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.
Slava Ukraini!
I wonder how many T-90s Ukraine will have now?
I suspect that things will begin to quiet down relatively along the Kherson front as both sides dig in and end up in an artillery duel. The orcs will try to reduce the city to rubble like they tried in Kharkiv. There, they had the safety of a border the Ukrainians wouldn't cross. Here, they have the relative safety of the Dniepro.
My prediction is that both sides will begin to shift forces to the area between Zaporizhia and Donetsk City. It is a whole lot of frontage with very few intervening terrain features which favors maneuver warfare. It is also the area containing the only remaining rail link to Crimea. If the Ukrainians break that link at any point, the Russians will send tens of thousands of zombies in human wave attacks to restore it. The alternative is some 80K troops and several million civilians beyond Russian supply capabilities.
Learn the names Smyrnove, Olesivka, and Volnovakha. If the Ukrainian winter counteroffensive takes any one of these, the Russian army is effectively finished.
The videos from Kherson have been very heartening, at least.
There is a lot of uncertainty of course, but many of the estimates I am seeing state that the number of Russian troops left behind number right around 4000. One Russian soldier presumably left behind shared an order given in the final hours advising remaining soldiers to change into civilian clothes and run for their lives. Others mention a mad dash for the remaining bridges before they were blown up.
I suspect there will be a concerted effort to round up these remainders as the propaganda value of several thousand Russians abandoned by their command would be huge. Particularly if they are shown being treated humanely in accordance to international law.
I haven't seen any photos or video of the crossings as the final hour approached but I am sure they are out there. Considering they were probably the most well known of all Russian positions, I imaging they were practically abattoirs as the hour of demolition was approaching.
Video of a mobilized solider aggressively confronting an officer about why they haven't been properly supplied and why their training has only amounted to firing 15 rounds at imaginary targets a handful of times.
There's another five and a half minutes of the confrontation that includes the solider complaining that the gear they have received is cheap crap (they tested the body armor they got and it did not stop a rifle round). The video culminates with the officer being struck by the big dude and basically told to go f*ck off because he's seen as worse than useless.
[YouTube version of the five and a half minute video from Twitter.]
Makes you wonder if mobilizing older men, some of whom have served, was such a good idea if only because they aren't going to be cowed as easily as an 18-year-old.
The soldiers were found by their relatives camping out in the open in a village with no food. They said they were there because they were going be charged with desertion after they retreated after an attack. Their commander ordered a company to attack again and only seven soldiers returned. The survivors were marked with paint, shackled, beaten, and hauled off.
As soon as the relatives got there a military convoy showed up and took the soldiers away promising they'd "now be alright." Alright being held prisoner in a basement and denied food and water until they agree to go back to the front.
Analysis of satellite imagery has detected two large ships with their AIS trackers off that passed near the Nord 2 explosion sites in the days before they were sabotaged. SpaceKnow, the firm that performed the analysis, has reported their findings to NATO and been asked to provide more information. Likely they're trying to trace the "dark ships" back to a known ship turning their AIS off (or forward to when they turned it back on) to identify the ships themselves, or at least trace them to a port of origin/destination.
Pure, unsupported speculation here, but a number of things I have noticed since the start of the war have me thinking that the war is about to take a very interesting turn.
You might recall that shortly after the start of the war, the Ukrainian government shut down the borders to military age men and announced full mobilization. About two weeks after that, they announced that they were swamped with volunteers and were unable to process them all so were putting men on waiting lists. About a month later, it was leaked that NATO countries were training mobilized Ukrainian reserve units.
A lot of the initially mobilized were used to stop the Russian advance in Donbas after the pullout from Kyiv and Sumi. They were mostly folks with prior Ukrainian military experience, but were not considered hardened combat veterans. Even still, they managed to blunt the Russian advance and get them to the culmination point of their offensive.
Folks I have talked to who were either with foreign legion units or Ukrainian military have told me that the armed forces of Ukraine have been doing an excellent job of rotating folks off the line to keep them from burning out. They have also done a really good job of integrating trained replacements to maintain readiness and unit cohesion.
