Russian special military operation in Ukraine #60

caveat emptor wrote:....
Problem on that side is ammunition shortage, especially artillery shells.  But, if thisnwar continues for too long they might eventually catch up with Ukr demand.
US alone could provide more equipment.

.....

Enough to prolong this war for some more years.
As i said before, goal of the West is to bleed Russia, Ukraininans are just expendable pawns in this game.

Expending them in full is the whole objective of this thing

Complete that and you win

SeigSoloyvov wrote:If this is true, this will actually be funny to see what happens

That thing corrodes just from humidity in the air

Also, Kadyrov risks losing fingers on trunk door (could he geya medal for injury out of it?)

Cleanup of Ukr carcasses from the Kursk "incursion zone"

(Second video)



Outstanding

I give it two months and Putin will be back to offering backroom deals, while shaking his fists for the camera at this point.

Fucking sad if your a russian man really is.

Its easy to make Retarded predictions when there are no consequences, you think you're Nostradamus 2.0?

If what you claimed never materialized in two months you have to be man enough to kill yourself.  

This is something that sometimes turns me on.
It is a trash talk Rybar where a claim about "not damaging Patriots" bullshit was provided.

If someone in the west saw a real hand grenade go off they would be horribly disappointed... most have been educated by hollywood movies and expect a gigantic fire ball and massive destruction... and instead it is a rapidly expanding ball of smoke and invisible fragments... often in an expanding pattern that outside of a few metres starts to become a bit hit and miss.

The cluster munitions on the other hand are often 5-10 times heavier than your average hand grenade, much of which is metal fragments.

Heavier fragments are more effective against stronger targets and have better reach because they maintain velocity better, but there are fewer fragments as they get heavier so the chances of a hit are reduced over size and distance.

A fragile object like a missile does not need to be blown to pieces to make it useless... a couple of fragments penetrating it means when you try to launch it it will simply explode... it might even explode before launch.

Warheads are a science... just like artillery is, and for each different type of target the calculations have already been made to determine the most effective warhead for any particular target.

Ironically the best warhead for taking out small mobile 5 man to 10 man teams of elite teams would have to be cluster munitions... The best body armour might stop a fragment through the heart, but with cluster munitions it is more likely to be hundreds of smaller fragments that slice you up and remove limbs even if they are not penetrating your body armour... Think of a frog in a blender...

Militarely yes but politicaly it's not the same.

If they go in and level every city and kill innocents in mass he will end up with all the population against them, then there is no point in doing this war.

They learned quite well from US mistakes in Iraq.

Exactly... they need to get the people on side... there is no point winning the battle if they end up losing the war of hearts and minds.

Look at Chechnia... it has been transformed into a place many people from much poorer countries would consider luxury and things are only getting better...

24 lives saved.

It was probably quite a shock for Ukrainians to go to the west for a year and a half to train and be equipped with western super gear, and then return home to be sent over the border into Mordor only to find things are not what they were told they were in Russia...

Equally a large group like this surrendering and not just getting murdered like some here have demanded means more might make that choice.

Don't like their chances of being traded back however...

And who are these Russians and what competency do they have to relate such accounts?

More importantly such accounts might originate from Langley US and have CIA or other links and are mobilised every time they try to pull these bullshit actions to try and boost the signal to create panic.

This attack against a Russian NPP and also the attack on the Crimean bridge with 10 ATACMS was clearly what Nuland was hinting at coming up that was going to change everything. And for a change... she was wrong again.

They have blown their reserve of HATO trained super troops and likely used up a good amount of missiles and artillery and so now they are in a much worse position than they were three weeks ago when they had these attacks up their sleeve... and all those weapons and ammo and trained troops ready to go...

Now the troops and equipment is committed and is being ground down and the Surprise is gone...

I will agree that Putin excels in looking weak and complaining about 'provocations' when life and now this war should have taught him to expect anything (and I'm sure he did, he's just being a politician). But that's a separate discussion.

The west underestimate him because he is not an idiot like Trump or Johnson and not an ego maniac like Moron...

You can call him anything you like but the results speak for themselves... if weak creates such an economic state that Russia is currently in then I think most countries in the west would prefer a weak leader.

Ironically most western countries have weak leaders because the follow the interests of the US above the interests of their own country. The US has a weak government because it is clearly owned and controlled by the super rich who don't give a **** about democracy and certainly don't want peace because war is so profitable for them.

