Yesterday was a fairly slow day of consolidations so we took a break. But now it’s time to summarize the new developments, which begin with the latest battlefield updates. Ukraine has ran into a brickwall on the western Zaporozhye front near Orekhov where the Russian 42nd division of the 58th army continues to strongly hold the line.
Yes, but be aware that this is notoriously pro-Ukrainian site. Back when the SMO started, their site was still full of Azov and other neo-Nazi unit worship (and little else). They seem to have cleaned up their image somewhat, at least at first glance.
They do seem to have a much better grasp of military realities than most other pro-Ukrainian sites and analysts though.
For comparison. And it is absolutely not pro-Ukrainian. And it is updated according to reliable data, including in the presence of photo and video confirmations.
But, when using it, anyone will inevitably be called fooled by pro-Russian propaganda. %)
Ciaramella is a deep state leaker. How many Ukrainians have to die as cannon fodder for the big guy senile joe to cover up for his crackhead son hunter? The bootlicking neocons at the bulwark are salivating at every escalation; https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-lick-boots-at-the-bulwark
350k would mean at least about 7-800k "irretrievable losses", KIAs, and very heavily wounded, like amputees, people with brain trauma, blindness, etc (who are no longer able to fight). Just run the numbers:
AFU was 200k strong in the start (at least in terms of "bayonet strength"), or thereabout. But let's assume 400k with all the logistics and support personnel, reservists, etc. Let's say they also trained up 30k extra troops every month. That's probably less than they mobilised at the start of the war during the initial months, but it quickly dropped off, especially these days, when the comissars have to hunt for mobiks one by one in Western Ukraine. Remember, any time the West trained up 10-20k troops, it was big news, and it didn't happen every month, but let's assume 30k/mo is about right. It's in the bullpark, anyways.
That would give, over 14 months, 400k + 16*30k = 880 k. That means they would currently have 80k troops left, resisting around 500k or so Russian troops. They wouldn't have the bayonet strength to man a 200km front line, let alone an 800km defense line, LET ALONE start an offensive. You're delusional. Losses on both sides are significantly lower than people generally think. KIAs at hundreds and hundreds of thousands are absurd on either side.
The qabal hid a half million man army in ukraine. They planned to use it to take over europe and russia after the reset and digital bank crash. Good thing we found the cockroach nest early.
It is absolutely up to 350,000. Zaluzhny told the US Chiefs of Staff that he had lost 257,000 men a while back. 30,000 of those were the missing. The latest figure I heard was 310,000 from Scott Ritter with 60,000 missing. All of those figures are well within reasonable guesses. That would also give us from 1-1.5 million wounded, which is also a very reasonable figure. Probably most of those wounded returned to combat.
They kept replenishing their army, silly. I think they are on their 5th or 6th entire army now. The others were all wiped out.
No, AFU had a minimum of 1 million men under arms at the start. They keep doing mobilizations. They are on their 8th mobilization now. It will be a long time before they run out of Ukrainian men to throw at the Russians.
Also, Russian losses from all forces, including Wager and the LDPR, are ~35,000. We know that Russian to Ukrainian losses are 10-1 and have been averaging that for a long time. Also
Russia has 10X more artillery pieces and 10X more ammo than the Ukrainians have, which make the 10-1 casualty figures even more believable.
Correct. The old ratio of KIA to WIA does not apply here due to Russian missiles, artillery, and MLRS. Most aren't shot with bullets as in previous wars. The KIA numbers are enormous.
Saw today in a respectable Telegram channel that 10,000 Poles have died in this conflict. I find this entirely believable. Might even be understated.
I am curious though, do we have any Poles from Poland on this blog? I am curious how the Polish Government is explaining or hiding the losses. Especially with an election looming.
With a couple of dozen mercenaries' deaths, you can easily sweep under the carpet. Entire brigades of dead Poles are not so easy to do.
Where are you getting your numbers from? The only item I can agree with is the 400K Ukraine started off with.
How many rounds of mobilization has Ukraine had? I have lost count. I hope you understand that the majority of the people dragooned off the streets are not sent to NATO countries for training. They are given at most two weeks of basic training and then sent to die.
400k casualties is plausible, and in fact probable (especially now, after 2 months of "The Great Counteroffensive ")
300k+ KIAs (which I was trying to refute, because it's parroted by many) is not plausible, that would imply around a million heavy casualties.
I've done some back of the envelope calculations. Ukraine has about 4-5 million men between ages 20 and 50. This means they could theoretically call up a lot more, however, they need their hundreds of thousands of railroad workers, powerplant workers, farmers etc. etc. If they start to dip into those people, it will go downhill very fast from there.
So the surplus manpower pool isn't as infinite as we are lead to believe, in fact, I'd say it's depleted. And yes, probably they train most of their conscripts domestically, and only send their dedicated, loyal conscripts to train in the West (the guys who won't try to escape).
Most Americans don't know, and most of the ones who do know are against what is happening inside Ukraine.
We are all aware of the coup in 2014 and everything that flowed subsequently from it. However our government doesn't represent us, so we are victims of state-enacted robbery.
Annalena Baerbock asks media not to call "Leopards" German: "Understand, it does not matter at all where what is made. You don't say about your iPhone that it's American or Tim Cook's. You say it's yours. It's the same story with tanks... German [tanks] in Germany, and these are Ukrainian. And what they do with them has nothing to do with us. Thank you!"
remember when German made was high quality branding , now they dont even want to own that junk
Ukraine js basically what russia would be if western backed oligarchs killed putin.
I recommend solzhenitsyn s 200 years together book and the hidden history of the khazarian mafia. They vonstitute most of the supervillain qabal we fight against. Helps to see then unmasked. Nuland is khazarian. Soros is related. Look up the ashkenazi mrna ceos and execs.
The ace2 receptor for ashkenazi is resistant immune to spike protein
The spike protein binds to an ace 2 receptor and causes toxins for the cells. If it does not bind, then jt is easier for body to defend itself. The spike is the weapon in both covid and shots. So they released a weapon that harmed all ethnicities except one genetic group. The ashkenazis aka the neocons aka the bolsheviks aka vindman nuland. Khazarian mafia.
Good analogy, except Russia still has oligarchs. It is incorrect to say Putin went after all the oligarchs. He did not. He only went after the ones that refused to stay out of politics.
It is just a shame what happened to Ukraine. They are into all this historical revisionism and fake nationalism, yet they turned over their entire country to the Americans. Literally handed over the keys to them for money. What sort of "Great Country" voluntarily becomes an American satrapy?
These are not the old oligarchs. Vladimir put the oligarchs under a severe restriction of not interfering in politics, and broke the ones that did not. He also created many new oligarchs to balance out the cartel handful.
He did in fact go after all the oligarchs, just using soft power. If you look at the oligarchs and their ranks, they increased in number and decreased in rank, even if they stayed out of politics. That's because Vladimir was working with the state central bank behind the scenes to get rid of the assets of these people, to make Russia more independent of the rothschilds and Western banksters.
I think it is the other way around. Ukraine is a critical strategic place for the qabal, so the qabal ordered AMerica to support Ukraine, not the other way around.
Yah. it was Vindman who gave the info to Ciaramella who gave it to Schiff. Additionally, Ciaramella told Ukrainian investigators in January 2016 to lay off Hunter Biden and begin investigating Paul Manafort. Ukraine passed their bogus "Russia collusion" evidence to Alexandra Chalupa of the DNC, who passed it to Comey's FBI, who gave it to Robert Mueller (the evidence was baseless, and Mueller nailed Manafort on tax charges from 2006), Chalupa likewise is a member of Ukrainian diaspora community.
If you read Solzhenitsyn's 200 years together, it starts connecting the dots between ashkenazis, bolshevik leaders that were not russian but hated russians, the marxists, Khazarians, and ukrainians.
There is a reason why Vladimir changed his tune from the past. He admires solzhenitsyn and made his works required reading in high school.
I took two screen grabs from Simplicius's article and wrote my own. While I am promoting him where I can I did not attribute the source to him so I will not post a link to my thing. This is what I had to say on the topic:
"And now, once again, new lives, dreams, love, and hope of thousands of young people are going to be mercilessly buried in that tragic land. The deafening silence of the Western population, once known for its "peace movement," is nothing but an embodiment of cowardice that has the potential to ultimately annihilate us all.
And why?
I harbor deep fear and possess strong suspicions that this tragedy is a direct consequence of Joe Biden's desperate attempts to conceal his involvement in the Ukraine Criminal Enterprise, LLC. The Cabal in power, driven by their unwavering willingness to protect their buddy and pocket a billion or two, has made us accomplices in this tragic affair. "
One day they might though. Ukraine is going to run out of men. We are not that far off. Give it another six to eight months. What does the Ukrainian leadership do at this point? They cannot negotiate, nor surrender. They will not be able to hide the losses at this point either. Everyone will know that they have bled the country dry. They have painted themselves into a corner. There is no way out.
I would not want to be in Zelensky's, Danilov's, Podoylak's, Yarmek or Zalunzy's shoes at this point. All the billions they have stolen are of little use if you are not around to spend it and they are unable to leave Ukraine.
Zelensky has no freedom of movement at all. His calls are all monitored. The last place on earth he wants to be is in Ukraine. Every time Ukraine is failing on the battlefield or mired in a corruption scandal, he runs off to some other country.
Well, Ukraine is talking of more mobilization, so they aren't out of meat yet. Or NATO will order Poland, etc. into the gap.
Anyway, if the Kiev regime collapses, Zelenskii will just bugger off to his Italian villa, his NYC penthouse, etc.. The example of Ghani fleeing Afghanistan with stacks of dollars is most instructive, and last I checked, Ghani is alive and well.
Ghani was a nobody. Other than the Taliban, few want him dead. Zelensky is another matter. I do not think he would be safe in any other country. Too much blood has been shed.
