Ukraine 31: Icarus Edition

[The Wondering Wolf]

Don't fly too close to the sun...

Good news and bad news from Germany: It doesn't look like we are going to start another war anytime soon. But it seems we aren't going to help a country to end a war anytime soon neither. Chancellor Scholz (I forget he exists most of the time) refuses to do the thing he has been elected for, which is leading the country. This results in polls which indicate that a majority of the German people doesn't want to send more weapons. Which in turn makes Scholz even more hesitant. A perpetuum mobile of fear and inaction.

[karaddin]

To be fair to that article I think there's room for doubt as to whether this was spontaneous taking advantage of a golden opportunity, or if it was planned out in advance. That's about it though.

I guess there's still the other larger time frame mystery of how on earth Prigozhin thought it was a good idea to be flying around Russia after half assing his coup.

[Makk]

45 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I guess there's still the other larger time frame mystery of how on earth Prigozhin thought it was a good idea to be flying around Russia after half assing his coup.

The best speculation I have heard on this is that Prigozhin judged (correctly) that it would be a bad strategic move from Putin to assassinate him, so he thought he was safe. Unfortunately for Prigozhin, Putin's paranoia and vindictiveness is much higher than his intelligence.

[JGP]

Part of me wondered [wonders?] if he hasn't been dead for a long time [yikes]

 

 

[House Balstroko]

1 hour ago, JGP said:

Part of me wondered [wonders?] if he hasn't been dead for a long time [yikes]

 

 

That’s an idea I’ve come across being floated around. Then again, he was present at the Russia-Africa summit, which happened a month ago. 
 

Is it possible that his speeches regarding Wagner’s role in Africa ended up being the tipping point that led to his death? Officially, Russia does not want to be associated with the recent coup in Niger. 

[Relic]

17 hours ago, The Wondering Wolf said:

This results in polls which indicate that a majority of the German people doesn't want to send more weapons. 

Kind of ironic. 

[Werthead]

US intelligence has offered a very rough assessment that Ukraine has lost 70,000 troops killed in the war to date. That seems on the high side, but there also seems to be an assessment that as many as 50% of these casualties have been sustained since the start of this year, with the bulk falling in counter-offensive operations. Given there was speculation of 30,000-40,000 KIA at the end of last year, this seems to track.

That's obviously horrendous losses, although still far less than Russia (with 250,000+ casualties overall, maybe 150,000 KIA). However, it indicates that Ukraine has moved out of the favourable 3:1 KIA ratio with Russia (which tracks with the respective populations of the two countries) more towards 2:1, which whilst still good, is not good enough to outlast Russia if it pushes things to the wire. Overall casualty figures are not available.

Russia is reportedly planning to mobilise 30,000 conscripts from Crimea, on the grounds that since Crimea is in danger of attack (and is being attacked regularly), Crimean citizens should do their part. The fact it's quite hard to get out of Crimea at the moment and dodge the draft is probably purely coincidental. In fact, Ukraine has been hitting Crimean targets again today, with reports of a large target destroyed on the Crimean steppe but it's unclear what. Possibly another air defence system.

Ukrainian forces have raised a flag on the south (left) bank of the Dnipro. It is unclear where, beyond "Kherson region."

Some analysis of the Robotyne front suggests the 7th Guards Mountain Air Assault Division was moved to the front over a month ago from the Kherson Dnipro front. The 7th appears to have suffered significant losses and been rotated out, or at least pulled back in favour of the newly-arrived 76th Guards from Luhansk. The 76th appear to have been kept in reserve for a breakthrough on the Kreminna axis when that seemed to be going well. When that did not occur and Ukraine achieved favourable results in the south, the 76th was sent to the front instead.

Both the 7th and 76th are VDV units typically assigned to spearhead offensives. Using offensive units in defence is not necessarily a great idea and may have been forced on Russia due to mounting losses on the front. Despite these reinforcements, Ukraine appears to maintain numerical local superiority along the Robotyne-Tokmak axis, with reserves ready to punch through should a major breach occur. Russia seems reluctant to commit overwhelming reinforcements to the region, fearing counter-attacks across the Dnipro, or on the northern front. Russia has also poured heavy reinforcements into the Bakhmut region to try to hold the city, on the grounds that the political custard pie in the face of ceding the city would lead to many heads rolling.

