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Ukraine: Are ya winning yet.


Varysblackfyre321

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On 2/7/2023 at 11:07 AM, Kalnestk Oblast said:

The wave attacks are the military equivalent of finding bullshit projects to spend budget on at the end of the year. It's theater and used entirely to justify future military investments later.

Kal, I disagree with a lot of your takes.  But this one in particular seems contestable on grounds where you might concede something.  Some sort of bureaucratic imperative to spend your full budget annually is nothing like an army thinking it needs to kill or injure more of its own soldiers.

Don't get me wrong, bureaucracies always end up in service to the bureaucrats rather than whatever aim they were established for.  But the number one imperative of winning a war (absent an overwhelming advantage) is to inflict more casualties than you sustain.  Russia has a larger manpower advantage but Ukraine has a larger supply advantage from where I sit.  Even so, there's nothing to be gained by spending lives cheaply.  Better tactically to conserve your forces until you can send in bigger numbers.

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13 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Tanks can't be there yet, can they?

The Ukrainian servicemen and women are still being trained on those. Last time I checked, they were struggling to get sufficient Leos (II) from other nations - despite Germany's pleading.

I think that a handful of tanks have arrived, but not in any meaningful numbers, and people still need to be trained on them.  Indications are that the next Ukrainian offensive will be done with the weapons they already had / received in 2022. The big difference is that now Kyiv knows that any losses of their own T-72s or APCs can be made good with western weapons coming online in the next few months.  That allows them to be a lot more aggressive with what they have. 

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1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Why are the Russians draining this reservoir?

Russia is draining a massive Ukrainian reservoir, endangering a nuclear plant  - https://www.npr.org/2023/02/10/1155761686/russia-is-draining-a-massive-ukrainian-reservoir-endangering-a-nuclear-plant

From the article:

Quote

Unclear Motivations

Helms believes the deliberate discharge is another way for Russia to hurt Ukraine. Now that Crimea's reservoirs are full, he says, this could be a way for Russia to hamper Ukraine's economy, which depends heavily on agricultural exports.

"It's as good as knocking out the power grid," he says.

But Kuns is less certain of Russia's intent. He points out that most of the affected agricultural areas are in Russian-held parts of Ukraine. "It just seems strange that they'd be doing a scorched-earth on territory that they claim publicly that they want to keep," he says.

Perhaps they are lying in public or feel that the best opportunity to keep the land is to make in unlivable.

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2 hours ago, Maithanet said:

I think that a handful of tanks have arrived, but not in any meaningful numbers, and people still need to be trained on them.  Indications are that the next Ukrainian offensive will be done with the weapons they already had / received in 2022. The big difference is that now Kyiv knows that any losses of their own T-72s or APCs can be made good with western weapons coming online in the next few months.  That allows them to be a lot more aggressive with what they have. 

Good thing Russia donated 30 new vehicles to them recently:

 

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14 hours ago, mcbigski said:

Kal, I disagree with a lot of your takes.  But this one in particular seems contestable on grounds where you might concede something.  Some sort of bureaucratic imperative to spend your full budget annually is nothing like an army thinking it needs to kill or injure more of its own soldiers.

But the number one imperative of winning a war (absent an overwhelming advantage) is to inflict more casualties than you sustain.  Russia has a larger manpower advantage but Ukraine has a larger supply advantage from where I sit.  Even so, there's nothing to be gained by spending lives cheaply.  Better tactically to conserve your forces until you can send in bigger numbers.

Yeah, the bolded is bullshit and has historically been bullshit for a long time. It's ESPECIALLY bullshit in this case, however, for a few reasons:

- Ukraine's ability to fight successfully is largely not determined by their population, but by external resourcing that has absolutely no impact via casualties

- Russia's goals on winning the war have little to do with inflicting casualties

- Russia's overall goal on going to war at all have very little to do with military goals or even particularly political ones; they are moral and ethical viewpoints first and foremost, making this closer to a crusade

 

I agree that tactically it's a lot better to conserve your forces for a variety of reasons, but all of those reasons do not matter as far as Russian decision making. If they mattered, Russia would never have started the war in the first place. Right now the people who are choosing these wave attacks are doing so not because they're going to be successful but because they have to show that they're doing something, and the best metric they have is 'keep attacking'. 

It's a horrible, idiotic way to run a war. But that's Russia right now. 