What amazed me and disheartened me was checking FJB's Approval Rating. Approval outweighs disapproval indicating the success of brainwashing the USA and infecting it with Russophobia. The majority of Americans are infected with the mental illness of Russophobia. The manufactured consent is as bad as the manufactured COVID-19.
How do I email the author? I found a GREAT clip that is likely evidence of Himmars GPS being jammed or potentially spoofed. It saved the lives of 50 RF soldiers. Can anyone help me? I already geo located it, did distance calculations, and other work. I just don't know how to send it to the author. Is there a dedicated member forum or questions submittal portal for the mailbag?
Offensives seem to be impossible, by either side. Those expecting a big Russian offensive upon the failure of Ukraine's are deluded. It has not happened, and it is never going to happen. You can see the problem. Just read this article. Russia will have to be content with micro-gains. When they tried to get ambitious in Ugledar, we see the poor results.
Consider that Russia has spent about eight months building its defences in the south, whilst Ukraine has been building there's for eight years.
Also people need to bear in mind that all these newly formed Ukrainian brigades with western equipment have been set aside specifically for the offensive. If it fails, why are people assuming that Ukraine's defensive lines will suddenly collapse? They are not collapsing now are they? The Chechen's were supposed to finally clear Marinka sometime ago. The order was apparently made. Has that happened? No. The Bottom-line is, I see the war dragging on for years. At least 5 years, maybe more.
The point does have merit, and I intend to cover it in more depth in the future. However, it must be said that Ugledar was an isolated mini push by one small unit *before* the Russian mobilization had fully matriculated, as the mobiks were still in the middle of training in rear areas at the time. Thus, it's not a good measure for what Russia can or will do so the fundamental reasoning is quite flawed.
With that said, yes the war can drag on for a long time, and I'm not saying *definitively* that a series of major Russian offensives will be successful, but I believe you'll still see quite more in store than you think.
How do I email the author? I found a GREAT clip that is likely evidence of Himmars GPS being jammed or potentially spoofed. It saved the lives of 50 RF soldiers. Can anyone help me? I already geo located it, did distance calculations, and other work. I just don't know how to send it to the author. Is there a dedicated member questions submital for the mailbag?
I was thinking about that. But Ukraine has been moving equipment via helicopter and whatever at night for years now. It seems Ukraine is becoming somewhat "thin." Sic Special Ops on them? Russia has the best helicopters and air defense control over all of Ukraine. With air cover, something like blitzkrieg becomes possible. I foresee increased use of cluster bombs and night raids, and it looks like Kiev still has electricity. Given the billions of dollars being spent on transporting weapons, destroy Liv and the war is done.
I think you are confusing them with mines like the PFM-1. I think cluster bombs are supposed to go off in a bunch of explosions rather than one in just one epicentre but I could find out there is a system called a cluster bomb that does what you say so good answer if there is such a system. The Ukrops have a rocket for the HIMARS that is like the Russian TOS-1a and that gets used on civilians. Even just regular bullets are an anti civilian weapon in their hands.
NATO and Ukraine have them. If they don't use them, it is by mutual agreement. But I expect that if Ukraine uses them so will Rus. They would be very effective in forests and trenches.
Russia would be better served by creating a series of meat grinders with associated micro-gains in territory, than it would by taking big arrow initiatives.
Ukraine doesn't have the personnel or time on its side.
War cannot be won on willpower alone. Without will, no war can be won. The mental state of Ukraine is a factor determining how long this war will last.
Ukrainians aren't the enemy or stupid en masse. They're human beings like us, often manipulated by forces we think are beyond our control. The body bags and unanswered calls of their family members dying for Western greed are being noticed. As the corpses pile higher, they could blot out nationalism, and make them rage at what they can reach. May Zelensky and his NATO handlers be near when that happens.
For the sake of Ukraine and Russia, and for little countries like mine affected by this war, I do not want a Korean situation.
I may like the romanticism of that but reality differs for me. I do not want to fight where my forefathers/mothers fought. I'm sure that almost every soldier would rather be at home watching TV. I'm anti-war. I'm anti citizens allowing their leaders to take them to war. But now that blood has spilt, all I can do is aim for the truth in the hope the war ends quicker.
While it is an “unfortunate” fact of history that the masses are pressed into war by the self titled elites, and thus become cannon fodder for their cause not all conflicts are driven by this fact alone. I’d wager that most of those soldiers understand that sitting at home watching TV will not be an option for either themselves or their families unless their nation is protected from the forces trying to destroy it. It’s not as though the Kremlin has to drum up some outlandish narrative about WMDs, spreading democracy, or some former cia asset. Most Russians who experienced the dark 90’s and likely have a pretty clear idea who and what was the driving force behind it. As has been said before, this is an existential battle.
The whole issue with 'anti'-whatever is that it does not change reality. Your wife/sister/mom could be very anti-rape however if there are faced with armed rapist intend to do exact that and then kill them, they better have the means to and willpower to neutralize the threat. Being anti-sexual violence would just make you suffer such violence. Fight or suffer the consequences.
Same thing applies here (at least to Russia), you see deliberate attack aimed at total destruction of the russian nation and state, from made up 'highly likely' incidents, to fake 'lists' , to confiscation of property and arrests based on citizenship/nationality (aka a jew from Lvov in London suddenly became 'russian oligarch') . RU knows it is fighting for survival and RU intends on winning. Worst case it would come to a 'draw' through MAD and RU already stated that. The fantasies of 'well we can pretend that we only fight in Ukraine and nowhere else' may end up being fantasies as well as 'we are not at war, just want to kill all of you and actively working towards that goal through hundreds of billions of dollars, our intelligence, our command and control, our supplies, our weaponry, etc' . in real life you are going to get punched back and hard if you try to do that and my fear that time is coming.
I have a decent understanding of NATO's war. There's a difference between romanticism and pragmatism. I would find no comfort in fighting where my forefathers fought - there are better reasons to fight. And peace must always be an option.
Russia is meeting its objective of demilitarizing Kiev by focusing on destruction of Ukrainian equipment and personnel which Kiev keeps feeding into established kill zones such as Bakhmut, and now the "counteroffensive" area. Furthermore by remaining relatively static Russia minimizes losses of their military personnel and harm to civilians and infrastructure. Russia has had every reason to forgo large scale offensive maneuvers, so far. They may be forced to eventually in order to remove the regime/DC puppets in Kiev. Or perhaps what's left of the Ukrainian military will terminate the problem in Kiev as their suffering becomes unbearable. We'll see.
The front gives the appearance of 'static' only because thus far it has been a war of attrition, not of territorial gains on the part of Russia. The only real offensives are from the Ukie side where thier military is being systematically dismantled. Russia conducts offensive maneuvers only in relatively small measure where it suits their attrition requirements - gain territory, fall back under attack, destroy the enemy, gain territory - the cycle goes on. It only appears 'static', though in the end Russian experiences net gains, though relatively small ones (Soledar, Artyomovsk, etc).
At some point, known only to the Russian General Staff, Ukraine will be be depleted to the point that they can no longer conduct successful offensive operations. It is at this point that Russia will conduct a real offensive to take the whole of the Donbass, complete acquisition of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Kharkov, and perhaps Sumy, Nikolaev and Odessa. They might well end up overrunning Western Ukraine and in the process end up fighting Poles who will be egged on by the US to intervene. I'm sure Simplicius will speak to these possibilities in the future.
But the bottom line is, to paraphrase Mr Putin - "You ain't seen nothing yet!" primarily because Russia has not yet gone on the offense.
The war lasting for 5 years depends on the west's ability to maintain political support for sending what will end up being trillions of dollars, to pay not only for military hardware, but to completely sustain the ever expanding black hole of the Ukrainian state.
I think this is one of the points that Russia will have to consider- is it worth having such a state, one beholden to the West/NATO - right on its borders?
If one considers that Ukrainians and Russians are connected by the roots- there's even more reason for Russia to liberate these lands. Like saving your family.
This will be the last native Ukrainian army of this war. The NATO side will be increasingly foreign. I don't know if that will make it a winning army or not. But the main thing to see is that the 'proxy war' phase ends this summer. It will either be a true international war, or there will be a cease-fire, or Washington/London will fold by the end of summer, I mean fold into a purely defensive posture with any attacks being covert/asymmetrical type things which hopefully will remain 'conventional'.
Yes. Any treaty that NATO makes is just 'be cool while I sharpen my knife'. The good news is that as my country has become more evil we have also become more incompetent. Sad but that is where we are.
I believe you're right - and if NATO does replenish the army from beyond Ukraine in an obvious fashion, then the war will get truly nasty. So far Russia has done what it can to go 'gentle' on the Ukrainians - focusing on military materiel rather than troops, avoiding civilian concentrations, etc.
That won't be true if it's Poles, or Swedes, or Finns, or Germans, or Brits and Americans.
"The Bottom-line is, I see the war dragging on for years. At least 5 years, maybe more."
Except that the Ukraine has no armaments industries to speak of. It can not pay it's own bills, whether it's for defence related issues, for government salaries, for social benefits, for health care or anything else the state has to pay for. It survives as a somewhat functioning state purely through massive amounts of western FINANCIAL aid. Without, it will collapse, and quickly too.
It's military only holds out because of western weapon deliveries. But the cupboard in the west is almost bare. And the west isn't producing meaningful quantities of new weaponry, nor can they within the next couple of years.
As soon as either the west's (enormous) financial aid becomes a trickle, or when they are forced to curtail the weapon deliveries, this war will essentially be over. There may be prolonged period of mopping up after that, but this war will ultimately be decided by economic factors, not by how much Russia does or doesn't conquer with its armies. And that isn't going to take five years.
