[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.

Paleocon wrote:

This appears to be an "all we have left" offensive before an attempt to pressure Ukraine into an unfavorable peace.

Battle of the Bulge has entered the chat.

On local farms, they don’t really pay anything, and they withhold your money. Of course he was looking for some kind of stability — that’s why he signed the contract, despite us all trying to talk him out of it. When they offered to take him out of the country, as I understand it, he could still decline. But he always said, “I’m not a coward.” And he agreed to go.

https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/06...

Going back to the lessons that can be drawn from this conflict and what it means for others on the horizon.

Twitter seems to think that the RUS experience means that any/all autocratic regime is going to perform the same way (see: CHN and Taiwan). Is that really true? Some of the failures of RUS appear to be tied to Putin himself or the kleptocracy that is modern Russia. Would the graft on display, lack of NCO corps, poor logistical acumen, brittle economy so susceptible to sanctions and atrocious morale...would all of those play the same role if China attacked Taiwan? I'm not so sure.

Certainly we have examples from history where the autocratic regime has walked all over the democratic, capitalist defenders.

And Taiwan (as one example here) is on an island, so the massive amounts of external aid flowing to UKR from Poland on trains can't be replicated for them...everything has to be by ship, which is much slower and vulnerable to missiles in the way that rail yards are more resilient.

Anyways, just been thinking about this. It'd be nice to know, in a scientific fact sort of way, that autocrats cannot win, ever. But that doesn't seem to be the way the world works.

China in the past has had real problems with under-trained conscripts, more used to growing vegetables for their mess than actual infantry work. I know they have good SF and probably Marine units, and maybe some others. But I don't know whether they have modernized their training like they have their weapons systems.

Anyone have any knowledge in this area?

Certain China is also a kleptocracy, but the state works to maintain the upper hand and still maintain the bureaucracy, unlike Russia where the political system has devolved to the point where it is largely broken (imo). At least in China, many elements of government still work as intended. But I could see that breaking down; they keep having to do corruption sweeps to prevent things getting *too* abusive...

I'm not sure that China can stay on the path of political Communism and economic Capitalism forever. Seems to me that will lead to more and more direct Party rule, which will ruin the latter. We'll see. I don't know enough to have real confidence in the above statements, just putting them out there.

China is, in many ways, far more susceptible to the kinds of boycotts and sanctions hitting Russia than Russia. It is also far less resilient considering its debt load.

Russia spent the last 10 years preparing for this war by hardening its economy to sanctions. It built a war chest of foreign exchange currency. It eliminated its national debt. It onshored as much of its production as it could and stockpiled what it couldn't. They went the full on Third Reich autarky model with the expectation that sanctions would hit them and their actions would be able to ride them out. They also tempered their societal expectations through information campaigns designed to create "unknowability" and apathy. The Russians are, by national policy, brainless, spiritless sheep. This is demonstrated in the performance of their military as well as their economy.

China, in sharp contrast, is nowhere near as hardened. Their public debt currently sits at 300% of their GDP with no hint of abating. Their economy is entirely dependent on foreign inputs. Social control is maintained by the promise of future prosperity. We make a lot out of the coercive measures they take to control people, but the reason they put up with it is because they see improvements in their standard of living over time. f*ck with that and what you will have is 1 Billion Chinese going back to the pattern of malicious compliance. Start pretending to pay them and they will go back to pretending to work. And when the stores go empty, the riots will start.

Xi was hopeful that Putin would be able to pull off a quick victory in Ukraine as doing so would provide the model he needed for an invasion of Taiwan. A quick victory followed by a Western unwillingness to deal with the inconvenience of punishing measures would set a precedent he could use for his own foreign policy.

Now, he is stuck rethinking 20 years of build strategy.

Any conclusion to this war that doesn't involve the complete defeat and humiliation of Putin will be a failure for humanity.

There's a hilarious (as in, f*ck these supporters of Putin) thread on Twitter you can watch where some RUS propagandists are filming, under blue skies, an MLRS launch. Inside of 30s the return fire comes in and the TikToker heads toward the trees. His buddy stops him to grab a camera (!) and then other rounds start falling, including one close to where the original guy was first standing not 30s ago.

