Russian special military operation in Ukraine #39

billybatts91 I disliked that post of yours not due to the content but the way you did it, as per my previous comment on the subject.

WTF couldn't you just have copy and pasted the content like the rest of us do, rather than burn up all that data?

Captured KV-2 tank in Berlin, 1942. 
So 3 years until T-90M tanks arrive to clean house.

The 50 kg unitary warhead is probably too much for most targets though, so maybe a cassette dispenser can be substituted instead so you can bomb several targets with several highly accurate passes.

I disagree... most of the time when a target is a vehicle or gun emplacement a big heavy explosive is what you need to also get nearby crew as well.... if rumours are correct and these HIMARS are operated by westerners then taking out the launchers is not enough... kill the crews too...

Will be the same with tanks too.

The Russian govt just hates unpredictability and chaos. And that's why they don't decapitate the Kiev regime. Yet

The only alternative to Zelensky at the start of this conflict was Poroshenko and he is worse... the question is that if you cut the head off the snake... what is the nature of the head that grows back... will it be worse... of course if Kiev wants to attack Russian peacekeepers in Moldova then anything would be better than this current head so chop chop...

Maybe the US is starting to use it as a test site as well as the Russians.

They test them in the Ukraine and they seem to work OK but Russia captures a few and by the time the US gets them into mass production Russia knows them inside out and is ready for them...

wonder if he made it??!!

Of course he made it... oh... I thought you were asking if he made it to the river... I think he did... there was a splash wasn't there? Or that could have been blood.

Future Leo2 driver. 

Look at his face. He knows what is coming: a lot of russian ATGM´s.

You see how they are working Ugledar now?

This proves that there is no "hidden 6d reason" for not leveling these cities

The marines are now leveling Ugledar high rises to their basements with artillery

Why now? This is why I am on record that this could have been done since day 1

Just level the place and go in after

This proves that the military is pursuing some ulterior political objectives in Ukraine

Some generals probably seek to please the appeasers for some political capital - but things are changing, although for the life of me I don't understand why even waste time sending several infantry charges without fire preparation and then decide all of the sudden to begin blasting it to rubble now

Anyway if they do this , progress will be lot faster

It proves nothing. The military is working with imperfect information and the need to consider tactical and operational constraints.

There is no ideal strat of "shelling the place" from afar. You raze every building in the settlement, but then what? You have rubble everywhere that any RPG or ATGM team can hide behind. Great plan.

Its always the same with you armchair morons. Always trying to boil warfare down to this one stupid trick. Guess what? War is chaos and the side that embraces this fact wins over the simplistic and idealistic.

I think previously there was a fear of killing innocent civilians... but it seems they left a while ago.

The people still there who were not allowed to leave might be stay behind 5th columnists, or they might be stubborn as hell.

If you remain seated in a McDonalds while to gangs are having a shootout and a third gang is robbing the place at gunpoint then you have no place to complain that the lead content in your order is too high I guess.

It has been proven again and again that when you shell a city or town that most people who take cover tend to survive even the heaviest bombardment.

German towns and cities were repeatedly bombed day after day during WWII... Germany only lost a tiny fraction of their population to strategic bombing... didn't come anywhere close to "wiping them out". Especially within a single year.

Look at US efforts in Iraq... they really did level those places for months on end... and they ended up having to fight their enemy on the ground too... bombing didn't do it.

Prospects of ukroshitstan with one picture.

Contrast this with the early days of the war where entire swaths of Ukraine were being colored in on maps and shared by Russia pundits and bloggers. Now, they’re coloring in fields and factories and little farms. And they’re trying to keep the same level of hype going as when they were talking about entire provinces being taken. Or, perhaps they will show videos of a tank getting blown up. Or a platoon of soldiers getting a grenade dropped on them from a drone. Very interesting footage, don’t get me wrong. We are seeing a different kind of war — a mix of WWI trench warfare and mini-Stalingrads.

In my opinion it started as a probing advance. Some kind of test to see the response of the Ukrainian defenses. Also to try to make the Ukrainians leave out of their prepared positions in the Donbass by moving their troops to defend elsewhere. When that failed to produce the necessary results then Russia pulled their troops back to focus on the fighting in the Donbass. So here we are.

But it is undeniable that a certain “zoom-in” has occurred. At best, we’re talking endlessly about towns that have been fought over for months now. Having a discussion about the tactical level of things is a worthy pursuit in its own right. But not when it is presented in the context of a bait and switch. That is, we were promised large scale offensives. However fierce the fighting is in Bakhmut, it doesn’t take away from the fact that everywhere else on the frontlines, we are at a standstill. Furthermore, people are drawing conclusions about the state of the war on the strategic level based on tactical level data.

Russia "lost" most of the initially commited troops in the effort because they let the troop contracts expire and had to cover that troop loss with the partial mobilization. Doing a proper large scale offensive would require another round or two of mobilization. Which might still happen but not any time soon. It seems the Russian leadership is fine with the current pace of operations. And the objective right now seems to be the liberation of the territories of the LPR/DPR.

I will give you a concrete example of what I mean. Bakhmut, even if taken, will not be exploited on an operational level. That is, there is no follow-up planned. I have been saying this for months now. There are no large concentrations of tanks and reserve troops to throw at the enemy once Bakhmut, a key point in the Ukrainian defensive line (or so we are told), finally falls to Ukraine.

Bollocks. After Bakhmut falls, then the bulge in the north of the DPR will be next.

In the early days, we saw a clear strategy reflected by large troop movements, rapid breakthroughs and consolidation of territory and so on. Since then, we have seen very little of the same kind of warfare. And after that, we well and truly saw nothing resembling a coherent strategy from Russia at all. Only feuding among its feudal commanders and an attempt to hold a defensive line. At the moment, there are no large concentrations of fresh Russian forces anywhere, except perhaps, in Belarus [or in the south, near Mariuple and Melitople ahead of the expected Ukrainian advance].