I think Russia needed to finish this war fast last year before the Ukrops had time to mobilise. I do not think this is a forgone conclusion though I agree with a lot of what you are saying.
Consider the following: Our leaders tell us that Putin is threatening to use nukes on Ukraine so they need to give Ukraine nukes as a deterrent to stop nukes being used. Then oops a daisy nukes get used and it is nothing to do with us. How could we possibly have forseen this? Putin has by his prior actions or inaction shown us that he will do nothing in response. NOTHING! They use their nukes as an insurance policy that they reckon will deter Russia from ever doing anything while they at the same time think Putin would never press the button even with Russia destroyed. That is your problem. There is a total lack of credibility when it comes to vindictiveness. Putin lacks the vital level of vindictiveness and determination that you need in this situation. Give the west enough time and they will think of something.
"I think Russia needed to finish this war fast last year before the Ukrops had time to mobilise"
Well, they did. In late march '22 the Ukrainian negotiators in agreed in principle to Russia's demands and the war was set to end. Then Boris Johnson intervened and suddenly the Ukrainians rejected what they had just agreed to, vowing to fight to the end instead (many of the involved Ukrainian negotiators have since been murdered by the SBU).
Since then, Russia has effectively been at an undeclared war with NATO. And Russia has been winning that war, hands down. They are defeating NATO without having to fight them. Talk about a masterful judo move!
I've said this before, but I'll say it again. This conflict is like a football match between NATO and Russia, with Ukraine as the ball that's being kicked all over the pitch by both sides.
Russia is deliberately delaying finishing off the Ukraine, because as soon as they do, NATO can extricate itself and stop its own haemorrhaging. Because of its own propaganda, NATO is forced to keep pouring vast amounts of treasure (which they desperately need for their ailing economies) and ever scarcer military resources (for which they don't have the industrial capacity to replace it any time soon) into a bottomless pit, for a hopeless cause. Or to put it more bluntly, Russia has NATO by the balls and is slowly ripping them right off.
The first part of your reply was a fair point and the last part sounds pretty much like what I said when Russia first pulled back from Kiev and I did not know why. I assumed it was to bleed all those weapons dry incase of more war with NATO later.
But I disagree with your confidence in ultimate victory and I do not think this is like a football match.
This will come down to a game of chicken and out of Biden or Putin my money is always going to be on Biden winning in a game of chicken.
The reason I think Putin is the one who will lose his nerve and veer off the road into a ditch rather than do a header is because Putin cares about the passengers in his car whereas Biden does not.
My prediction is there will be a pretext where our journalists tell us that the Russians have set off a dirty bomb or somehow created a threat to humanity.
The Americans will do a limited strike and give Putin the option of stepping down if he wants to save his life.
Then they will arrest him and hang him for fake war crimes.
I hope they do not manage to pull it off but it does seem to be going that way.
In my experience, the bad guys tend to win.
Sorry but that is how things are.
History will remember Putin as an evil maniac.
Biden will be written up as some sort of great leader who stood strong against a tyrant.
The Russian leadership need to wise up and get tough.
It isn't so much Ukraine's defensive lines collapsing as the entire Ukrainian state collapses.
This could arise from many causes, top of which is significant reduction or delay of Western aid but "war weariness" is also possible. It is impossible at this point for even the redoubtable Ukrainian propaganda capabilities to conceal Ukraine's massive losses and failure to succeed. War is the ultimate pressure cooker on any society - the reduced population in Ukraine, its defunct economy, its poor prospects for the future even compared with its literally worse-in-class economic performance post 1991 - these are all iron bars on the camel's back.
Your making an assumption that all the conditions will remain basically the same, when precisely the opposite is happening -they are going to be thrown all out of balance this summer..Russia hasn't had a general mobilization yet, and hasn't need one meanwhile according to some westerners "Ukraine has mobilized its entire adult poulation" , NATO itself is scraping for ammo and they're talking about sending the Polaks in when they cant find any more Ukrainians . But It all depends on what Russias actual political goals are and that remains somewhat ambiguous at the "granular" level.Meanwhile in the US its finally starting to dawn on them that they already lost to China.
Volyn Region would be a great place to attack the Ukrops.
It would signal an intention to actually finish the job.
It has been manly stripped clean of defending troops.
The bulk of their army is at the other end of the country.
It would seriously dampen the enthusiasm of the Poles to get involved.
Fighting the Russians at the other end of Ukraine does not seem as scary to them as fighting the Russians on their own border.
The Ukrops will not use local civilians as hostages if they are their fellow Ruthenians.
They probably will not want to fight over towns when it is their towns that would get flattened (positioning troops in towns for defensive purposes is against the Geneva Convention anyway).
Most importantly it would put the Russians within range of the rail shipments from Poland using cheaper rockets than the fancy missiles they normally have to use to get at targets in Western Ukraine.
It feels like this is going to go on forever.
Invading the western part and starting to cut off the Polish border would be the beginning of the end and everyone would know it.
Except that I think a better way is to attack a bit west of Zhitomir, and cut Ukraine in half. There is a strip of land there going south to Moldova that bypasses any major city.
They need to cut off the supply if they are serious about ending the war any time soon.
Giving nukes to Ukraine is a pipe dream. Doing so would destroy the Non Proliferation Treaty. It'd open a whole can of worms, everyone would be sending nukes everywhere, it'd be nuclear anarchy.
I'm surprised how butt hurt Ukranian supporters are over the undisputably correct decision to enforce NPT and prevent a cascade of nuclear weapons. Undoubtedly they'd be mad if Russia and China started gifting nukes. Yet that is what they want, they want their cake, nuclear proliferation, and to eat it, only the west may proliferate nukes, an impossible scenario.
Desperate people will do desperate things. Now that the decline of the US empire is accelerated by the Ukraine war, we don't know what acts of desperation the Neocons will resort to in order to avoid the inevitable.
The Russians were rightly alarmed when Zelensky demanded nuclear weapons at the Munich security conference without any opposition from Western governments.
Neither Ukraine nor Nato can win a conventional war with Russia on Ukrainian territory. The West can't beat Russian air defenses and missiles. If Western leaders are serious about avoiding a Ukrainian defeat, that can only be achieved by nuclear weapons.
Yeah, they'll give Zelensky some nukes and in a couple of months the whole world will see one of them strapped to some Mexican cartel soldier's truck...
Btw, it's Putin's duty as Supreme Commander to protect citizens of Russia by any means necessary, and judging from Ukraine's latest stunts with blowing the dam, attacking civilians in Belgorod region and so forth we can safely assume that his answer or at least the second best option will be to glass the region of warhead(s) location, be it some city or whatever else
The problem is in the pattern that we have observed. As soon as the west starts to consider any new weapon delivery to Ukraine, you can guarantee that they have already delivered it.
Anything is possible, and we shouldn't discount anything. The west has made Ukraine their final redoubt. It needn't have been this way, but this is their choice.
"Giving nukes to Ukraine is a pipe dream. Doing so would destroy the Non Proliferation Treaty."
Since when did the West care about consistency or treaties? And yes, they'd make war on Iran and go nuclear if they must, rather than allow Russia to do the same with Iran.
Yes, millions would die. These are sociopaths we are dealing with here. They could not care less, as long as they seem themselves as "winning".
I'm going to make a shameless plug. Thank you for your considerable effort. You're communication skills are off the charts, positive. The use of grey-matter energy and organizational skill it takes to marshal the information you present is nothing short of superior.
I hope you get more and more subscribers. The more the better. In an age of willful distortion of facts and narrative manipulation voices like yours are not a luxury. They are a necessity.
God bless. Here's to doubling and tripling your subscribers.
I dont sweat the frontest of front line positions changing hands, thats almost the point of them. In fact i have accepted Russias penchant for letting the enemy come to them, clearing them up, moving back the the original position and starting the cycle again in this whole event.
This appears to be the pattern and really one that works fairly well it would seem. With the AFU essentially believing their own propaganda and being press ganged to the front it behooves the RF forces to let them have a bit of leeway. In the end it leads to their destruction.
I am increasingly of the view that Russia will need to kill 3-4 million Ukrainians in order for Ukrainians to turn on their domestic civilian and military leaderships, in order to effect a domestic coup.
The benefit of a domestic coup in Ukraine is it allows for an off-ramp for the US, before the administration decides to use nuclear weapons.
Biden may be inclined to use nuclear weapons in order to prove he is tougher against Russia than Trump.
We are living in batshit crazy times.
+++
With respect to counter-mine operations, there are ways to make mine detection and destruction more effective, in a way that would neutralize the effectiveness of tube-launched scatterables.
"With respect to counter-mine operations, there are ways to make mine detection and destruction more effective, in a way that would neutralize the effectiveness of tube-launched scatterables."
We have seen the result of Russian doctrinal defence as Ukies probe for weakness. Russia absolutely has a doctrinal offense to counter that same defence. If it doesn't, then there's no big arrow offensive to be made.
If it was as useful in practice, as in theory, they'd obviously use it. They've been using it as yet another form of IDF to destroy trenches, but not really to clear mines. Clearly it's not as effective on the battlefield as it was thought out to be.
Earlier I saw demining done with a huge percussive explosion that might have been used to clear a field. Instead of using it for clearing a mine field they used it to destroy a fortification. Wham. Don't know if it would work for all kinds of mines, but that might be what he meant.
Keep in mind the tooth to tail ratio of a military unit - this is turn is the tip of the pyramid on top of the civilian economy.
Soldiers are generally in the prime period of productivity; every single loss is a generational loss for the overall society in question. Ukraine's population has fallen tremendously - half or more on top of which a significant portion of the cream of its manpower is dead or permanently disabled. You don't need to inflict 3 or 4 million casualties on a 20 million population - 500K dead and disabled would be more than enough to cripple it for a generation.
Ordinarily you're probably correct, however Ukraine has been turned into the tip of the NATO spear.
