Ukraine Conflict - Das Himmelfahrtskommando

[Darkpriest]

Seems the more open critique appears in Russia as well. 

 

[kanisatha]

More fun:

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/belarusalert/belarusians-are-sabotaging-plans-to-join-vladimir-putins-ukraine-war/

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1583572/Vladimir-Putin-Russia-Belarus-Ukraine-railway-sabotage-supply-lines-trains-latest-news-vn

[kanisatha]

And then there's this:

https://globalnews.ca/news/8708478/russia-ukraine-missiles-failure-rate/

I am very confident this is about the same breakdown rate for their military equipment across the board. Must be giving nightmares to military officials in Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, and New Delhi. Hehe. It should be illegal for us to have so much fun at the Russians' expense!

[pmp10]

4 hours ago, Mamoulian War said:

Latest report by US should be few days old, and yes, I know that they are not independent party, but compared to Ukrainian estimate of 15000, and Russian estimate of 498, their number seems to me the most plausible.

Also the latest numbers from Ukraine are now out. And Their soldier casualties are probably underestimated as well, but we will probably never know by how much

and comparison of Russian casualties by Ukraine sources. (which are as you say probably inflated by some %)

 

The 500 Russians and 1300 Ukrainians might be self-reported numbers but they are three and two week old respectively.
And that is assuming their MoD can be trusted, which I wouldn't since they refused to update the numbers since release.

The US estimations showed that Russians have lost 10% combat strength by now which would mean 10k KIAs is plausible.
But when it comes to Ukraine all we know is that early on they were trading proportionally 2 to 1 in that metric.
Unless that changed that could place them at around 20k dead by now.

Edited March 25, 2022 by pmp10

[Malcador]

12 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

And then there's this:

https://globalnews.ca/news/8708478/russia-ukraine-missiles-failure-rate/

I am very confident this is about the same breakdown rate for their military equipment across the board. Must be giving nightmares to military officials in Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, and New Delhi. Hehe. It should be illegal for us to have so much fun at the Russians' expense!

And why would US officials lie, well assuming the person even exists

Edited March 25, 2022 by Malcador

[HoonDing]

Goebbels' ugly mug pops up in my head every time I hear the screeching about Russia being about to use chemical weapons.

[Mamoulian War]

3 hours ago, pmp10 said:

The 500 Russians and 1300 Ukrainians might be self-reported numbers but they are three and two week old respectively.
And that is assuming their MoD can be trusted, which I wouldn't since they refused to update the numbers since release.

The US estimations showed that Russians have lost 10% combat strength by now which would mean 10k KIAs is plausible.
But when it comes to Ukraine all we know is that early on they were trading proportionally 2 to 1 in that metric.
Unless that changed that could place them at around 20k dead by now.

Well, the latest estimates are 40k Russian soldiers either dead, injured, captured or deserted. I do not know how plausible it is (again IIRC info from UK and US intelligence), but even if it is half true, that is ****ing crazy number for 4 weeks of warfare...

Edited March 25, 2022 by Mamoulian War

[Malcador]

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/24/politics/ukraine-us-request-javelin-stinger-missiles/index.html

Seems a pretty high consumption, at least for the Javelins.

[ComradeYellow]

4 hours ago, Totally not Gorgon said:

I don't understand what the victory condition is for Russia

Search engines are your friend, living in bubbles where rich white people set the narrative is not your friend.

Russian victory conditions:

Ukraine never becomes part of Nato and remains a neutral buffer state

Donbass region is fully recognized as an independent albeit most certainly pro-Russian gvts. (Donetsk and Luhansk consist of the Donbass region)

Stop neo Nazi's and other anti-Russian groups from attacking Donbass region, which brings us to

Completely deNazify all armed forces in Ukraine, especially the notorious Azov battalion (Ukrainian Nazi's think they are the true Slavs and Russian are inferior and Asiatic, Western liberals are actually doing a wonderful job perpetuating these early-to-mid 20th century stereotypes of Russians)

.........

If all conditions are met, it's a Russian victory, if only some than it's a stalemate or a semi stalemate, if none than it's a Ukrainian victory, a neo Nazi victory, and a Western liberal victory.

Edited March 25, 2022 by ComradeYellow

[Mamoulian War]

IIRC Russia have 3000-5000 tanks in the army, and they are sending loads of them to Ukraine as well. So the consumption of all AT weapons is indeed high...

[Malcador]

Depends on whatever the Pentagon's idea of "full control" is, anyway.

[kanisatha]

1 hour ago, Malcador said:

And why would US officials lie, well assuming the person even exists

Yes, why would they? To do so would only come back to bite them on the ass and damage their future credibility.