That kind of thing, deep pushes with poorly defended supply lines, was leading to high losses of Russian materiel and equipment so it would not be sustainable in the long term. I think we will see it happen again eventually but right now the focus is on the liberation of the Donbass.

We have no idea what Russia’s plans are on the strategic level at this point. Putin’s speech did nothing to clarify this.

Duh. Of course not. Russia has to keep them guessing. My guess is the initial goal will be liberation of the Donbass. And afterwards it will be the neutralization of Ukraine in some way. If that is destruction of its ability to remain as a viable state, or some form of overt ground campaign across the whole country remains to be seen. I think Putin and most Russians are just too invested in the concept of Ukraine as part of the Russian world to be able to just turn it into scorched earth. But we will see. Russia can simply adopt the same concept of Israel in the Middle East if it wants to. Any country which wants to join NATO or even NATO countries in its backyard could just be blown to smithereens. Think of this possibility as Russia being China's agent in Europe, kind of like Israel being the US's agent in the Middle East.

If the strategy is to engage in attrition warfare, then simply do the math yourselves. How many years of fighting will it take at this pace to destroy the Ukrainian army, which stands at 700k now, at least, and whose numbers continue to climb and which, in theory anyway, could easily draft another million men? And, of course, their ranks are being supplemented by Western mercenaries all the while. Poland openly admits to training tank crews and sending officers into Ukraine and so does NATO.

Russia is getting access to ever increasingly advanced Western gear. Already I heard of 5th gen French ATGMs like Akeron MP being supplied to Ukraine. The system isn't even a decade old and is basically leading edge and not available outside the West. Quite likely all of this will being passed to China and Iran too. In the long term the technological loss from the Ukraine conflict will cost NATO dearly I think. If they continue hemorrhaging technology to Ukraine.

America bombed North Vietnam to smithereens, didn't help them win...I don't think just bombing everything to hell will achieve the objectives in Ukraine. That's way too simplistic thinking.

Russia is vastly increasing its numbers of Kinzhals. I think that demonstrates they are taking into consideration possibly expanding strikes to targets outside Ukraine. Another possibility is using Kinzhal to strike the bridges on the Dnieper to prevent the movement of heavy equipment, think heavy artillery and tanks, into the Donbass. Without Kinzhal, destroying those bridges would likely require the use of tactical nukes.

Fall of Bakhmut can't come closer, but for the love of sanity, tell me how can Russia take Ugledar like this?

Oh look! Another junk resolution photo taken from a long distance, where it is not possible to identify which vehicle, much less to whom it belongs, being portrayed as another "failed attack" by Russian armor, never seen this happen before

Backman wrote:Let's see that destruction again. I mean , what are we doing?

Maybe there is some cynical reason that the Kremlin wants to fight like this..at least for now. Maybe they want to move people further east. And some of these settlements aren't economically viable anyway.

They are fighting a war

If they did this from the get go they would have been across the Dnepr by now

In the long run every single settlement between Donetsk and Polish border should look like this

Do the job right or don't do it at all

If Russia wants to achieve its goals it cannot stop with the regions it currently controls. Blinken has proposed a "peace plan" where
Ukraine re-arms and Crimea is demilitarized. The choice is clear, total regime change or going back to worse than square one in several
years and having to fight another war. Limited engagement in Ukraine is just retarded. There cannot be any deal with NATzO and the
Kiev regime. Partition is not an option if it is confined to east of the Dnepr. The only partition option is where the Poland-adjacent
territory is left for NATzO. But Medvedev seems to be indicating that this is not an acceptable option either.

If two more mobilizations are needed, then they have to be undertaken. Pushing across Ukraine cannot be done on a limited budget.

America bombed North Vietnam to smithereens,

They bombed neighbouring countries, too.

After Bakhmut falls, then the bulge in the north of the DPR will be next.

Bakhmut, Seversk, Ugledar. After that Slavyansk and Krematorsk.

Russia’s defense minister has outlined the conditions for a widening of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, explaining that potential advances are directly tied to Western arms deliveries to Kiev.

“It depends on the weaponry that will be supplied,” Sergey Shoigu said in a brief remark to the TV program ‘Moscow. Kremlin. Putin.’

The minister appeared to be speaking on the sidelines of President Vladimir Putin’s address to the Federal Assembly, the country’s main legislative body, earlier this week.

“One thing must be clear to everyone,” Putin said during the event. “The longer the range of the Western systems that arrive in Ukraine, the further we will be forced to push the threat away from our borders. It’s obvious.”

So more comments from official bodies that a widening of SMO is coming

Ukraine will just become Gaza Strip 2.0 if they persist.

FP wrote:Did Russian troops end up caught there again, or are you beating the same month old horse?

Not sure, most likely old, but the footahe is new. Not much have changed recently on that front.
I'm curious about what solution will be employed. To be honest, my limited understanding of tank warfare always led me to believe that open fields were ideal for tanks and that mines could be easily cleared with attachments. However, I've learned that this isn't the case in reality. Russians are clearing the path in the pre-layed minefield while the Ukrainians are monitoring the situation and using artillery to lay mines in the now-cleared corridor. Russians also have this capability and PTKM-1R mines to make it even more dangerous.
Furthermore, the new footage from Kremennaya forest shows how effective the tanks and IFVs can be in the… forest. Where I imagined it would be an infantry slugfest.

https://t.me/intelslava/45148

Why hasnt russia been able to destroy any Ukrainian Olkha, smerch or vilkha launchers? Ukraine managed to destroy one smerch launcher. Theyre easier to identify than himars and have lower range.