Having their civil service and military funded by the US, EU, and UK has effectively allowed Ukraine to divert far more manpower into its military than what would happen if it was a true country-to-country conflict.
That's why I have such a large number (15-20% of the current population) as needing to be killed or wounded without the ability to return to battle.
My estimate is that Ukraine currently has around 400k KIA. If so x3 = 1.2 million WIA = 1.6 million out of the fight one way or another.
Funding doesn't change the reality of having to grow and transport food, transport fuel ammo and equipment, repair equipment, and run a civilian economy.
The tooth to tail in a combat unit is high precisely because of this - and the real world also requires even greater tooth to tail in order to input into the military logistics equation. Let's not forget that the civilians have to eat and move around too.
The reality is that no society outside of Rome has ever shown the capability of having even 5% of its population killed in combat and still want to fight.
I don't think there's really any historical precedent for a foreign power to pledge resources on such a scale to a proxy on the condition that they commit to endless unwinnable war. Makes it really hard to guess just how far the fanatics and the grifters inside Ukraine could push this.
I would point out that both the Korean war and Vietnam war - there were massive influxes of equipment from foreign powers: the USSR and Communist China.
The question is twofold: are Ukrainians are willing to die in the job lots as the Vietnamese did, and secondly if the US is willing to send in hundreds of thousands of troops as China did in Korea.
My view of the first is: Hell No! given the increasingly draconian recruitment tactics being used by Ukraine. There is certainly no Vietcong equivalent for a Tet offensive in Donbass or Russia; if anything, this is more true in "free" Ukraine.
My view of the second is: Hell No! given that there is neither a handy ex-Nationalist stack of undesirable ex-soldiers to expend nor the military industrial/logistic capacity/national will to do so.
In neither the Korean nor the Vietnam War did the US just hand over military equipment that amounted in value to several times the total defense budget of North Korea or North Vietnam while continuing to deny being direct participants. Nor did they commit to underwriting the entire governmental budget of South Korea and South Vietnam. I still maintain that the current situation is kind of unprecedented. If there's not a general mutiny of the Ukrainian army, Ukraine might well be pushed into fighting on beyond the 3-4% of the population killed that usually results in unconditional surrender.
Labeling your sitrep "superb" can only be understatement.
Mines. The thought of them rips my body apart. On one hand, I don't want them to exist. On the other, they may become a big reason why this war ends sooner than cold-blooded Cold War fans want it to.
This death of tens of thousands is fucking unnecessary. All Ukraine and Europe needed to do was be honest, and honour the Minsk agreement. All NATO had to do was be the defensive agency it claimed to be. Instead, we get faraway little people with big heads, moving murder like its a board game whilst they adjust their ties and lipstick.
The reasons for this war go way beyond 2014. I read a book about war in Ukraine by Gleb Bobrov (he lives or at least lived in Lugansk) called "The Epoch of Stillborn" and the fun is - it's been written in the middle of 2000`s, or maybe 2006-2007. The whole generation of ukrainians were raised and taught in schools that "the russians are the worst that ever happened to them, but we'll get our revenge soon" or smth. like that
It goes way beyond CIA meddling. Presumably the first guys who started stirriing the shit up (that i know of) were the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I think you've heard of Hrushevsky, somewhat like father of ukrainian national idea?
The Ukrainian national idea and the Ukrainian language date to ~1880's. The vicious Ukrainian nationalism we see now was birthed ~1919 after the October Revolution. And dating back at least to the 1820's, they were running pogroms on Jews. Odessa is/was full of Jews because so many Jews migrated from the countryside in the West to Odessa where they thought they could be relatively protected as it was a hardcore "Russian" city. On the other hand, when they got there, they found the same pogroms.
Interesting, I have heard people in Kharkov say they can hardly understand Odessa Russian, although this is controversial. They appear to speak an extremely pure Russian language from ~1800 that has not changed much. Sort of like the 1800 French they speak down in Louisiana.
The West was the first part to split off or want to split off. They didn't have much in common with those in the center or east for a few hundred years.
I dunno, supposedly people in Kharkav say they can't understand Odessans.
Pogroms have everything to do with Ukrainian nationalism. They were biggest in the West as far back as the 1820's. The Ukrainians launched their first Jewish pogrom in 1919 after the October Revolution. They killed 20.000 Jews. That was the birth of the true Nazi Ukrainian nationalism. It consolidated and got even more Nazi-like in the 1920's when there were a few other huge pogroms. Some may have occurred in what is now Poland.
Well, I had heard that Odessa got full of Jews due to all of the Jews escaping pogroms in the Western Ukrainian countryside. Apparently they thought it was a safer place. Looks like they were wrong though.
Greeks have never been much into Jew-killing AFAICT. The Slavs were a lot worse as far as that went, and even there, the Croats and Slovenians were much worse than the Serbs. Catholicism has been tied into murderous antisemitism forever. The Orthodox, not so much.
The Pale was created as a place to toss all the Jews in the Russian Empire so they were someone else’s problem.
Even in the 1980's in the USSR, Western Ukraine was considered a dangerous place. Russians report being threatened there by Ukrainians who heard them speaking Russian. The Ukrainian language is huge in the West.
One of my Austrian friends partly blames the Hapsburg Empire. When Galicia was part of the empire from the late eighteenth century onwards until WW1 there was allegedly a state policy of encouraging anti Russian sentiment as a way of keeping the province. Governments and elites drawing often artificial boundaries around peoples and then accentuating differences with others such as language and religious practice to maintain control seems to be a feature of history.
"Divide and conquer" (or rule) wasn't a new technique when Machiavelli wrote his political manual. Or when the English conspired to move hordes of Scottish protestants into the conquered Irish Island and "lease" them the former lands of Irish they'd murdered or driven off.
The US funded several operations supporting fascist nationalists in Ukraine: Project Icon, Project Aerodynamic, QRPLUMB, etc. from the late 1940s to 1990. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its militant arm UPA helped take part in the Holocaust.
Although there were factions within the OUN, the Bandera led faction proved more militant and the primary one the US backed. Bandera's father, Andrii, was a homicidal nationalist before Nazis existed in Germany. He took part in pogroms to hunt Jews and minorities long before there was any fascist government anywhere.
The OUN formed in the 1920s. It formed when the older League of Ukrainian Fascists (creators of 'Slava Ukaini') joined with other nationalist groups and rebranded. Ukrainian fascism continued under OUN and Bandera's leadership.
He and his supporters worked directly with the German Nazis till Bandera and the Germans parted ways. They did not part because Bandera opposed their philosophy. Bandera wanted Ukraine for Ukrainians without being controlled by Germany.
Bandera wanted a seat at the fascist table as an equal along with Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler. The Germans disagreed. Their difference was who would run fascist Ukraine, not should Ukraine be fascist?
Post war the US continued working with OUN using Bandera's 2nd in command, Mykola Lebed. The US CIA director, Allan Dulles wrote a personal letter overriding USCIS and State Dept to get Lebed in the US under a fake name, with a job at the US CIA run Ukrainian nationalist publishing house, Prolog. Lebed worked there till 1990.
After 1990 US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said the US continued to back regime change by spending over $5 billion from 1990 - the end of 2013. She said this publically briefing at the National Press Club. The money paid for a coup in 2004 and in 2014.
All the time the US continued to back fascist groups with the intent of destabilizing Ukraine to attack and weaken Russia.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are over 4,000 documents describing US support for Ukrainian fascists from the late 1940s to 1990. The US also used actual Nazis under LtGen Gehlen working for the US CIA to recruit and train fascists in Ukraine. So, the roots of this conflict go back over 70 years. They are informed by geoplolitical perspectives outlined by US official Zig Brzenzinski who was echoing British Prof MacKinder revealing an ideology and policy framework that the US and UK have pursued for over 130 years.
Many Ukrainian fascist groups try to soften their appearance. The modern Svoboda party started as the Social-National Party of Ukraine (literal Ukrainian Nazis). Their youth wing, C14, openly declared their Nazi affiliation on Ukrainian national TV.
The US knew what it was dealing with, who it was funding and training for over 70 years. There is a lot more to the conflict in Ukraine than this last year or the period from 2014 after.
"All Ukraine and Europe needed to do was be honest, and honour the Minsk agreement."
From the start there was no intention to honor this agreement.
"All NATO had to do was be the defensive agency it claimed to be."
From Day One, NATO has never been a defensive organization and has always been an offensive one dedicated first to destroying the USSR and now to the destruction of Russia.
Organizations are like living beings. None of us higher types want to die, and organizations don't wish to die either. Many organizations continue on for a long time after the purpose for which they were formed has been fulfilled. They often retrofit themselves and change gears to adopt new goals.
In particular, militaries, especially the US military, are always itching to start wars. Even read documents by Pentagon intellectuals operating out their various stink tanks like Rand? They're all about starting new wars in a wide variety of places. We shouldn't valorize the US military too much. It was a crap organization all through the Cold War, and it sucks even more now. And the US military absolutely has an ideological view! The US complains about other countries "politicizing their militaries," but ours become ideologized long ago.
Keep in mind that I came out of the Cultural Revolutions of the 1960's. I used to be on the mailing list for the Weathermen. Remember those urban guerrilla bombers? I've been a Pentagon-hater for a long time.
These guys get tired of shooting at targets after a while. They start to want to shoot at real targets and enemy soldiers.
Further, the Pentagon wants to fight wars all the time so it can try out its new weapons systems.
Furthermore, in our sleazed-out political system, both parties start wars to distract people from the party's problems or for other partisan reasons. As far as party politics go, starting a war is like a massive campaign contribution. It's usually great for your party's poll numbers.
Nato has always been a tool of US foreign policy. And US foreign policy has always been about imposing US hegemony worldwide. All that talk about fighting the Nazis, the Commis, the Jihadists, etc., is just nonsense. It's all about US hegemony.