Inside of a minute, they're all running back to the car and tossing their gear into the back to skedaddle.

f*ck Putin.

They had a similar result when they did a live television interview with a laser guided siege mortar

A reaction video to someone's first time hearing Metallica's "One" came into my feed.
I know the Russians love Metallica.
Perhaps they need to revisit them, watch the video and listen to the lyrics more closely...

fangblackbone wrote:

A reaction video to someone's first time hearing Metallica's "One" came into my feed.
I know the Russians love Metallica.
Perhaps they need to revisit them, watch the video and listen to the lyrics more closely...

Well, that song is stuck in my head now.

While you are at it, slide on over to "And Justice for All" and marvel at how Metallica prophesized about the modern GOP and Trumpism

I can’t help but think that Putin was sold the assurance that Xi would be “right behind” him with a Taiwan invasion in the hopes that the multiplicity of threats would overwhelm a western response. But when Xi saw the buzzsaw that hit his economy he figured he dodged a bullet.

I just read that the Chinese are running exercises near Tuva now so it looks like they are hedging their bets. If they can’t take down the global financial system, maybe they can at least feast on the corpse of their erstwhile “ally”.

Looks like Ukraine has counter attacked at Sverodonestsk and retaken a chunk of the city. Their forces are apparently 'hugging' Russian forces to negate Russia artillery and air strikes.

OG_slinger wrote:

Looks like Ukraine has counter attacked at Sverodonestsk and retaken a chunk of the city. Their forces are apparently 'hugging' Russian forces to negate Russia artillery and air strikes.

Seems I have heard about that tactic before.

You'd think they'd learn not to go into cities at this point.

RUS appreciation for their forces is so strong, I'm surprised they don't just shell their own guys.

I've seen reports of that happening, when they have units drawn from neighboring provinces with old feuds.

Top_Shelf wrote:

RUS appreciation for their forces is so strong, I'm surprised they don't just shell their own guys.

They kill them wet toilet paper and shoe polish (and incompetent commanders).

As Ukraine loses troops, how long can it keep up the fight?

ZHYTOMYR, Ukraine (AP) — As soon as they had finished burying a veteran colonel killed by Russian shelling, the cemetery workers readied the next hole. Inevitably, given how quickly death is felling Ukrainian troops on the front lines, the empty grave won’t stay that way for long.

Col. Oleksandr Makhachek left behind a widow, Elena, and their daughters Olena and Myroslava-Oleksandra. In the first 100 days of war, his grave was the 40th dug in the military cemetery in Zhytomyr, 90 miles (140 kilometers) west of the capital, Kyiv.

He was killed May 30 in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine where the fighting is raging. Nearby, the burial notice on the also freshly dug grave of Viacheslav Dvornitskyi says he died May 27. Other graves also showed soldiers killed within days of each other — on May 10, 9th, 7th and 5th. And this is just one cemetery, in just one of Ukraine’s cities, towns and villages laying soldiers to rest.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this week that Ukraine is now losing 60 to 100 soldiers each day in combat. By way of comparison, just short of 50 American soldiers died per day on average in 1968 during the Vietnam War’s deadliest year for U.S. forces.

Among the comrades-in-arms who paid respects to the 49-year-old Makhachek at his funeral on Friday was Gen. Viktor Muzhenko, the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ chief of general staff until 2019. He warned that losses could worsen.

“This is one of the critical moments in the war, but it is not the peak,” Muzhenko told The Associated Press. “This is the most significant conflict in Europe since World War II. That explains why the losses are so great. In order to reduce losses, Ukraine now needs powerful weapons that match or even surpass Russian weaponry. This would enable Ukraine to respond in kind.”

Concentrations of Russian artillery are causing many of the casualties in the eastern regions that Moscow has focused on since its initial invasion launched Feb. 24 failed to take Kyiv.

Retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commanding general of U.S. Army forces in Europe, described the Russian strategy as a “medieval attrition approach” and said that until Ukraine gets promised deliveries of U.S., British and other weapons to destroy and disrupt Russian batteries, “these kinds of casualties are going to continue.”

“This battlefield is so much more lethal than what we all became accustomed to over the 20 years of Iraq and Afghanistan, where we didn’t have numbers like this,” he said in an AP phone interview.