It appears that the Ukrainian counteroffensives that have been rocking the Russians in Kharkiv, Lugansk, and Kherson have mostly been executed with troops that have been in theater since the first few months of the war. But what of the units being trained by NATO?
The evidence suggests that the Ukrainians had a glut of willing volunteers. Many of them had significant prior military experience. NATO has a functionally unlimited capacity to train these willing recruits. It is entirely possible there could be a couple hundred THOUSAND Ukrainian troops moving through the pipeline that are trained to NATO standard. Assuming they started around April or May, they would just be finishing up their advanced training now. And I would assume they would be spread over all manner of different MOS's. I suspect there are a couple divisions worth of Ukrainians trained with Abrams and Bradleys low key waiting in Poland for Biden to officially transfer vehicles that arrived by rail last month.
Again, I am just an ignorant civilian, but my gut tells me that the Russians are going to have a really bad Christmas.
NATO and EU member states have been training Ukrainian troops, but the numbers (and pace) is nowhere near what you're talking about.
The biggest trainer so far has been the UK which, through Operation Interflex, has put about 6,000 Ukrainian troops through a five-week basic combat training program since it began in late June. The UK has pledged to train 10,000 Ukrainian troops within a year. Canada is assisting the UK's efforts with Operation UNIFIER which has sent about 200 personnel to the UK to help train Ukrainian forces.
The US was part of a multinational program that trained more than 20,000 Ukrainian troops from 2015ish right up through Russia's invasion, but there's not a lot of details about the post-invasion training short of it's been primarily focused on getting small groups of Ukrainian troops up to speed on the weapon systems they're being provided, like M777s, counter-battery radars, HIMARS, HARMS, etc.. Every tranche of aid that gets released, though, has included money for training, though it's unknown if that's just training for the weapon system or putting thousands of Ukrainians through basic.
Last month the EU announced a €500 million program to train 15,000 Ukrainian troops (Poland will train 12,000, Germany 3,000, and France "up to 2,000").
As with most things Ukraine has been exceptionally opaque about what it's military is doing. There really hasn't been a peep about the Yavoriv military base, which is Ukraine's largest training facility, since the Russian's hit it with dozens of cruise missiles in mid-March and killed about 50 troops. No idea if they bulked up the air defense and kept training or disbursed their training. Hell, at that point in the invasion Ukrainian might have stopped all training to maximize the forces it had in the field.
But it does seem clear that they have been conducting training since March because, as you pointed out, they've been able to rotate the territorial defensive troops off the front line and, especially in Kharkiv, even Russian Telegram accounts noted that the territorials were being replaced by more professional troops in the run up to the counter offensive.
I severely doubt there's a couple hundred thousand Ukrainian troops that have been trained up to NATO standards, but there's probably several divisions that are at training levels that far surpass anything Russia has on the field now or will have in a few months (everything I see points to Russian training being absolutely horrible and nothing short of a complete overhaul of its entire military is going to change that).
Nor do I think that there's going to be battalions worth of tanks and IFVs transferred to Ukraine, especially US equipment.
There is, however, no doubt that the Ukrainian are going to be attacking this winter. They've made that abundantly clear. The primary thing that's been holding them back is that they have to wait to build up reserves of donated equipment and ammunition before they can launch offensives. I'd hazard a guess that they burned through a fraction of the consumables they had planned to go through in the Kherson counter-offensive and are already figuring out where to use their unexpected surplus to accelerate their plans.
I do like that they've already started their next round of f*cking with the minds of Russians and telegraphed that they're eyeing the Kinburn Peninsula. That's going to force Russia to think long and hard about transferring most of the troops they saved in Kherson to the east.
Slava Ukraine. f*cking sick of Russia messing with the US elections so I want them to replace Putin.
ISW is arguing that Putin is directing his generals to take the troops late of Kherson and...re-start offensive (lol) operations in Donetsk.
So, take a bunch of completely demoralized, exhausted, troops and throw them at an enemy that can still interdict their supply with longer-range artillery (HIMARS), all while you still (!!!) don't have air superiority.
Where do we think the final resting place will be for Putin in the annals of incompetent authoritarians? He's doing his best to get down to the Saddam level. But the way he's going, he's on a path closer to Il Duce.