Also additional indications that the 7th and perhaps now the 76th have been used to conduct offensive action in front of the main trench defence network, which is particularly cretinous (we also need to recall that order allegedly signed by Gerasimov doubting the loyalty of the VDV and indicating a willingness to bleed the entire service to remove it as a potential threat).

Just as I was writing that, some indications that Ukraine has launched a substantial artillery assault on Verbove, directly on the main Russian defensive line. Quite a lot of heavy fire directed at the main line. A few days ago there was speculation that the lines in Verbove were not as substantial as to the west, with far fewer trenches and ditches in front of the main line to break up attacks. Ukraine seems to have burned the land around the line quite substantially. Ukrainian forces are less than 4km from Verbove, which could be a hell of a fight.

Edited August 29, 2023 by Werthead

[A Horse Named Stranger]

20 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Russia is reportedly planning to mobilise 30,000 conscripts from Crimea, on the grounds that since Crimea is in danger of attack (and is being attacked regularly), Crimean citizens should do their part. The fact it's quite hard to get out of Crimea at the moment and dodge the draft is probably purely coincidental. In fact, Ukraine has been hitting Crimean targets again today, with reports of a large target destroyed on the Crimean steppe but it's unclear what. Possibly another air defence system.

Yeah, arming the Crimean Tartars sounds like a very good plan for Russia, what could possibly go wrong there?

[Derfel Cadarn]

 

[Zorral]

The End of the Russian Idea
What It Will Take to Break Putinism’s Grip
By Andrei Kolesnikov
September/October 2023
Published on August 22, 2023

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/vladimir-putin-end-russian-idea

" .... What is particularly striking about Putin’s Russia, however, is the extent to which it has combined re-Stalinization with antimodern imperialism. In reviving some of the most extreme versions of what in the nineteenth century was called “the Russian Idea”—a concept originally meant to convey the country’s separateness and exalted moral stature but that in practice came to stand for raw militarized expansionism—Putin has drawn on a pernicious ideological tradition to shape both the campaign in Ukraine and his long-term vision of power. Although Putinism may be finite, its advanced state of development and its deep roots in anti-Western thought suggest that it may take more than the outcome of war for Putin’s hold over Russian society to break." ....                                                                              

Quote

 

... Of course, Putin has not openly referred to Stalin or declared himself Stalin’s heir. But for more than a decade, the Kremlin has presented the Stalinist period as an era of greatness in which imperial traditions were respected and national values cherished. And more recently, in his language of power and his intolerance of dissent, Putin has come to resemble Stalin in his final phase in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Yet the two tsars and Stalin also viewed empire as a means to what they understood to be a modern state. In the early eighteenth century, Peter borrowed Western innovations, including advances in shipbuilding and other technologies, and Western ideas about government management and even styles of dress. A century later, Alexander abolished serfdom and carried out progressive judicial reforms influenced by European examples. As for Stalin, in the 1930s he pushed for Western-style industrialization and catch-up development even as he transformed Marxism, a modern European ideology, into Soviet Marxism-Leninism at the cost of countless human lives. By contrast, Putin’s opening to the West was short-lived, more or less ending in 2003, less than four years after he came to office, when he took full control of parliament and the authorities arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the billionaire investor and one of the symbols of a free market and independent thinking in Russia, on trumped-up charges.

Now, Putin seeks something different from any of these predecessors: an empire without modernization. To fully apprehend Russia’s continuing intervention in Ukraine and how it has been presented to the Russian people, it is necessary to recognize this impulse. Putin resurrected the Russian imperial idea with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and expanded it with the launch of the “special operation” eight years later. Buttressed by the abstract and archaic teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church, he has also embraced an older strain of nationalist ideology in which the decadent West is the enemy and Russia has a messianic destiny to oppose its harmful influence. If Peter I, as Pushkin once said, cut a window to Europe, 300 years later, the man who sits in the Kremlin is boarding up that window. ....