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The problem is that the Russian generals - and certainly people on the ground - probably know that their current tactics are overly costly and perhaps futile, but the political directive from Moscow is clear: they have to take the Donbas, preferably by 24 February but if not, ASAP, to show that there are some successes to be achieved. If not, it doesn't look good for them. So they grind on with human wave attacks, hoping they will achieve success before they run out of troops.

That tactic seems to be working around Bakhmut because they were able to envelop the Ukrainian lines from three directions, making defence more problematic (but still significant). At Vuhledar it seems to be less successful, with inexperienced troops attacking some of the few hardened Ukrainian units whose whereabouts can be ascertained.

The key figures are that Russia outnumbers Ukraine 3:1 in terms of general population but, even after the last wave of conscription, is outnumbered by Ukraine at least 2:1 in the theatre (and there are some indications that Ukraine has increased its manpower reserve to around 1.2 million by recruiting among its emigres and people who fled at the start of the war but have since returned), and is sustaining losses at a rate of at least 5:1 and it looks like closer to 7:1 at Vuhledar and maybe Bakhmut as well, in Ukraine's favour. These are figures that are completely stupid. They are unsustainable in the medium and long term. We may well see a repeat of last year's summer offensive, when Russia finally succeeds in seizing key objectives with much fanfair and mountains of corpses, and doesn't have enough in the tank to resist the inevitable counterpunch (again).

The difference between this offensive and the summer offensive last year is that Russia is enjoying nothing like the superiority it had then in artillery, and in fact during some assaults Ukrainian artillery fire has proven superior.

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According to Assistant Secretary of Defense Wallander, Russia has lost half of its tank stocks in the past year.  Now, there is a little wiggle room in that I assume they are talking about operable battletanks, because Russia still has fields and fields of old tanks in open fields in varying stages of disrepair.  And yet, non-operational battletanks can be cannibalized and repaired into a smaller number of operational tanks, something that Russia is perhaps the best in the world at doing. 

NONETHELESS.  The war isn't even 12 months old.  We know that Russia is producing a small number of tanks, but they are losing more every week than they produce in a month.  Once the reserves are gone, they are gone and Russia will just have to make do.  And the 50% of tanks lost includes a disproportionate number of the new, modern tanks.  The percentage of 1980s and earlier vintage tanks being lost has been steadily increasing over time (quoting a Perun video from memory, I think the percentage has increased from like 25% of losses in the early months to over 40% in the fall offensives).  Russia isn't quite scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to tanks (they have an extremely large barrel), but it's getting there. 

Russia's plan is to win this war by exhausting Ukraine, but there is evidence that it is Russia who is experiencing unsustainable losses of men (see Wert's post above) and material like tanks and IFVs. 

And that's not even touching the fact that Russia's theory for victory is basically assuming that NATO assistance will wane with time, when thus far the exact opposite is happening. 

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

The problem is that the Russian generals - and certainly people on the ground - probably know that their current tactics are overly costly and perhaps futile, but the political directive from Moscow is clear: they have to take the Donbas, preferably by 24 February but if not, ASAP, to show that there are some successes to be achieved. If not, it doesn't look good for them. So they grind on with human wave attacks, hoping they will achieve success before they run out of troops.

That tactic seems to be working around Bakhmut because they were able to envelop the Ukrainian lines from three directions, making defence more problematic (but still significant). At Vuhledar it seems to be less successful, with inexperienced troops attacking some of the few hardened Ukrainian units whose whereabouts can be ascertained.

The key figures are that Russia outnumbers Ukraine 3:1 in terms of general population but, even after the last wave of conscription, is outnumbered by Ukraine at least 2:1 in the theatre (and there are some indications that Ukraine has increased its manpower reserve to around 1.2 million by recruiting among its emigres and people who fled at the start of the war but have since returned), and is sustaining losses at a rate of at least 5:1 and it looks like closer to 7:1 at Vuhledar and maybe Bakhmut as well, in Ukraine's favour. These are figures that are completely stupid. They are unsustainable in the medium and long term. We may well see a repeat of last year's summer offensive, when Russia finally succeeds in seizing key objectives with much fanfair and mountains of corpses, and doesn't have enough in the tank to resist the inevitable counterpunch (again).

The difference between this offensive and the summer offensive last year is that Russia is enjoying nothing like the superiority it had then in artillery, and in fact during some assaults Ukrainian artillery fire has proven superior.

I think the rule of thumb is that defence is easier than offence, and the attacker needs to outnumber the defender by about 3:1.

Russia attacking Ukraine while outnumbered resembles the Germans in 1941, but with absolutely none of the Germans’ military advantages.