Yes, what nobody ever tells you is that NATO is run by the US and everyone else is just taking orders and saying yes sir. I'm not sure how long it's been like this, but the US is the boss of NATO. It's odd because a lot of those countries are rather leftwing countries, but then they support fascism and Nazism in NATO.
Also, NATO has been supporting fascists and Nazis from the day it was born. Barely was the German signature on the armistice papers and we were already forging ties with the Banderist Nazis in Ukraine to run an anti-Soviet insurgency. The Gladio Stay at Home Network was set up by NATO as a guerrilla army to fight the Soviets if the USSR ever overran Western Europe, which was probably never going to happen. This was a network of almost entirely fascists and Nazis in all NATO countries. In the East such as in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine, it was underground.
They went on a crazy bombing spree in Italy in the 1970's called "the Strategy of Tension" where they would set off terrorist bombs in railway stations, killing up to ~100 people at a time. They would claim these attacks as either some rightwing or leftwing organization. If they set off a bomb disguised as a rightwing group, the next bomb was set off disguised as a leftwing group.
I think they were even somehow involved in the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro claimed by the Red Brigades. I had a friend in Trieste who told me that the Red Brigades were extremely popular in his part of Italy when they were active.
I've also heard that Maidan was set off by a reinvigorated and resurrected Gladio Network in Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia, and Poland. I know those snipers who shot both cops and protesters were trained at a NATO base in Poland. The snipers were Lithuanians and Georgians disguised as musicians. They brought their guns in via musical instrument cases. I've seen footage of these snipers leaving Ukraine with those cases in their hands. Some of them were women!
Remember the Fulda Gap? The Soviets were supposed to invade via this corridor.
All true, Robert. We're all gonna die so some people cling to purpose as empowerment of their weaker selves. That's as human as it gets but so is choice. They could have chosen to help people which is as purposeful as killing them.
Nice! I would add also that organizations are not really nonhuman entities. They are made up of humans, so in a way, they are almost living beings like you or I. As noted, they don't like get hurt and don't wish to die, etc. just like us.
I'd also like to point out that if you study psychology, especially defense mechanisms, you will find that not only do we humans use defenses every minute of every day (and you're lying if you say you don't), but organizations, states, etc., as conglomerations of humans, also use the same defenses as we do. Conglomerations of humans don't act a whole lot different from we differentiated autonomous higher mammals do.
I've done my masters in organisational theory, so yeah, all of that is true, and it still only scratches the surface of how much of our daily lives are run and determined by organisations over which no human or group of humans has any real control.
There's a common belief that people can fundamentally change organisations. That is only sometimes true for pretty small ones, and even then it's a real struggle. Organisations change the people exposed to them far more than the other way around. It's a fascinating phenomenon, as there appears to be no conscious will or effort involved in it, and yet it happens. It's almost like it's a mass-subconscious that reprograms the minds of those it touches. The more exposure, the bigger the changes.
The most obvious example is religion of course (and similar belief structures, like the cult of woke). The influence and change can also be negative by the way, like how among radical believers exposure to their counterparts only reinforces their own beliefs and increases their hostility towards 'the Other'.
A great deal of the tendencies in human social behaviors (organizations of all kinds ARE societies) are fairly hard wired, evolved to get your band of pre humans more territory/food and you, personally, more sex.
It is bloody difficult to subsume all of that knee jerk level social tendency to mere logic, and while you are trying, someone who sees no reason to change any of that is apt to shove a pointy stick into your heart or bash your head in with a rock.
First comment: Let them advance into what will become a valley of death. Just another form of meatgrinder.
Second comment: Thanks for recognizing the forward spotters and their teams. Properly trained, equipped and deployed they can wreck immense havoc with the sort of artillery and CAS they can call upon. Without their tenacity, the Ukies would have an easier time.
Third comment: One of the first comments I made here was on the Minefield article and the vast complications posed. There're only two solutions via tech I envision: assault hovercraft that float over the ground or the same sort of capability using anti-gravity. Air-mobile assaults vaulting such obstacles can only do so safely with local air supremacy at minimum, which Russia seems to currently enjoy. I researched Russian hovercraft early in the SMO; some formidable prototypes were produced but never made in any quantity. If such a craft could be engineered to ford minefields, but that still doesn't allow your heavy equipment through. Oh the toil of the Sapper!
Last comment: In Russian comms we hear Russian troops calling Ukie/Nato forces Nazis. The trenches unearth Great Patriotic War remains. As I've written, that emotional motivator can be enormous. And combined with superior weapons and leadership is extremely hard to defeat. Let the NATO "vols" attack too so they can do their share of dying.
Let's throw the anti-gravity out the window, since it doesn't exist and implies that gravity simply vanishes, which is impossible - nowhere do we see force, energy or matter simply disappearing without a trace.
So that leaves us with hovercraft. Do you know how they function? Yes, it looks like magic, but it isn't. I guess your idea is based on that James Bond movie, where 007 is crossing the Korean DMZ in a hovercraft and the mines don't go off.
In reality, to stay afloat hovercraft has to project about as much force as its own weight, meaning that at least weight-based mines would trigger, not to mention other, more sophisticated ones.
The only realistic advantage a hovercraft gives is its superior all-terrain capabilities, however it struggles when crossing trenches, ditches and uneven ground in general, as the force that it project to lift itself dissipates very quickly.
The disadvantages are many, however: it has to be light, it's skirt is vulnerable to explosives, it's relatively hard to maneuver, it's very loud and bulky.
I had posted a video long ago of large agricultural drones being outfitted as possible mine-disabling vehicles by flying over a battlefield and using some form of EW to disable mines but I think it's a very immature technology and there are a lot of problems why it won't really work. Unfortunately mines are simply an intractable problem there's no way of solving neatly in an *active* and contested battlefield. THey're easy to solve if you don't have an enemy ATGM'ing you and dropping artillery shells on you while you're doing it.
It will remain an intractable problem for a long time even if the technology you describe can be developed. Not all mines can be activated via EW, sympathetic vibration, or wide-area overpressure (e.g., UR-77 Meteorit, etc.). The most basic (basic does not necessarily mean primitive) mines are those that are actuated via a purely mechanical action with literally zero electric/electronic components. In addition, mines can be made that are undetectable via normal magnetic, etc. sensor technology. Thus, the "best" minefield is one which has a combination of mechanically and otherwise actuated mines, which will require several different and independent methods (to include physical probing for individual mines) to clear - thus precluding any contested, "big arrow" advances unless one is willing to incur horrendous equipment and personnel losses.
As we speak, Chinese engineers are experimenting with air born + land traveling AI controlled & interactive drone swarms to saturate and neutralize mine fields. The technology is made somewhat easier as these "scatterable" mines are mostly going to be on the surface-
We will get to a point where a mine scattering artillery round or MLRS is counter battery fired on towards the launcher/gun tube PLUS a counter mine drone swarm deploy is dispatched towards the mine impact zone. Probably by 2024, if we have not begun to glow in the dark by then...
It won't be perfect, but if it even reduces minefield saturation by 80%? It will be a game changer.
You do understand that just because there is an air cushion - there is still weight on the ground? And that the skirts on an air cushion vehicle are MORE vulnerable to damage than tracks?
Anti-gravity - please stick to reality and not fantasy. Anti-gravity isn't even real science fiction anymore.
The surface area is higher, but it isn't 10x. And it isn't a feather amount of weight, either. AFAIK: anti-vehicle mines are triggered mostly by overhead magnetic proximity, otherwise tanks would only ever suffer tread damage. Why exactly would that not work on a hovering vehicle? It is a minor sensor adjustment.
If anything, between the fans, enormous power consumption and really being loud - hovertanks are always going to remain a 1980s era science fiction myth.
I don't know what giroscope is - please provide a link.
The surface area of a hovercraft looks at least ~100x bigger, so I'd say the weight is 100x smaller per m2, but even if it was only 10x different, it would likely deceive the fuse/trigger, wouldn't it? Also, the magnetic proximity might require a metal approaching instead of air cushion?
Btw, I meant a gyroscope. Of course I don't need to explain to military person what gyroscope is. I love the kinetic toys people play with all the time on youtube:)
The surface area of a hovercraft compared to a tank tread might be 100x bigger, but again it isn't like a mine is finely calibrated to a tank's weight nor are they triggered just by weight.
The Channel hovercraft were 300 tons vs. 56x24 meter size = 220 kg per square meter - not exactly light even on a per square meter basis. An armored hovercraft would certainly have far, far higher weight per square meter.
As for gyroscopes: I have no idea how it is relevant to this discussion.
Mythbusters was about flashy entertainment. Not engineering. Don't bet your life on anything you saw there-
It was done by two guys who were/are movie/video SFX people. Every thing I saw them do made my hands twitch, I do SFX too- But I came to it through engineering, snd explosives handling, not the arts department!
After the war the mine situation will be terrible for people in Ukraine/Russia. People still cant clear out mines in Vietnam and Cambodia, and African states are still having daily struggles in mined areas. What a nightmare.
There's no interest in de-mining Global South countries in an industrial way. Post war Ukraine, with its highly fertile soil, will be a test bed for de-mining at scale.
A Cat D11 could push all 3 mine ploughs AND the Leopards they were attached to, in the pictures above, no problem. On the other hand a D11 can be sidelined with a rifle shot.
After this is over, you might even see attachments for John Deeres to de-mine with, but good luck getting insurance cover!!
If you had read the specs you'd know the mines can simply be set to go inert or self destruction since they're all wirelessly networked.
Will some of them slip the net? That's a guarantee. But it's not gonna be like the global south with millions of buried mines that people just gotta live with.