But Putin is weak... that is perhaps why he is still in power and still kicking arse against the entire western world... the first world... the rich and all powerful west... who think he is weak and the next sanctions limiting the amount of icecream he can import will break him.

The real problem is the west learns history from movies and there are way more movies of Americans being heroic than of Soviets being heroic so how can they lose... they will fold when the lights go out or the wifi goes down... except they don't.

It takes time, deal with it. Victory will be ours. For our enemies are stupid beyond belief.

And that is why Russia will win... they are not perfect and make mistakes but they identify their mistakes and learn from them.

The west is ideologically driven and everything they do is right... when the Russians traded territory and withdrew when large forces of Ukrainians attacked but kept killing the enemy at a huge rate and often successfully counter attacked to make the Ukrainian loss of life worthless the west seems to have thought that if you send in a strong force they will retreat. That was the basis of their summer offensive and this incursion now... create a small mobile force that can't be wiped out easily with air power and artillery all at once and push through the enemy lines and push them back and reach your objectives... the Black Sea coast in the case of the summer offensive and the Kursk NPP in this current incursion. They still don't understand what the Russians were actually doing to eliminate the Ukrainian numerical advantage to the point now where they have the advantage in numbers and weapons and ammo.

The real irony is that these should be tactics that HATO should have had 40 years ago when facing Warsaw Pact forces that outnumbered them, but it seems they got fat and lazy and believe their own propaganda that a Challanger and Abrams and Leopard II tank is so superior it just needs to appear on the battlefield and clean up Russian and Soviet tanks as it spots them like it was Desert Storm part two.

Some go on about how incompetent Russian generals or Putin is but where is the criticism of the west... this has been ridiculous...

HATO has been humiliated.

The western MIC has been humiliated.

If the Ukrainians detonate a dirty bomb in Russia then that would open up a new avenue for ending the war

Launching nukes at the cities of Lvov and Ivano-Frankovsk and then demanding the immediate surrender of Kiev.

That is the irony isn't it... there are lots of cities in the west of the Ukraine that are probably hard core Banderite that are really not worth converting and saving so being able to nuke them would be tempting, but Putin is not the sort of person who is in to mass punishment.

Of course the threat of a nuke attack would probably cause a mass exodus to the west from those regions, which might be just as effective in removing the filth, but also contaminating the EU and HATO countries with the disease they have been trying to infect Russia with all these decades.

But so far I haven't seen anything to suggest that this isn't a propaganda fairy-tale made up by Russian psyops. Let's hope that's all it is.

I would say more likely made up by Kiev... they are grasping at straws and getting rather desperate...

Moscow was ready to make further concessions and Kiev launched an offensive against Kursk Oblast. Unbelievable

What concessions?

That is all in your head.

The analysis by Mercouris who seems to have a "source" that the Kursk crisis is essentially staged is on the mark.

You are both very cynical if you think Putin would sacrifice Russian citizens in the hope of improving the situation.

That is certainly something the west would do, but I rather doubt Putin would.

Putin was under pressure from China and India to negotiate.

Bollocks. Putin has been trying to negotiate since 2014, it is the west that is not ready and that still has not changed or there would already be actual negotiations.

There is not... and likely wont be now.

Thanks to the
lunatics in Kiev he can tell them that there is no point.

Minsk 1 and 2 and the attempt at Istanbul suggests there was no need for further evidence of that.

So the Chinese leadership are retarded? Anyone who is not should realise that there you should not negotiate with nato, but rather accumulate as much military force as possible and then use it as effectively as possible.

China and India will be publicly talking about negotiations, but privately they will be thanking Russia for taking on HATO like this because this is weakening the west like nothing else could...

IMHO this special military operation Smile has been and will continue to be a war of attrition. Not just of Ukrainian manpower and equipment but also valuable NATO reserve stores of equipment and supplies plus the overall economic strain.

Exactly.... this is about the west too... and straining their economies... forcing them to spend money rearming is not helping their economies except their MIC which are fat bloated SOBs anyway. This will further increase the gap between the rich and everyone else.

I'm not saying all of this was the intent from the start but there were clearly a lot of reasons for those planners who may have noticed the Ukrainian preparations, and then the beginning of their offensive, to simply let events take their course and not interrupt the enemy in making a mistake, so to speak

You can dress it up like 10D chess master does it again, but really Putin can't expect Kiev to be this fucking stupid all the time... it is better explained that he is on his toes and expecting stupid things from the west and he responds to these stupid things with calm clear well thought out responses the further his interests and don't backfire.... you know... the way the west does not.