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8 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

I agree that tactically it's a lot better to conserve your forces for a variety of reasons, but all of those reasons do not matter as far as Russian decision making. If they mattered, Russia would never have started the war in the first place. Right now the people who are choosing these wave attacks are doing so not because they're going to be successful but because they have to show that they're doing something, and the best metric they have is 'keep attacking'. 

It's a horrible, idiotic way to run a war. But that's Russia right now. 

I still don't think Russia is trying to get their guys killed as a matter of policy so that they end up feeling compelled to double down.  Maybe I misunderstood your previous post.  But that's how it sounded to me.

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1 hour ago, mcbigski said:

I still don't think Russia is trying to get their guys killed as a matter of policy so that they end up feeling compelled to double down.  Maybe I misunderstood your previous post.  But that's how it sounded to me.

The policy is the Russian dictator demands “action” so Russian Generals are sending their troops into a meat grinder killing them to the tune of nearly 25,000 KIA in the last month to fulfill that “policy”.  

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8 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

The policy is the Russian dictator demands “action” so Russian Generals are sending their troops into a meat grinder killing them to the tune of nearly 25,000 KIA in the last month to fulfill that “policy”.  

Losing 25K military aged men a month in a country with as disastrous a demographic situation as Russia's is not sustainable, even in the short term. Those losses, if not mitigated will result in an economic disaster before the year is out, along with possible severe unrest. 

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3 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

Losing 25K military aged men a month in a country with as disastrous a demographic situation as Russia's is not sustainable, even in the short term. Those losses, if not mitigated will result in an economic disaster before the year is out, along with possible severe unrest. 

What if those men are considered a net loss to the state? They are minorities, prisoners, poor people from far away. The cynics in Moscow might see getting rid of them while gaining a few square meters in Donbas as a positive effect. Once they are no longer available, they can be a bit more careful with the good Russian soldiers. And if they get their goals done, they have traded 10 Asian looking alcoholics for 1 blonde Russian looking kid each.

This war looks more and more like population control. Finally the great reset, the rights all over the world are dreaming of.

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35 minutes ago, kiko said:

What if those men are considered a net loss to the state? They are minorities, prisoners, poor people from far away. The cynics in Moscow might see getting rid of them while gaining a few square meters in Donbas as a positive effect. Once they are no longer available, they can be a bit more careful with the good Russian soldiers. And if they get their goals done, they have traded 10 Asian looking alcoholics for 1 blonde Russian looking kid each.

This war looks more and more like population control. Finally the great reset, the rights all over the world are dreaming of.

As horrible as these losses are, they aren't enough to have a big impact on Russia's demographics. There is another advantage to the Kremlin, though. Dead men don't talk. They have committed and witnessed all sorts of war crimes and know the true situation on the front line. Better get rid of them.

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As always with these internal Kremlin pieces, it is hard to be sure how accurate this is.  But if this is correct, Surovikin was replaced not for battlefield failures, but for insufficient loyalty to the military establishment.  It sounds like Prigozhin and Surovikin are very much on the outs.

 

 

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On 2/10/2023 at 9:14 AM, hauberk said:

Nah. They’ve already demonstrated that they think the Chernobyl exclusion zone makes a great camp ground. 

I sometimes feel like a broken record chiming in on these points, but while the exclusion zone is noted to be one of the most highly contaminated areas in the world, that doesn't mean it's especially dangerous (although it does vary depending on the areas). Reactors 5/6 had radiation fields that would dose you at 0.3 microSieverts per hour (this is 2009 data, so it would measure even lower now). NCRP recommends a maximum whole body dose of 50 mSieverts per year. So if you camped out there 24 hours a day for the entire year, you would be dosed with 2.6 mSieverts, or 5% of the maximum permissible dose. Neoplasms have not been observed in anything less than an acute dose of 250 mSieverts.

There is a lot of uncertainty in the effects of low dose ionizing radiation, so we generally go with the most conservative model - that is, using the assumption that any amount of radiation contributes to the statistical likelihood of manifesting some health effects - which is a very controversial assumption (many health physicists believe that there is a radiation dose threshold requirement for any kind of deleterious contribution to the stochastic effects on the body). But this is the model that is in common use, and so even when there is no statistical evidence of harm mitigation, we try to achieve the lowest dose reasonably achievable.

It is more problematic when soldiers are shifting the soil with tanks and such, which increases the risk of inhaling contaminants. Since the most common radioisotopes are cesium-137 and strontium-90, the committed dose is considerably more.

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