“That level of attrition would include leaders, sergeants,” he added. “They are a lot of the brunt of casualties because they are the more exposed, constantly moving around trying to do things.”

Forced conscription of civilians into front line combat military service results in large casualties, news at 11.

End of June should see a shift in the balance from the new long range weapons, if we are going to see one.

It looks like Putin either sh*tcanned Dvornikov or he was killed. Operational command over the Ukraine "special operation" is now in the hands of Gennady Zhidko.

The uncomfortable answer is that the West will politically tire of sending Ukraine weapons and supplies long before Ukraine burns through all the people willing to fight for the freedom of their country.

You can already see this with France's Marcon eagerly volunteering to surrender swaths of Ukraine to appease Putin and Germany dragging its collective ass on delivering any substantive military aid to Ukraine.

Of course this is also a very worthwhile question to ask about Russia. A much more worthwhile question, perhaps, because politically Russia is nowhere near ready (or even able) to throw bodies at Ukraine like they have historically done.

The following are more anecdotes than evidence, but they do paint a picture that Russia is experiencing a pretty substantial manpower shortage, especially among basic infantry.

In late May there was footage of two Russian BTR 80s taking accurate Ukrainian artillery fire. Rather than maneuvering away, the two vehicles were abandoned in place. One, this gives a window into the morale of the Russian troops: non-existent.

And, two, the video only showed six soldiers running away. BTR 80s have a crew of three and are supposed to carry seven soldiers. So the question is "where were the 14 infantrymen that should have been there?"

The answer likely goes back to Russia's entire Battle Tactical Group force structure which scrimped on actual infantry manpower vs comparable NATO force structures. In addition to having less infantry manpower on paper, they had significantly less than that in reality. The BTGs were typically only staffed to about 75% of required manpower and a chunk of that manpower was raw recruits. After seeing footage of early ambushes of Russian armored columns some analysts noted that some Russian tanks failed to scan for threats or even orientate their turrets in the direction of the threat. The explanation for that is either horrendous or non-existent training or that Russian commanders were forced to reduce tank crews from three down to two, meaning the tank commander was pulling double duty and also serving as the gunner.

This is what was sent into Ukraine: lots of equipment, not a lot of actual infantry. And a lack of infantry to screen armored elements means a lot of destroyed armor. Oryx's very busy abacus bears this out.

And, as Kamil Galeev points out, Russia really doesn't have the ability to rapidly mobilize large numbers of reserve troops anymore. Doing so would 1) violate the accepted social contract that conscripts did their time and then couldn't be called up again in the future, and 2) massively overwhelm Russia's current mobilization infrastructure, which got rid of its numerous--and very costly--training bases decades ago.

So now we see things like this pop up on social media: three Russian POWs. Except they aren't Russian Army. They're Russian Air Force. Specialists from a helicopter, strike aircraft, and radar regiment. That's a lot of costly and very specific training to toss aside and say "now you're infantry." You don't do that unless you're scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel.

Making things worse, one of Russia's primary coping mechanisms to its manpower shortage--separatist LPR and DPR forces, which are being propped up by conscripting every man 18 to 65 in the regions--isn't working any longer because the conscripts are so poorly trained and equipped, and 2) they've started to mutiny because they know they're just serving as cannon fodder.

It's probably telling that Russia hasn't officially updated its casualty list since March 25th when it announced about 1,300 deaths and has since moved to classify casualty numbers.

Yeah, I keep seeing think pieces that question Ukraine's ability to win a war of attrition, that still rely on the belief that the Russians have a million man army, or basically limitless material reserves.

Even if weapons deliveries slow down to Ukraine and only come from the US and UK (realistically, I don't know how much more the former Eastern Bloc/Baltic states have to give) I would guess that those weapons and munitions would be enough to reclaim much of the pre-February lines.

Retaking all of the Donbas might require a lot more weapon systems to punch through the hardened positions on the other side, but that probably comes down to how close the Russians and Separatist forces can get to the 1 against 3 ratio for defense. I think that is the million dollar question, especially with a potential winter campaign.