One more thing. This Kursk invasion is a good excuse to do another round of mobilization and officially proclaim a war. On the other hand, that would mean that whole concept of SMO proved to be a failure and Putin is known not to accept easily that he made a mistake.

Your logic is so stupid when you spell it out like that.

The situation to date has not required war to be declared...

The only ones who would make a fuss are the ones already supplying weapons to kill Russians troops.

They will make a fuss to demonise Russia, but they wont actually care about the destroyed Ukrainian cities and certainly the money flowing to kill Russians will stop when the fighting stops and new money to repair and restore the Ukraine simply wont arrive... it will be loans, which will result in those giving the loans essentially owning the country and all its resources.

What munition is this? It explodes about 50 meters up and then the M-270 explodes underneath.

Interesting... certainly airburst, but seemed to direct its fragments over a relatively small area directly below where it detonated.

If true than this Kursk incursion is a very positive and timely development

It will take this incursion to fail and the attack on the Crimean bridge to fail (which it did) before Zelensky is going to come round to accepting Ukraine has lost and that any terms Russia is likely to offer now is the best deal they can get because the next offer is always going to be worse.

But he is not very smart so it might take a bit longer for him to figure that out... take your time bro... the ship is sinking and on fire and you can bet your arse you will be going down with the ship.

In the case of equipment, the West has so much that there's no shortage.

But there is, because western forces need to have material in case things escalate... just like Russia is keeping material and weapons and men in reserve on HATO borders too.

They recently opened a fully automated ammunition production plant somewhere in the US.

They did, but they are also having problems sourcing materials needed to make shells and weapons and ammo... some of the stuff they have to buy from Russia like Ammonia and cotton.

The West still has a lot of industrial potential. Just look at aviation production, both civilian and military, although that's not really related to the war in Ukraine. They still have a ton of combat vehicles, tanks, and anti-aircraft systems, as well as artillery.

And perhaps what you are not understanding is that the west has been pissing cash into the bottomless pit of Kiev for quite some time now, and now you want them to spend money building factories to make bombs and shells and ammo... money they wont get back... money not spent on improving their own economy... the people of the west cannot live in an artillery shell and cannot eat 5.56m ammo.

This is throwing good money after bad and they will have to continue making ammo long after this war ends just to have stores to use themselves.

Cluster munitions are incredibly effective against troops, but they were banned until the US made them OK again by running out of conventional shells and having to send cluster warheads instead.

The Russians have massively benefited from such a policy because they had a lot of munitions that would otherwise have to be scrapped.

The Americans themselves have a lot of M1s, of course, in basic versions.

Having to clean their engine filters every 6 hours even in combat makes them more trouble than they are worth... they are horribly vulnerable to top attack drones and their ammo is exposed to enemy fire in the rear of the turret.

How many 70 ton tanks do you think would benefit Kiev... especially now winter is coming... along with the rainy seasons.

They will probably run out of people sooner.

They will run out of people sooner... send them 500 F-35s and the money will be gone too.

Before targetting the bridge the S-400 are engaged with HIMARS, decoys and EW. This gives the Ukrainians a window to target high value assets like the Kursk bridge.

A bridge in the Kursk region is not a huge deal. Or do you mean the Crimean bridge which wasn't hit.

I give it two months and Putin will be back to offering backroom deals, while shaking his fists for the camera at this point.

So you guys keep saying. All in your head.

If what you claimed never materialized in two months you have to be man enough to kill yourself.

As someone who has friends who have killed themselves I would like to say I have zero tolerance for such talk.

You get no warning.... take week off.

Broski wrote:
If they keep provoking Russia they may live to regret that decision. The entirety of Europe is woefully undefended and Russia would have little problems hitting everything in Europe. Only 2 NATO members outside the US have their own nuclear weapons and one of those members has to beg the US for the launch codes to use "their" nukes.