Slava Ukraine. f*cking sick of Russia messing with the US elections so I want them to replace Putin.
That's never going to happen. Messing with elections is a time-honored tradition among all nations.
Hockosi wrote:Slava Ukraine. f*cking sick of Russia messing with the US elections so I want them to replace Putin.
That's never going to happen. Messing with elections is a time-honored tradition among all nations.
Pretty much and we (the US) do it too.
I wasn't mad that Russia interfered with our elections. I was mad we let it matter.
Mixolyde wrote:Hockosi wrote:Slava Ukraine. f*cking sick of Russia messing with the US elections so I want them to replace Putin.
That's never going to happen. Messing with elections is a time-honored tradition among all nations.
Pretty much and we (the US) do it too.
I wasn't mad that Russia interfered with our elections. I was mad we let it matter.
Yea you would hope it would be more difficult.
lunchbox12682 wrote:Mixolyde wrote:Hockosi wrote:Slava Ukraine. f*cking sick of Russia messing with the US elections so I want them to replace Putin.
That's never going to happen. Messing with elections is a time-honored tradition among all nations.
Pretty much and we (the US) do it too.
I wasn't mad that Russia interfered with our elections. I was mad we let it matter.Yea you would hope it would be more difficult.
I am pretty sure that if Clinton had won in 2016, US Cyber Command would have turned half of St. Petersburg into a smoking hole in the ground.
lunchbox12682 wrote:Mixolyde wrote:Hockosi wrote:Slava Ukraine. f*cking sick of Russia messing with the US elections so I want them to replace Putin.
That's never going to happen. Messing with elections is a time-honored tradition among all nations.
Pretty much and we (the US) do it too.
I wasn't mad that Russia interfered with our elections. I was mad we let it matter.Yea you would hope it would be more difficult.
Most important races are so close to begin with that you don't have to nudge too hard to get the other outcome. A percent switch their vote, another percent stay home, and another percent show up that wouldn't have normally and you have it. Also, this is a natural effect of constantly cutting education and social services and not taking care of our society. People are primed and receptive to easy answers.
You gotta give Zelensky credit for walking the walk.
Dude shows up a few days after Kherson's been liberated to stroll around, shoot the sh*t with troops and city residents, and do a press conference out in the open.
Meanwhile all a spokesperson for the Kremlin can say about Zelensky's visit is "We will leave this without comment. You know that this is territory of the Russian Federation."
You gotta give Zelensky credit for walking the walk.
Dude shows up a few days after Kherson's been liberated to stroll around, shoot the sh*t with troops and city residents, and do a press conference out in the open.
Meanwhile all a spokesperson for the Kremlin can say about Zelensky's visit is "We will leave this without comment. You know that this is territory of the Russian Federation."
Yeah. The Russian representatives on the talk shows all keep talking about how Kherson is "90% Russian" as some kind of justification for invading and putting boots on their necks without acknowledging the irony of the similarity with Hitler's Lebensraum and the annexation of the Sudetanland. Whether they are ethnically Russian or not doesn't and never has mattered.
The text translates to "no comment."
ISW is arguing that Putin is directing his generals to take the troops late of Kherson and...re-start offensive (lol) operations in Donetsk.
So, take a bunch of completely demoralized, exhausted, troops and throw them at an enemy that can still interdict their supply with longer-range artillery (HIMARS), all while you still (!!!) don't have air superiority.
Where do we think the final resting place will be for Putin in the annals of incompetent authoritarians? He's doing his best to get down to the Saddam level. But the way he's going, he's on a path closer to Il Duce.
If you, again, look at Ukrainian rail maps, you recognize how difficult it will be for the Putinites to perform such a repositioning without significant disruption.
With Ukrainians in control of Kherson, pretty much all of the ground lines of communication to and out of Kherson Oblast (and Crimea) are subject to Ukrainian interdiction. The assumption was that Ukrainian artillery and MLRS had a maximum engagement range of about 25 miles, but the ammo dump explosion at Novoleksiiva yesterday was some 65 miles from the Dniepro indicating that the Ukrainians have new capabilities not previously disclosed.