And besides, this is based on the intel community collecting raw data daily on Russian missile usage in the theater. So they actually have the data in their hands. It is not some sort of projection or estimate. And lastly, the US intel here tracks extremely well with the intel from other governments who also have good intel. We know for a fact, for example, that many Russian pieces of military hardware have fallen into Ukrainian hands, either because they broke down and were abandoned, or because Russian troops surrendered them to the Ukrainians in exchange for safety (that recent handover to US intel of Russia's super highly classified EW pod the Ukrainians got a hold of being the best example).

https://interestingengineering.com/ukraine-captures-russian-ew-system

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44879/ukraine-just-captured-part-of-one-of-russias-most-capable-electronic-warfare-systems

If there is anything we can truly say about this war, it is the extent to which the Ukrainians, and NATO, and also humanitarian NGOs have been able to collect on-site data about the war, documented with phones and video cameras and SM. I am very comfortable with that 40k figure recently released by NATO of total Russian service members lost (killed, wounded, missing, captured). That's 25% of their total force, which also means it's probably about 40% of their combat force. Those are catastrophic numbers for Russia. I can only imagine what the Chinese are thinking of all of this.

[Totally not Gorgon]

17 minutes ago, ComradeYellow said:

Search engines are your friend, living in bubbles where rich white people set the narrative is not your friend.

Russian Russian victory conditions:

Ukraine never becomes part of Nato and remains a neutral buffer state

Donbass region is fully recognized as an independent albeit most certainly a pro-Russian gvt

Stop neo Nazi's and other anti-Russian groups from attacking Donbass region, which brings us to

Completely deNazify all armed forces in Ukraine, especially the notorious Azov battalion (Ukrainian Nazi's think they are the true Slavs and Russian are inferior and Asiatic, Western liberals are actually doing a wonderful job perpetuating these early-to-mid 20th century stereotypes of Russians

.........

If all conditions are met, it's a Russian victory, if only some than it's a stalemate or a semi stalemate, if none than it's a Ukrainian victory, a neo Nazi victory, and a Western liberal victory.

I don't see the need to invade Ukraine to get most of those fulfilled. Russian armies present in the breakaway republics would more than likely have been sufficient to prevent attacks, and to finally negotiate and end to the fighting. What's more, Russia could have done this years past. Russia didn't, because it needed to build antipathy against Ukraine in preparation for an invasion, and because the war was serving them so well in destabilizing Ukraine and slowing down membership of both NATO and the EU, neither of which would have allowed Ukraine to join while it was fighting a civil war.  

The West rather foolishly let Russia know by its actions that the opportunity to invade Ukraine was running out, and so Putin took our advice to do it while he could. It's pretty clear that Russia meant to overwhelm the whole of Ukraine, and claim the big prize, rather than the consolation prize of the Donbas, but couldn't do it because of the sad state of its armed forces. 

 

 

[Zoraptor]

2 hours ago, Darkpriest said:

Seems the more open critique appears in Russia as well.

Uh, yeah. Girkin is a decidedly Zhironovsky style 'critic'. You might have heard stories about '200 Russians killed by the US in Syria' a few years ago- that resolves to him. It was actually about 190 local tribespeople and about a dozen Wagner. He said they were all Russians because he wanted Putin to... bomb the US in Syria. Yes, really.

In other words his 'criticism' would be something like "this operation is badly run because Putin isn't nuking every west Ukrainian city, plus all the bits of NATO that are supplying them".

59 minutes ago, Mamoulian War said:

IIRC Russia have 3000-5000 tanks in the army, and they are sending loads of them to Ukraine as well. So the consumption of all AT weapons is indeed high...

Russia has way more tanks than that. It's cheaper to mothball tanks than scrap them so they've still got a load of ex soviet stock. Probably around 15,000 of them.

45 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Depends on whatever the Pentagon's idea of "full control" is, anyway.

In this case it's not even denied by Russia, but by the Ukrainians. Given the lols generated by americans not understanding the difference between rif and city in Syria they're probably confused by oblast vs city in this case.

24 minutes ago, Totally not Gorgon said:

I don't see the need to invade Ukraine to get most of those fulfilled. Russian armies present in the breakaway republics would more than likely have been sufficient to prevent attacks, and to finally negotiate and end to the fighting.

They actually had that already- that was the Minsk Agreement. The trouble was that that was signed when Ukraine was indisputably losing so didn't favour them, and was politically impossible to implement.

[Totally not Gorgon]

3 hours ago, Totally not Gorgon said:

months or years. Millions of willing resistance fighters. Millions of displaced refugees with nothing but hatred for Russia. The Ukrainians are simply done being told what to do. That's the main miscalculation.