Russia has perfectly zero goals to strike anything inside Europe.
If you want to hear my opinion, anti Russian sentiments will fade away in most of the EU bigger member states pretty soon.
The reason for this is that most Russkie eaters proved to be both corrupt and incompetent.
And for every sane observer, it gets pretty clear that it was not Russkie who were meddling in Euro matters for a very long time.
Our parliament has established a commission to "investigate Russian and Belarussian involvement".
The thing is just hitting a grotesque level, as after spending multiple mlns and a few dozen of meetings, all they managed was 1.5 page "report".
ONE AND A HALF PAGE.
Most of it is some bullshit and blah blah blah in a style "Belarussia is evil, but Russia is even greater evil, and it is evil because it is evil and evil will ever be evil. And evil."
This sort of shit can be swallowed only by a hard core Russophobes, and there are only a few countries in EU that have some of those.
This is why the narrative started to be different in EU countries, and only the MSM is trying desperately to follow the tasked direction of "evil Russkie".

GarryB wrote:
If someone in the west saw a real hand grenade go off they would be horribly disappointed... most have been educated by hollywood movies and expect a gigantic fire ball and massive destruction... and instead it is a rapidly expanding ball of smoke and invisible fragments... often in an expanding pattern that outside of a few metres starts to become a bit hit and miss.

And that is the point.
In most of this sort of discussion, folks who are making the biggest noise have a close to zero technical background.
And by technical I don't mean they master's degree at a technical university, only common sense and a wide technically driven perspective to the matters.
One should know how the shit works.
Not one shit, but all the shit.
It is not a matter of battling if a Meteor has a range of 100 or 200 km, but a knowledge that both numbers can be right. And knowing why those can be right.
Someone who has not a single clue of how the guarding of the border looks like will yap all day long about "Russian failure in Kursk".
The very same guy, won't even notice that it is impossible to block this size of intrusion without proper preparation.
What is the most hilarious part of the story, is when the yapping about "Russkie failure" is coming from the murica - which has no effective border along the entire southern perimeter
It is being penetrated by hundreds of people daily basis
Oh yeah, those are the folks who own both skill and knowledge to judge a planned NATO border penetration executed by two mechanized battalion size, because as we know, Russkie have a 2 mln soldiers out there, to keep all 1200 km border manned with 3 lines echeloned defensive belt.
It worked great at Maginot Line, and Ostwall.

So again, we are facing lack of historical background.
Knowledge of how the defensive positions are being constructed by modern armies for the last 100 years.

And last but not least - getting in touch with a scale of the whole situation ...

SeigSoloyvov wrote:I give it two months and Putin will be back to offering backroom deals, while shaking his fists for the camera at this point.

Fucking sad if your a russian man really is.

Can't exclude that possibility, sadly.

Still I'm optimistic that we're entering the final phase of the war.

pavi wrote:
I've been thinking that this whole Kursk offensive was a trap. I have been made this conclusion based on couple of things. First, remember what general Zhalusny said about Gerasimov. Gerasimov is very clever and neat opponent and he has read everything what Gerasimov had ever published. Second, there is a rumour that Gerasimov emptied the area just before the attack. This has been stated in finnish media, which does not make it particularly reliable information. There has been also discussion, that Gerasimov ignored warning signs of the attack. How plausible is that, if 2.5 years has been fought and opponent has shown to be able to do every kind of suicide missions? Third, in public you are not allowed to say that you was arranging the trap for your opponent by letting opponent to invade your countri and terrorizing your citizens. It is huge possibility, that this trap was only known by himself and maybe set  for the reason, that he didn't get permission to open new front to diversify ukrainians. Most of the people would think you are crazy, but sometimes it is necessary to act covertly against common opinion. These are my thougths and should be considered as opinions, not a fact.

Any such plan can't have been put in motion only by himself, he works together with his staff, and would also have to get approval from the civilian leadership

Well I don't know the truth, but yes it strikes me strange that anyone would be unprepared for Ukrainian one-way suicide mission by this point, much less right on an exposed border with the Ukraine.

Any possibility of Putin cucking out was destroyed when he unleashed the Russian Army to kill close to three-quarter million of hohols...

Its like waking up from a drunk stupor in bed with an ugly woman - balls deep.

The damage has been done, might as well get it over with.

What you do not get is that just because a piece of equipment is stored somewhere this does not mean it is either operational or combat capable. It takes time to take equipment out of mothballs, spruce it up, and send it to Ukraine. Then in several cases you run into the problem that you are putting back into use equipment which has not been in production for decades. In some cases the supply of parts for these systems is gone. The original suppliers do not even exist anymore having gone bankrupt a long time ago. wrote:

Of course you are right. That is what they do, they restore equipment to operation, service it etc. The US still has a few thousand Stylkers, many of them are operational, a lot of rocket artillery, about 500 Patriot system launchers, hundreds of JASSMs, which they intend to deliver. The West still has a lot of scrap metal.

