kvs wrote:Morpheus Eberhardt wrote:kvs wrote:Viktor wrote:sepheronx wrote:So how are the rebels fairing so far today? Hope they are doing well!
https://twitter.com/kp_steshin/status/559366351219728384
It seems that Novorossia Army managed to trap 8000 Ukraine solders in another boiler (Debaltsevo surounded) with the liberation of Popasna.
Peski also got liberated (yesterday).
Supposedly this is all rebel propaganda and the Ukr army is doing fine.
Nobody can say now that the Ukr army is competent. They were deploying men and armour to the front since the Minsk ceasefire
agreement. I was expecting them to launch an offensive and grab rebel territory. Instead they are losing and badly.
With at least a 2-3:1 advantage in men and and a 5-10 advantage in equipment, the Ukr army should have been succeeding.
Facts on the ground indicate the opposite. The Debaltsevo pocket will be closed regardless of chatter about "rebel lies".
These ratios are not valid any more; they applied to the balance of forces a long time ago. However, currently, due to the small size of the Novorussian forces, the terrain size is their biggest enemy, not the Nazi forces.
It is strange that the regime which supposedly controls everything outside the Donbas, except for Crimea, does not have higher
ratios of men and equipment. The regime should have 45 million less the 10 million from the Donbas and Crimea. That is 35 million people.
I guess we can subtract part of the 7 million Ukrainians working in Russia, but that still leaves 30:7 in terms of population (taking 1 million
off for refugees) and the regime has all the factories in Kharkov that can produce tanks.
Glazyev had a point when he predicted that the regime would slowly mobilize Ukraine potentially raising an army of 300,000 and gearing
up military production. That the regime can barely scrape together 60,000 men indicates that there is a lot of resistance to its
authority. This resistance is not being given any media coverage even by RT.
But the most important factor in the equation is that the Nazis have lost over 60000 men already (fatalities), while the Novorussian forces' losses have been very small. The exchange ratio is up to 100 to 1, favoring the Novorussians. The corroboration for these numbers had been given very early in this thread and elsewhere, and the massive exchange ratios were the result of all the pockets of Nazis that were annihilated.
As I pointed out earlier, what the Novorussians are facing is the terrain, and the fact that Russia prohibits them from marching west (the peace offensive). To elaborate on the first point, from a military point of view, the empty terrain has more military power in it than what remains of the Nazi forces.
The assertion by Glaz'yev is not a military or technical assertion.