 .... What is particularly striking about Putin’s Russia, however, is the extent to which it has combined re-Stalinization with antimodern imperialism. In reviving some of the most extreme versions of what in the nineteenth century was called “the Russian Idea”—a concept originally meant to convey the country’s separateness and exalted moral stature but that in practice came to stand for raw militarized expansionism—Putin has drawn on a pernicious ideological tradition to shape both the campaign in Ukraine and his long-term vision of power. Although Putinism may be finite, its advanced state of development and its deep roots in anti-Western thought suggest that it may take more than the outcome of war for Putin’s hold over Russian society to break. ....

 

 

Edited August 29, 2023 by Zorral

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Yeah, arming the Crimean Tartars sounds like a very good plan for Russia, what could possibly go wrong there?

The Crimean Tartars got I think maybe three years of extra funding and special protection for their language and rights, and then that promptly ended, not just in Crimea but in Tatarstan as well. They have not forgotten about this.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

10 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The Crimean Tartars got I think maybe three years of extra funding and special protection for their language and rights, and then that promptly ended, not just in Crimea but in Tatarstan as well. They have not forgotten about this.

Not to mention, that quite a few of the sabotage and reconaissance stuff on Crimea is probably done by Tartars. That'S the group, that absolute detests Russia. So Russia should really heavily arm them and allocate the Russian troops elsewhere and then just wait and see what happens.

[Werthead]

26 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Not to mention, that quite a few of the sabotage and reconaissance stuff on Crimea is probably done by Tartars. That'S the group, that absolute detests Russia. So Russia should really heavily arm them and allocate the Russian troops elsewhere and then just wait and see what happens.

To be fair, the Crimean Tartars were not wildly in love with being under Ukrainian rule either. However, I suspect right now they'd dramatically prefer it. I also wonder if they'd think to cut a deal. Like, if Russia and Ukraine can't agree over Crimea, why don't neither of them have it and it exists as a separate independent state under Tartar rule?

That makes zero sense from a demographic point of view (or really any point of view), but from a political point of view it might be an interesting idea to float.

[Werthead]

A very large drone attack is taking place across Russia. Multiple explosions in Bryansk, Tula, Pskov and Moscow.

Four IL-76 cargo carriers destroyed in Pskov Airbase. One large ground strike explosion in Bryansk. Moscow's airports are all shutting down. Air defences engaged. This attack seems to be pretty large.

[Zorral]

Where are you seeing this?

 

57 minutes ago, Werthead said:

A very large drone attack is taking place across Russia. Multiple explosions in Bryansk, Tula, Pskov and Moscow.

Four IL-76 cargo carriers destroyed in Pskov Airbase. One large ground strike explosion in Bryansk. Moscow's airports are all shutting down. Air defences engaged. This attack seems to be pretty large.

I can't find anything mentioning it.

ETA -- just found this:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-military-repelling-drone-attack-pskov-four-planes-damaged-officials-2023-08-29/

And now this:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/30/drone-strike-in-russian-city-of-pskov-reportedly-damages-heavy-transport-planes

Edited August 30, 2023 by Zorral

[Wilbur]

Tonight's many attacks, and the number and type of drones used all across Russia tonight make it pretty clear that a great number of them were launched locally.  Several, various groups of people inside Russia, even possibly with eyes on the target, put these drones up and attacked these different factories and airports hundreds of miles apart all at once.

It just amazes me that Russia brought all this on itself, specifically this death of a thousand cuts, just asking for the pain.

Invading a country where everybody looks like you and speaks your language and shares a large land border and is likely to show up and set fire to targets of opportunity or launch attacks at military assets worth millions of dollars is just nuts.

It makes George Bush the Younger's military adventures look sensible in comparison.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

Why dosent Georgia use this war as an opportunity to liberate itself now that Russia is distracted ? 

[Makk]

It has been claimed that at least some of the drones used in this or other recent attacks are from Australia and made out of some cardboard composite to avoid radar detection.

 

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/aussie-cardboard-drones-used-in-attack-on-russian-airfield-20230829-p5e0bv.html

[karaddin]

Flatpack drones... I'm amazed we beat IKEA to the punch on that one

[Maithanet]

Ukrianians just outside Verbove.  Seems like good news, once a defense line is breached it can be outflanked and rendered ineffective.  As you can see in the diagram, there are more defense lines to go, but Russian defenses do seem to be flagging a bit.  Hopefully the Ukrainians can reach Tokmak before the mud sets in around early October.