The Russians are not moving heavy equipment by truck. They don't have the trucks to pull it off. If they are going to move anything bigger than a jeep in any kind of mass, they are going to need to safely get it on a train. With Rivetjoints, Global Hawks, and all manner of spooky projects from the US and NATO filling the airspace, you can pretty much guarantee that the Russians aren't able to move a crate of rubber dog sh*t without the Ukrainians know exactly why, when, and where.
Putin might be able to get his troops out to Donetsk, but he is going to have to generate the iron from scratch and move it from the east.
Russia really f*cked up today:
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia pounded Ukraine’s energy facilities Tuesday with its biggest barrage of missiles yet, striking targets across the country and causing widespread blackouts, and a U.S. official said missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, where two people were killed.A defiant Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy shook his fist and declared: “We will survive everything.”
Polish government spokesman Piotr Mueller did not immediately confirm the information from a senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the situation. But Mueller said top leaders were holding an emergency meeting due to a “crisis situation.”
Polish media reported that two people died Tuesday afternoon after a projectile struck an area where grain was drying in Przewodów, a Polish village near the border with Ukraine.
Neighboring Moldova was also affected. It reported massive power outages after the strikes knocked out a key power line that supplies the small nation, an official said.
Russia really f*cked up today:
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia pounded Ukraine’s energy facilities Tuesday with its biggest barrage of missiles yet, striking targets across the country and causing widespread blackouts, and a U.S. official said missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, where two people were killed.A defiant Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy shook his fist and declared: “We will survive everything.”
Polish government spokesman Piotr Mueller did not immediately confirm the information from a senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the situation. But Mueller said top leaders were holding an emergency meeting due to a “crisis situation.”
Polish media reported that two people died Tuesday afternoon after a projectile struck an area where grain was drying in Przewodów, a Polish village near the border with Ukraine.
Neighboring Moldova was also affected. It reported massive power outages after the strikes knocked out a key power line that supplies the small nation, an official said.
The Poles have been itching for an excuse to beat wholesale Russian ass. Now they have it.
This couldn't happen at a better time for the Ukrainians. It effectively silences all the defeatist f*ckwits telling Zelenskyy to "negotiate" with that mass murderer.
Poland has previously stated that any rocket hits within its territory was a red line. Thus there has to be a response, the question is what that will look like.
KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Russia pounded Ukraine’s energy facilities Tuesday with its biggest barrage of missiles yet, striking targets across the country and causing widespread blackouts, and a U.S. official said missiles crossed into NATO member Poland, where two people were killed.
In all seriousness, shouldn't this provoke a full NATO military response? Most of my information on the conflict has been from this thread but it sure seems like a week of NATO airstrikes would render Russia completely unable to fight. I guess the risk is that they use nukes at that point?
Which is why it likely won't be a full NATO military response, even though it certainly could be used to justify one. There has to be some kind of response though, but I think it'll be a fairly proportionate one rather than NATO using it as an excuse to pound Russia into submission.
A proportionate one that would not involve NATO directly entering the war would be the immediate transfer of a couple hundred ATACMS, a division's worth of Abrams tanks, and some 60 or so NATO F-16's piloted by Ukrainians with suspicious Polish accents.
Would love to hear the official explanation from the Russian ambassador to Warsaw on this one.
Russia has stated, officially, that it has not even fired any missiles *near* the Polish border today, much less *into* Poland, so it's a provocation. (Narrator: But in fact, they hit Lviv today...)
A proportionate response would be to gift a Tomahawk in the heart of a supply depot deep behind the eastern front.
I can't see a huge appetite for conflict escalation. Energy and inflation is bringing the global economy to its knees. Heck, even China is seking a more constructive engagement with the US and containment allies.
I do appreciate the only way to end this war is partial/total de-occupation (or removing the RUS head of state and replacing with someone who is not a warmonger). But throwing NATO bodies and materiel into the fire will put RUS into fear of an existential crisis and backing a wounded animal into a corner never ends well.
I wonder if this will be a, "Poland acts alone" (with the full support of NATO quietly behind it after the emergency meeting). A full NATO response is an escalation that I don't think world powers are ready for yet. That toothpaste can't be put back in the tube once opened.
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