Via ZeroHedge. My highlight.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre claimed that the US didn’t know about Ukraine’s plans to invade Russia’s Kursk Region, but that’s unbelievable since there’s no way that its intelligence services didn’t even catch a hint of it, not to mention likely participate in the preparations.

Putin even reaffirmed during a meeting on Monday with high-ranking government officials about this crisis that Ukraine is the West’s proxy for waging war on Russia. Here are the five reasons why the US is still playing dumb:

    1. Maintain Plausible Deniability For Escalation Control

    Admitting complicity in Ukraine’s invasion of Russia’s universally recognized territory would make the US a direct participant in these unprecedented hostilities and thus place enormous pressure upon Moscow to respond against it and/or other NATO countries like Poland. The US doesn’t want that to happen, ergo why it also forced Ukraine to call off its reportedly planned assassination of Putin last month as explained here, so dishonestly denying knowledge of its proxy’s plans is par for the course and not unexpected.

    2. Avoid Embarrassment & Responsibility Once Ukraine Fails

    It’s unlikely that Ukraine will be able to indefinitely hold the territory that it captured inside of Russia so it’s a question of when and not if it fails. Accordingly, the US wants to avoid the embarrassment associated with that once it happens and also reduce the chances that Russia feels pressured to respond against it and/or other NATO countries as written above. The US is basically letting Ukraine hold the bag after everything inevitably fails apart so that Russia’s full fury is directly solely against its proxy.  

    3. Propagate David-vs.-Goliath Optics For Boosting Morale

    By pretending to be caught off guard by what just happened, the US is lending false credence to the optics that the latest phase of the already decade-long Ukrainian Conflict that began almost two and a half years ago is a modern-day David vs. Goliath story. This is meant to boost morale inside of Ukraine amidst its drastic slump caused by the ramping up of forcible conscription there and increase support among the Western public for continuing to fund this proxy war in the face of growing fatigue.

    4. Keep Up The Charade Of A “Gentlemen’s Agreement” Gone Bad

    RT’s Sergey Poletaev introduced an intriguing theory into the global information ecosystem earlier this week when he wrote that “The relative calm along the 1,000-kilometer border for two and a half years likely wasn’t coincidental. We can suggest there were agreements between Moscow and Washington, specifically with the administration of US President Joe Biden.” If there’s any truth to that, then lying about not being aware of Kiev’s plans could be an attempt by the US to try to hoodwink Putin yet again.

    5. Troll Russia After It Previously Denied Supporting Donbass

    Russia always denied militarily supporting Donbass throughout the eight years between “EuroMaidan” and the special operation, but the US insisted that this was a lie and that Russia had “invaded” Ukraine, albeit at a limited scale. Whatever the truth may be, playing dumb about its support for Ukraine’s indisputable invasion of Russia is also an attempt to troll Russia for denying the dubious claim that it “invaded” Donbass before 2022.  

There’s no truth to the US’ denial that it knew nothing about Ukraine’s plans to invade Russia, but claiming otherwise advances its escalation control and soft power interests.

Those who play along with this are insulting the intelligence of their targeted audience, some of whom might feel pressured not to call them out though due to fear of being aggressively harassed online and “canceled”.

All objective observers know the truth, especially those in the Global South, which is all that matters for Russia.

With Zelensky moaning like this we know what will be the ending for his gamble in Kursk region.

https://www.rt.com/news/602739-zelensky-british-support-slowed-down/

Ukraine’s Vladimir Zelensky has said his administration will “insist” that the Western allies take “bold steps” to support Kiev’s war effort, singling out the UK, which once showed “real leadership” but is now falling behind.

In his daily address on Friday, Zelensky expressed his intention to “fix” the situation with the country’s allies limiting Ukraine’s “long-range capabilities” and preventing Kiev from fully utilizing the Western-supplied weapons to support its incursion into Kursk Region in Russia.

“The long-range capabilities of our forces are the answer to all the most important, to all the most strategic issues of this war,” he said. He vowed to “intensify our diplomatic work” with the US, UK, France, and “other partners” to remove any barriers.