No, they aren't. Why the hell will someone want to use mines that are screaming their position to anyone with a radio? And if you can disable them wirelessly, then somebody else can reverse-engineer and hack them.
As for the map - the system is figuring it out according to launch parameters then sends an info to "Google maps, military version" or whatever Russians are using
"Secondly, it gives you a networked computer-mapped image of roughly where the mines are spread so you can keep track of the minefields on digital maps" - direct quote.
I really don't know how "networked computer-mapped image of roughly where the mines are spread" turned into wirelessly networked minefields in that mind of yours :)
Well I think how it works is they don't give you a real time networked update to your computer but rather the computer on the launcher maps out the likely position of where it launched them and where they landed so that on the map it can keep track of the 'rough' minefields. But I don't think it's as granular as each individual mine giving off its own bluetooth/wifi signal and giving an exact precise mapping to the launching computer. At least that's how I understood it from reading the precis on it long ago but I'll try to research it again for future update.
"After the war the mine situation will be terrible for people in Ukraine/Russia."
- much less terrible than after the Great Patriotic War. We have a lot of experience in mine clearance of our territory. Hitler and his bastards tried very hard for this...
P. S. However, one of the last mine explosions of those times was 13.09.2022. The tractor driver died in the hospital, the tractor was destroyed. Such is the "potato".
Most of the legacy mines were produced with the cheapest of purely mechanical, no self destruct/deactivate feature old technology. They were also frequently made sweep resistant and with as little metal as possible- The recent generations being fielded by MLRS and tube artillery deployment at least TRY to be timed self destructing/self neutralizing, they are not 100% perfect, though.
Thanks for all the links, appreciated.
Yes, but be aware that this is notoriously pro-Ukrainian site. Back when the SMO started, their site was still full of Azov and other neo-Nazi unit worship (and little else). They seem to have cleaned up their image somewhat, at least at first glance.
They do seem to have a much better grasp of military realities than most other pro-Ukrainian sites and analysts though.
Here is a permanently updated map for you: https://lostarmour.info/map
For comparison. And it is absolutely not pro-Ukrainian. And it is updated according to reliable data, including in the presence of photo and video confirmations.
But, when using it, anyone will inevitably be called fooled by pro-Russian propaganda. %)
Ciaramella is a deep state leaker. How many Ukrainians have to die as cannon fodder for the big guy senile joe to cover up for his crackhead son hunter? The bootlicking neocons at the bulwark are salivating at every escalation; https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-lick-boots-at-the-bulwark
At least 350,000 by now is what I see many estimates at. I think we will see over a million dead Ukrainians soldiers before the war is over.
VERY unlikely. I'd say 100-200k.
350k would mean at least about 7-800k "irretrievable losses", KIAs, and very heavily wounded, like amputees, people with brain trauma, blindness, etc (who are no longer able to fight). Just run the numbers:
AFU was 200k strong in the start (at least in terms of "bayonet strength"), or thereabout. But let's assume 400k with all the logistics and support personnel, reservists, etc. Let's say they also trained up 30k extra troops every month. That's probably less than they mobilised at the start of the war during the initial months, but it quickly dropped off, especially these days, when the comissars have to hunt for mobiks one by one in Western Ukraine. Remember, any time the West trained up 10-20k troops, it was big news, and it didn't happen every month, but let's assume 30k/mo is about right. It's in the bullpark, anyways.
That would give, over 14 months, 400k + 16*30k = 880 k. That means they would currently have 80k troops left, resisting around 500k or so Russian troops. They wouldn't have the bayonet strength to man a 200km front line, let alone an 800km defense line, LET ALONE start an offensive. You're delusional. Losses on both sides are significantly lower than people generally think. KIAs at hundreds and hundreds of thousands are absurd on either side.
Technically it is true from their pov, since the ones they are sending to kill russians are themselves russian.
The qabal hid a half million man army in ukraine. They planned to use it to take over europe and russia after the reset and digital bank crash. Good thing we found the cockroach nest early.
It is absolutely up to 350,000. Zaluzhny told the US Chiefs of Staff that he had lost 257,000 men a while back. 30,000 of those were the missing. The latest figure I heard was 310,000 from Scott Ritter with 60,000 missing. All of those figures are well within reasonable guesses. That would also give us from 1-1.5 million wounded, which is also a very reasonable figure. Probably most of those wounded returned to combat.
They kept replenishing their army, silly. I think they are on their 5th or 6th entire army now. The others were all wiped out.
No, AFU had a minimum of 1 million men under arms at the start. They keep doing mobilizations. They are on their 8th mobilization now. It will be a long time before they run out of Ukrainian men to throw at the Russians.
Also, Russian losses from all forces, including Wager and the LDPR, are ~35,000. We know that Russian to Ukrainian losses are 10-1 and have been averaging that for a long time. Also
Russia has 10X more artillery pieces and 10X more ammo than the Ukrainians have, which make the 10-1 casualty figures even more believable.
This is soviet ukraine nkvd style
Correct. The old ratio of KIA to WIA does not apply here due to Russian missiles, artillery, and MLRS. Most aren't shot with bullets as in previous wars. The KIA numbers are enormous.
Saw today in a respectable Telegram channel that 10,000 Poles have died in this conflict. I find this entirely believable. Might even be understated.
I am curious though, do we have any Poles from Poland on this blog? I am curious how the Polish Government is explaining or hiding the losses. Especially with an election looming.
With a couple of dozen mercenaries' deaths, you can easily sweep under the carpet. Entire brigades of dead Poles are not so easy to do.
Where are you getting your numbers from? The only item I can agree with is the 400K Ukraine started off with.
How many rounds of mobilization has Ukraine had? I have lost count. I hope you understand that the majority of the people dragooned off the streets are not sent to NATO countries for training. They are given at most two weeks of basic training and then sent to die.
400k casualties is plausible, and in fact probable (especially now, after 2 months of "The Great Counteroffensive ")
300k+ KIAs (which I was trying to refute, because it's parroted by many) is not plausible, that would imply around a million heavy casualties.
I've done some back of the envelope calculations. Ukraine has about 4-5 million men between ages 20 and 50. This means they could theoretically call up a lot more, however, they need their hundreds of thousands of railroad workers, powerplant workers, farmers etc. etc. If they start to dip into those people, it will go downhill very fast from there.
So the surplus manpower pool isn't as infinite as we are lead to believe, in fact, I'd say it's depleted. And yes, probably they train most of their conscripts domestically, and only send their dedicated, loyal conscripts to train in the West (the guys who won't try to escape).
3-4 million.
Most Americans don't know, and most of the ones who do know are against what is happening inside Ukraine.
We are all aware of the coup in 2014 and everything that flowed subsequently from it. However our government doesn't represent us, so we are victims of state-enacted robbery.
the same khazarian mafia that did the bolshevik revolution and stalin wars, also control Ukraine and USSA.
Yes, they want all Slavs killed. They blame Russia for the loss of Khazaria and consider the current occupiers of Ukraine as squatters.
Do you mean to tell me people like Blenchen and Nudelman carry a blood libel going back over a thousand years? YES!!!!!
The flow of money and weapons from the West won't last long enough to sustain those numbers.
Alternately: The drying up of the Flow will greatly precipitate an increase in those numbers...
Annalena Baerbock asks media not to call "Leopards" German: "Understand, it does not matter at all where what is made. You don't say about your iPhone that it's American or Tim Cook's. You say it's yours. It's the same story with tanks... German [tanks] in Germany, and these are Ukrainian. And what they do with them has nothing to do with us. Thank you!"
remember when German made was high quality branding , now they dont even want to own that junk
Ciaramella was piece of crap CIA whistleblower in Trump's 2019 impeachment.
vindman also, ukrainian/khazarian
https://www.conservapedia.com/Alexandra_Chalupa
Ukraine js basically what russia would be if western backed oligarchs killed putin.
I recommend solzhenitsyn s 200 years together book and the hidden history of the khazarian mafia. They vonstitute most of the supervillain qabal we fight against. Helps to see then unmasked. Nuland is khazarian. Soros is related. Look up the ashkenazi mrna ceos and execs.
The ace2 receptor for ashkenazi is resistant immune to spike protein
The spike protein binds to an ace 2 receptor and causes toxins for the cells. If it does not bind, then jt is easier for body to defend itself. The spike is the weapon in both covid and shots. So they released a weapon that harmed all ethnicities except one genetic group. The ashkenazis aka the neocons aka the bolsheviks aka vindman nuland. Khazarian mafia.
Good analogy, except Russia still has oligarchs. It is incorrect to say Putin went after all the oligarchs. He did not. He only went after the ones that refused to stay out of politics.
It is just a shame what happened to Ukraine. They are into all this historical revisionism and fake nationalism, yet they turned over their entire country to the Americans. Literally handed over the keys to them for money. What sort of "Great Country" voluntarily becomes an American satrapy?
These are not the old oligarchs. Vladimir put the oligarchs under a severe restriction of not interfering in politics, and broke the ones that did not. He also created many new oligarchs to balance out the cartel handful.
He did in fact go after all the oligarchs, just using soft power. If you look at the oligarchs and their ranks, they increased in number and decreased in rank, even if they stayed out of politics. That's because Vladimir was working with the state central bank behind the scenes to get rid of the assets of these people, to make Russia more independent of the rothschilds and Western banksters.
I think it is the other way around. Ukraine is a critical strategic place for the qabal, so the qabal ordered AMerica to support Ukraine, not the other way around.
Yah. it was Vindman who gave the info to Ciaramella who gave it to Schiff. Additionally, Ciaramella told Ukrainian investigators in January 2016 to lay off Hunter Biden and begin investigating Paul Manafort. Ukraine passed their bogus "Russia collusion" evidence to Alexandra Chalupa of the DNC, who passed it to Comey's FBI, who gave it to Robert Mueller (the evidence was baseless, and Mueller nailed Manafort on tax charges from 2006), Chalupa likewise is a member of Ukrainian diaspora community.