So far the Russian invasion has achieved nothing much that will be of value on the negotiation table. Best case scenario, Russia started this slaughter for the win of some s

Minsk 2 mentions Donbas autonomous regions that would somehow also have representation in Ukrainian central government and have veto power over, say, NATO membership for Ukraine. Yeah, that was never going to fly. 

[Totally not Gorgon]

I quoted the wrong thing.

 

ehh. Nevermind, 

[Zoraptor]

Pretty obvious what you were replying to anyway.

Thing is, as much as Minsk may have been hard to implement what they've ended up with from not implementing is a lot lot worse, and they're still going to have a worse ultimate result than Minsk too.

And on a somewhat related tangent; I am highly amused by Australia and New Zealand throwing fits about Solomon Islands maybe signing a defence agreement with China. I thought it was an inalienable right of countries to sign defence agreements with whoever they wanted, and objections were just a sign of paranoia? I'm getting the distinct impression it's only an inalienable right when they're signing agreements with, well, us...

Might have helped if we- well, mostly the Ockers with a bit of political cover from us- hadn't treated the Solomons like a vassal state close to an outright colonial possession since independence. Though not as badly as Nauru, of course.

[Totally not Gorgon]

Ohh the Ukrainians massively underestimated just how urgently they needed peace, I agree. 

[Sarex]

5 minutes ago, Totally not Gorgon said:

Ohh the Ukrainians massively underestimated just how urgently they needed peace, I agree. 

Dollars to donuts they were promised direct support by the west if they didn't back down.

[kanisatha]

Here are two more superb articles I urge people to read. This first one gives a first-hand account of why the Ukrainians are winning against an on-paper superior Russian force, and also gives amazing details on how the US (and other allied) military needs to evolve to win wars in the contemporary era:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/american-volunteer-foreign-fighters-ukraine-russia-war/627604/

This second article is an excellent proposal for what the Ukrainians need now as they go on the offensive against a spent Russian military force:

https://thedispatch.com/p/what-ukraine-needs-now?s=r

[Malcador]

3 minutes ago, kanisatha said:

Here are two more superb articles I urge people to read. This first one gives a first-hand account of why the Ukrainians are winning against an on-paper superior Russian force, and also gives amazing details on how the US (and other allied) military needs to evolve to win wars in the contemporary era:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/american-volunteer-foreign-fighters-ukraine-russia-war/627604/

Doesn't really seem like anything all that new,  Ukrainians are motivated and have better tactics.  Been beaten over the head with that in the media here, nearly 24/7

When I mentioned to Jed that I’d fought in Fallujah in 2004, he said that the tactics the Marine Corps used to take that city would never work today in Ukraine. In Fallujah, our infantry worked in close coordination with our premier tank, the M1A2 Abrams. On several occasions, I watched our tanks take direct hits from rocket-propelled grenades (typically older-generation RPG-7s) without so much as a stutter in their forward progress. Today, a Ukrainian defending Kyiv or any other city, armed with a Javelin or an NLAW, would destroy a similarly capable tank

Is why I roll my eyes when I see some talking head say "We lost less men in 20 years in Iraq!", heh.  Is interesting to see what role armour is going to play going forward, though. Not sure how much help infantry is going to be when you're getting shot at from the distances a Javelin can do. 

[Mamoulian War]

This one will be really interesting to watch, how it will unfold. When you see, that Greece and Turkey are willing to cooperate, this shows very strong message what they do feel about situation in Mariupol and Russian presence there...

 

Edited March 25, 2022 by Mamoulian War

[Zoraptor]

Er lol. They need Turkey's permission to access the Black Sea in a time of war. That's not exactly extraordinary co-operation considering they're NATO allies.

12 minutes ago, Malcador said:

Is why I roll my eyes when I see some talking head say "We lost less men in 20 years in Iraq!", heh.  Is interesting to see what role armour is going to play going forward, though. Not sure how much help infantry is going to be when you're getting shot at from the distances a Javelin can do. 

Fallujah style tactics would work in Ukraine with some adaption. Strong cordon, artillery, block to block with TOS-1. Thermobaric, so the advantage of hiding underground or in ruins is largely negated by losing all your oxygen. Just not very good for PR.

Tanks aren't much use if they're used badly even with only 'traditional' ATGMs. The Syrians found that out constantly, and even ancient 60s/70s Malyutkas have taken out Saudi Abrams and Turkish Leopard 2s.

[kanisatha]

1 hour ago, Malcador said:

Doesn't really seem like anything all that new,  Ukrainians are motivated and have better tactics.

What's new is details on exactly what those tactics are, how they're being carried out, and why they're so effective against an armor-heavy opponent. It's not a superficial "report" like we get on TV/Internet news these days.

[Sarex]