people point out how, "But Russia can just throw people at the problem," and I don't see how that works in modern complex systems.

But Ukraine is losing troops too, right? Short of Russian troops resorting to sticks and rocks, they could theoretically throw people away at a 15:1 ratio and eventually "win", right? I don't know so asking, but I imagine that is what people mean when they say the above.

Not precisely. Like I pointed out above, the number of actual bodies is only one part of the equation of "combat power". And as it turns out, it isn't really even the biggest component. Simply throwing bodies at the problem doesn't guarantee you an outcome and ultimately, it is about affecting outcomes.

As Perun points out, neither side is anywhere near their theoretical manpower maximum. More to the point, neither side is capable to realizing their theoretical maximum before they have exhausted their political will, combat power, and/or national resources. The Russians simply don't have the equipment, training resources, or even the capital to field an army much larger than the one they currently have. They can draft and press gang all the young men they want, but they aren't going to get the 2 million man army they need to take the rest of Lugansk. Their economy would fully collapse before that happens.