If you read Solzhenitsyn's 200 years together, it starts connecting the dots between ashkenazis, bolshevik leaders that were not russian but hated russians, the marxists, Khazarians, and ukrainians.
There is a reason why Vladimir changed his tune from the past. He admires solzhenitsyn and made his works required reading in high school.
I took two screen grabs from Simplicius's article and wrote my own. While I am promoting him where I can I did not attribute the source to him so I will not post a link to my thing. This is what I had to say on the topic:
"And now, once again, new lives, dreams, love, and hope of thousands of young people are going to be mercilessly buried in that tragic land. The deafening silence of the Western population, once known for its "peace movement," is nothing but an embodiment of cowardice that has the potential to ultimately annihilate us all.
And why?
I harbor deep fear and possess strong suspicions that this tragedy is a direct consequence of Joe Biden's desperate attempts to conceal his involvement in the Ukraine Criminal Enterprise, LLC. The Cabal in power, driven by their unwavering willingness to protect their buddy and pocket a billion or two, has made us accomplices in this tragic affair. "
Nobody in Kiev, much less Washington, cares. Neither Zelenskii nor his masters lose a minute's sleep.
The only person who really cares is president Putin.
One day they might though. Ukraine is going to run out of men. We are not that far off. Give it another six to eight months. What does the Ukrainian leadership do at this point? They cannot negotiate, nor surrender. They will not be able to hide the losses at this point either. Everyone will know that they have bled the country dry. They have painted themselves into a corner. There is no way out.
I would not want to be in Zelensky's, Danilov's, Podoylak's, Yarmek or Zalunzy's shoes at this point. All the billions they have stolen are of little use if you are not around to spend it and they are unable to leave Ukraine.
Zelensky has no freedom of movement at all. His calls are all monitored. The last place on earth he wants to be is in Ukraine. Every time Ukraine is failing on the battlefield or mired in a corruption scandal, he runs off to some other country.
Well, Ukraine is talking of more mobilization, so they aren't out of meat yet. Or NATO will order Poland, etc. into the gap.
Anyway, if the Kiev regime collapses, Zelenskii will just bugger off to his Italian villa, his NYC penthouse, etc.. The example of Ghani fleeing Afghanistan with stacks of dollars is most instructive, and last I checked, Ghani is alive and well.
Ghani was a nobody. Other than the Taliban, few want him dead. Zelensky is another matter. I do not think he would be safe in any other country. Too much blood has been shed.
Ghani was certainly lionized by the West when he was in office, and Zelenskii and crew swan in and out of Kiev quite freely.
What amazed me and disheartened me was checking FJB's Approval Rating. Approval outweighs disapproval indicating the success of brainwashing the USA and infecting it with Russophobia. The majority of Americans are infected with the mental illness of Russophobia. The manufactured consent is as bad as the manufactured COVID-19.
the polls are also all fake. Joe's approval is 10-20% at best.
I suspect that as well as the news being fake.
Deep fakes on tv.
If it were only that simple. Politicians don't decide anything.
How do I email the author? I found a GREAT clip that is likely evidence of Himmars GPS being jammed or potentially spoofed. It saved the lives of 50 RF soldiers. Can anyone help me? I already geo located it, did distance calculations, and other work. I just don't know how to send it to the author. Is there a dedicated member forum or questions submittal portal for the mailbag?
Here is some of my research and evidence in this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/148po53/ru_pov_several_dozen_rf_soldiers_avoid_certain/
Offensives seem to be impossible, by either side. Those expecting a big Russian offensive upon the failure of Ukraine's are deluded. It has not happened, and it is never going to happen. You can see the problem. Just read this article. Russia will have to be content with micro-gains. When they tried to get ambitious in Ugledar, we see the poor results.
Consider that Russia has spent about eight months building its defences in the south, whilst Ukraine has been building there's for eight years.
Also people need to bear in mind that all these newly formed Ukrainian brigades with western equipment have been set aside specifically for the offensive. If it fails, why are people assuming that Ukraine's defensive lines will suddenly collapse? They are not collapsing now are they? The Chechen's were supposed to finally clear Marinka sometime ago. The order was apparently made. Has that happened? No. The Bottom-line is, I see the war dragging on for years. At least 5 years, maybe more.
The point does have merit, and I intend to cover it in more depth in the future. However, it must be said that Ugledar was an isolated mini push by one small unit *before* the Russian mobilization had fully matriculated, as the mobiks were still in the middle of training in rear areas at the time. Thus, it's not a good measure for what Russia can or will do so the fundamental reasoning is quite flawed.
With that said, yes the war can drag on for a long time, and I'm not saying *definitively* that a series of major Russian offensives will be successful, but I believe you'll still see quite more in store than you think.
How do I email the author? I found a GREAT clip that is likely evidence of Himmars GPS being jammed or potentially spoofed. It saved the lives of 50 RF soldiers. Can anyone help me? I already geo located it, did distance calculations, and other work. I just don't know how to send it to the author. Is there a dedicated member questions submital for the mailbag?
My worry is the Russian leadership will get sick of seeing people die before the Western leadership does.
I don't just mean their own guys.
Most Ukrainians are Russians too.
Medvedev's mother is Ukrainian.
I have almost no connection to this and it is hard for me to stomach.
I was thinking about that. But Ukraine has been moving equipment via helicopter and whatever at night for years now. It seems Ukraine is becoming somewhat "thin." Sic Special Ops on them? Russia has the best helicopters and air defense control over all of Ukraine. With air cover, something like blitzkrieg becomes possible. I foresee increased use of cluster bombs and night raids, and it looks like Kiev still has electricity. Given the billions of dollars being spent on transporting weapons, destroy Liv and the war is done.
Russia doesn't use cluster bombs. They think it is an immoral weapon.
Whereas thermobaric rockets seem positively virtuous.
I wonder how they figure out which weapons are moral.
Thermobarics don't leave unexploded bomblets on the ground that kill civilians for years after. That is the moral point.
I think you are confusing them with mines like the PFM-1. I think cluster bombs are supposed to go off in a bunch of explosions rather than one in just one epicentre but I could find out there is a system called a cluster bomb that does what you say so good answer if there is such a system. The Ukrops have a rocket for the HIMARS that is like the Russian TOS-1a and that gets used on civilians. Even just regular bullets are an anti civilian weapon in their hands.
On second thoughts - some may fail to go off. That might be what you mean. Fair point.
NATO and Ukraine have them. If they don't use them, it is by mutual agreement. But I expect that if Ukraine uses them so will Rus. They would be very effective in forests and trenches.
Russia would be better served by creating a series of meat grinders with associated micro-gains in territory, than it would by taking big arrow initiatives.
Ukraine doesn't have the personnel or time on its side.
War cannot be won on willpower alone. Without will, no war can be won. The mental state of Ukraine is a factor determining how long this war will last.
Ukrainians aren't the enemy or stupid en masse. They're human beings like us, often manipulated by forces we think are beyond our control. The body bags and unanswered calls of their family members dying for Western greed are being noticed. As the corpses pile higher, they could blot out nationalism, and make them rage at what they can reach. May Zelensky and his NATO handlers be near when that happens.
For the sake of Ukraine and Russia, and for little countries like mine affected by this war, I do not want a Korean situation.
The Russsians are now fighting in places where their grandfathers fought. They say so.
I cannot think of a better motivating factor.
I may like the romanticism of that but reality differs for me. I do not want to fight where my forefathers/mothers fought. I'm sure that almost every soldier would rather be at home watching TV. I'm anti-war. I'm anti citizens allowing their leaders to take them to war. But now that blood has spilt, all I can do is aim for the truth in the hope the war ends quicker.
While it is an “unfortunate” fact of history that the masses are pressed into war by the self titled elites, and thus become cannon fodder for their cause not all conflicts are driven by this fact alone. I’d wager that most of those soldiers understand that sitting at home watching TV will not be an option for either themselves or their families unless their nation is protected from the forces trying to destroy it. It’s not as though the Kremlin has to drum up some outlandish narrative about WMDs, spreading democracy, or some former cia asset. Most Russians who experienced the dark 90’s and likely have a pretty clear idea who and what was the driving force behind it. As has been said before, this is an existential battle.
The whole issue with 'anti'-whatever is that it does not change reality. Your wife/sister/mom could be very anti-rape however if there are faced with armed rapist intend to do exact that and then kill them, they better have the means to and willpower to neutralize the threat. Being anti-sexual violence would just make you suffer such violence. Fight or suffer the consequences.
Same thing applies here (at least to Russia), you see deliberate attack aimed at total destruction of the russian nation and state, from made up 'highly likely' incidents, to fake 'lists' , to confiscation of property and arrests based on citizenship/nationality (aka a jew from Lvov in London suddenly became 'russian oligarch') . RU knows it is fighting for survival and RU intends on winning. Worst case it would come to a 'draw' through MAD and RU already stated that. The fantasies of 'well we can pretend that we only fight in Ukraine and nowhere else' may end up being fantasies as well as 'we are not at war, just want to kill all of you and actively working towards that goal through hundreds of billions of dollars, our intelligence, our command and control, our supplies, our weaponry, etc' . in real life you are going to get punched back and hard if you try to do that and my fear that time is coming.
I have a decent understanding of NATO's war. There's a difference between romanticism and pragmatism. I would find no comfort in fighting where my forefathers fought - there are better reasons to fight. And peace must always be an option.
We've been hearing for months now that the casualties will cause the Ukrainian army to break. It hasn't happened.