And for those who are still worried that Putin's going to nuke someone because the West is supplying heavy weapons to Ukraine:

TASS wrote:

"In my view, all this fuss over additional deliveries of armaments generally pursues the sole objective of stretching out the armed conflict as long as possible," Putin said in a fragment of his interview with reporter Pavel Zarubin for the program Moscow. Kremlin. Putin. shown in the Vesti Nedeli (News of the Week) program on the Rossiya-1 TV Channel on Sunday. The head of state thus commented on the deliveries of US rocket systems to Kiev.

The deliveries of US multiple launch rocket systems to Ukraine changes nothing since Kiev previously had an inventory of these armaments, including rockets of this range, and is simply replenishing its stock, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday.

"There is nothing new about that," the head of state said. The Russian leader thus responded to a request to assess the decision on such deliveries. "These are all multiple launch rocket systems and the Ukrainian army operates similar Soviet-and Russia-made Grad, Smerch and Uragan rocket systems," Putin said.

The Russian leader pointed out that the range ‘depended on rockets that are used and not on the system itself." "What we hear today and what we understand, these are rockets that fly to a distance of 45-70 km depending on the rocket type. The same is true about Grad, Uragan and Smerch rocket systems that I spoke about. They also have the range of 40-70 km and there is nothing new about that," the head of state explained.

This is why, these deliveries by the United States and some other countries can only be related to the intention to help Kiev make up for the losses of its combat hardware," Putin said.

How do you all forsee this war ending and what is the new status quo in eastern Ukraine, the rest of Ukraine, and Russia?

maverickz wrote:

How do you all forsee this war ending and what is the new status quo in eastern Ukraine, the rest of Ukraine, and Russia?

I honestly think that all depends on how cowardly the Germans and French decide to be. If Europe unites around the Brits and the Poles, Putin will be forced to f*ck off back to Russia and die of cancer mad. If the Germans and the French dictate the policy, Putin's successor will start a nuclear war after a failed invasion of Poland.

OG_slinger wrote:

And for those who are still worried that Putin's going to nuke someone because the West is supplying heavy weapons to Ukraine:

TASS wrote:

"In my view, all this fuss over additional deliveries of armaments generally pursues the sole objective of stretching out the armed conflict as long as possible," Putin said in a fragment of his interview with reporter Pavel Zarubin for the program Moscow. Kremlin. Putin. shown in the Vesti Nedeli (News of the Week) program on the Rossiya-1 TV Channel on Sunday. The head of state thus commented on the deliveries of US rocket systems to Kiev.

The deliveries of US multiple launch rocket systems to Ukraine changes nothing since Kiev previously had an inventory of these armaments, including rockets of this range, and is simply replenishing its stock, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sunday.

"There is nothing new about that," the head of state said. The Russian leader thus responded to a request to assess the decision on such deliveries. "These are all multiple launch rocket systems and the Ukrainian army operates similar Soviet-and Russia-made Grad, Smerch and Uragan rocket systems," Putin said.

The Russian leader pointed out that the range ‘depended on rockets that are used and not on the system itself." "What we hear today and what we understand, these are rockets that fly to a distance of 45-70 km depending on the rocket type. The same is true about Grad, Uragan and Smerch rocket systems that I spoke about. They also have the range of 40-70 km and there is nothing new about that," the head of state explained.

This is why, these deliveries by the United States and some other countries can only be related to the intention to help Kiev make up for the losses of its combat hardware," Putin said.

Us supplying them weapons was not what we were worried would trigger a tactical nuclear strike, but thanks.

Latest Gen. Hertling assessment of the war. He references Leeroy Jenkins. Echoes other takes that I have read that state the Ukrainians are conducting great, bend but don't break defense, in the east.

Paleocon wrote:

I honestly think that all depends on how cowardly the Germans and French decide to be.

Just an fyi....there has been a ton of criticism within Germany about how the goverment is dealing with the situation. I get the feeling that if either government coalition parties - liberal democrats (FDP) or the Greens (who used to be very anti-war, but now have been among the loudest in calling for all sorts of weapons) - were in charge rather than the ruling social dems (SPD), things would be quite different.
The chancellor and his party have taken a heavy hit in surveys as a result, while Greens and the opposition CDU/CSU have made big gains.