Russia is meeting its objective of demilitarizing Kiev by focusing on destruction of Ukrainian equipment and personnel which Kiev keeps feeding into established kill zones such as Bakhmut, and now the "counteroffensive" area. Furthermore by remaining relatively static Russia minimizes losses of their military personnel and harm to civilians and infrastructure. Russia has had every reason to forgo large scale offensive maneuvers, so far. They may be forced to eventually in order to remove the regime/DC puppets in Kiev. Or perhaps what's left of the Ukrainian military will terminate the problem in Kiev as their suffering becomes unbearable. We'll see.
The front gives the appearance of 'static' only because thus far it has been a war of attrition, not of territorial gains on the part of Russia. The only real offensives are from the Ukie side where thier military is being systematically dismantled. Russia conducts offensive maneuvers only in relatively small measure where it suits their attrition requirements - gain territory, fall back under attack, destroy the enemy, gain territory - the cycle goes on. It only appears 'static', though in the end Russian experiences net gains, though relatively small ones (Soledar, Artyomovsk, etc).
At some point, known only to the Russian General Staff, Ukraine will be be depleted to the point that they can no longer conduct successful offensive operations. It is at this point that Russia will conduct a real offensive to take the whole of the Donbass, complete acquisition of Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Kharkov, and perhaps Sumy, Nikolaev and Odessa. They might well end up overrunning Western Ukraine and in the process end up fighting Poles who will be egged on by the US to intervene. I'm sure Simplicius will speak to these possibilities in the future.
But the bottom line is, to paraphrase Mr Putin - "You ain't seen nothing yet!" primarily because Russia has not yet gone on the offense.
The war lasting for 5 years depends on the west's ability to maintain political support for sending what will end up being trillions of dollars, to pay not only for military hardware, but to completely sustain the ever expanding black hole of the Ukrainian state.
I think this is one of the points that Russia will have to consider- is it worth having such a state, one beholden to the West/NATO - right on its borders?
If one considers that Ukrainians and Russians are connected by the roots- there's even more reason for Russia to liberate these lands. Like saving your family.
This will be the last native Ukrainian army of this war. The NATO side will be increasingly foreign. I don't know if that will make it a winning army or not. But the main thing to see is that the 'proxy war' phase ends this summer. It will either be a true international war, or there will be a cease-fire, or Washington/London will fold by the end of summer, I mean fold into a purely defensive posture with any attacks being covert/asymmetrical type things which hopefully will remain 'conventional'.
I don't believe that the RF can accept a ceasefire agreement on any terms as the west has repeatedly proven itself agreement incapable.
Yes. Any treaty that NATO makes is just 'be cool while I sharpen my knife'. The good news is that as my country has become more evil we have also become more incompetent. Sad but that is where we are.
I believe you're right - and if NATO does replenish the army from beyond Ukraine in an obvious fashion, then the war will get truly nasty. So far Russia has done what it can to go 'gentle' on the Ukrainians - focusing on military materiel rather than troops, avoiding civilian concentrations, etc.
That won't be true if it's Poles, or Swedes, or Finns, or Germans, or Brits and Americans.
"The Bottom-line is, I see the war dragging on for years. At least 5 years, maybe more."
Except that the Ukraine has no armaments industries to speak of. It can not pay it's own bills, whether it's for defence related issues, for government salaries, for social benefits, for health care or anything else the state has to pay for. It survives as a somewhat functioning state purely through massive amounts of western FINANCIAL aid. Without, it will collapse, and quickly too.
It's military only holds out because of western weapon deliveries. But the cupboard in the west is almost bare. And the west isn't producing meaningful quantities of new weaponry, nor can they within the next couple of years.
As soon as either the west's (enormous) financial aid becomes a trickle, or when they are forced to curtail the weapon deliveries, this war will essentially be over. There may be prolonged period of mopping up after that, but this war will ultimately be decided by economic factors, not by how much Russia does or doesn't conquer with its armies. And that isn't going to take five years.
I think Russia needed to finish this war fast last year before the Ukrops had time to mobilise. I do not think this is a forgone conclusion though I agree with a lot of what you are saying.
Consider the following: Our leaders tell us that Putin is threatening to use nukes on Ukraine so they need to give Ukraine nukes as a deterrent to stop nukes being used. Then oops a daisy nukes get used and it is nothing to do with us. How could we possibly have forseen this? Putin has by his prior actions or inaction shown us that he will do nothing in response. NOTHING! They use their nukes as an insurance policy that they reckon will deter Russia from ever doing anything while they at the same time think Putin would never press the button even with Russia destroyed. That is your problem. There is a total lack of credibility when it comes to vindictiveness. Putin lacks the vital level of vindictiveness and determination that you need in this situation. Give the west enough time and they will think of something.
"I think Russia needed to finish this war fast last year before the Ukrops had time to mobilise"
Well, they did. In late march '22 the Ukrainian negotiators in agreed in principle to Russia's demands and the war was set to end. Then Boris Johnson intervened and suddenly the Ukrainians rejected what they had just agreed to, vowing to fight to the end instead (many of the involved Ukrainian negotiators have since been murdered by the SBU).
Since then, Russia has effectively been at an undeclared war with NATO. And Russia has been winning that war, hands down. They are defeating NATO without having to fight them. Talk about a masterful judo move!
I've said this before, but I'll say it again. This conflict is like a football match between NATO and Russia, with Ukraine as the ball that's being kicked all over the pitch by both sides.
Russia is deliberately delaying finishing off the Ukraine, because as soon as they do, NATO can extricate itself and stop its own haemorrhaging. Because of its own propaganda, NATO is forced to keep pouring vast amounts of treasure (which they desperately need for their ailing economies) and ever scarcer military resources (for which they don't have the industrial capacity to replace it any time soon) into a bottomless pit, for a hopeless cause. Or to put it more bluntly, Russia has NATO by the balls and is slowly ripping them right off.
The first part of your reply was a fair point and the last part sounds pretty much like what I said when Russia first pulled back from Kiev and I did not know why. I assumed it was to bleed all those weapons dry incase of more war with NATO later.
But I disagree with your confidence in ultimate victory and I do not think this is like a football match.
This will come down to a game of chicken and out of Biden or Putin my money is always going to be on Biden winning in a game of chicken.
The reason I think Putin is the one who will lose his nerve and veer off the road into a ditch rather than do a header is because Putin cares about the passengers in his car whereas Biden does not.
My prediction is there will be a pretext where our journalists tell us that the Russians have set off a dirty bomb or somehow created a threat to humanity.
The Americans will do a limited strike and give Putin the option of stepping down if he wants to save his life.
Then they will arrest him and hang him for fake war crimes.
I hope they do not manage to pull it off but it does seem to be going that way.
In my experience, the bad guys tend to win.
Sorry but that is how things are.
History will remember Putin as an evil maniac.
Biden will be written up as some sort of great leader who stood strong against a tyrant.
The Russian leadership need to wise up and get tough.
No sign of it so far.
It isn't so much Ukraine's defensive lines collapsing as the entire Ukrainian state collapses.
This could arise from many causes, top of which is significant reduction or delay of Western aid but "war weariness" is also possible. It is impossible at this point for even the redoubtable Ukrainian propaganda capabilities to conceal Ukraine's massive losses and failure to succeed. War is the ultimate pressure cooker on any society - the reduced population in Ukraine, its defunct economy, its poor prospects for the future even compared with its literally worse-in-class economic performance post 1991 - these are all iron bars on the camel's back.
Your making an assumption that all the conditions will remain basically the same, when precisely the opposite is happening -they are going to be thrown all out of balance this summer..Russia hasn't had a general mobilization yet, and hasn't need one meanwhile according to some westerners "Ukraine has mobilized its entire adult poulation" , NATO itself is scraping for ammo and they're talking about sending the Polaks in when they cant find any more Ukrainians . But It all depends on what Russias actual political goals are and that remains somewhat ambiguous at the "granular" level.Meanwhile in the US its finally starting to dawn on them that they already lost to China.
Volyn Region would be a great place to attack the Ukrops.
It would signal an intention to actually finish the job.
It has been manly stripped clean of defending troops.
The bulk of their army is at the other end of the country.
It would seriously dampen the enthusiasm of the Poles to get involved.
Fighting the Russians at the other end of Ukraine does not seem as scary to them as fighting the Russians on their own border.
The Ukrops will not use local civilians as hostages if they are their fellow Ruthenians.
They probably will not want to fight over towns when it is their towns that would get flattened (positioning troops in towns for defensive purposes is against the Geneva Convention anyway).
Most importantly it would put the Russians within range of the rail shipments from Poland using cheaper rockets than the fancy missiles they normally have to use to get at targets in Western Ukraine.
It feels like this is going to go on forever.
Invading the western part and starting to cut off the Polish border would be the beginning of the end and everyone would know it.
I 100% agree
Except that I think a better way is to attack a bit west of Zhitomir, and cut Ukraine in half. There is a strip of land there going south to Moldova that bypasses any major city.
They need to cut off the supply if they are serious about ending the war any time soon.
Giving nukes to Ukraine is a pipe dream. Doing so would destroy the Non Proliferation Treaty. It'd open a whole can of worms, everyone would be sending nukes everywhere, it'd be nuclear anarchy.
I'm surprised how butt hurt Ukranian supporters are over the undisputably correct decision to enforce NPT and prevent a cascade of nuclear weapons. Undoubtedly they'd be mad if Russia and China started gifting nukes. Yet that is what they want, they want their cake, nuclear proliferation, and to eat it, only the west may proliferate nukes, an impossible scenario.
Desperate people will do desperate things. Now that the decline of the US empire is accelerated by the Ukraine war, we don't know what acts of desperation the Neocons will resort to in order to avoid the inevitable.
The Russians were rightly alarmed when Zelensky demanded nuclear weapons at the Munich security conference without any opposition from Western governments.
Neither Ukraine nor Nato can win a conventional war with Russia on Ukrainian territory. The West can't beat Russian air defenses and missiles. If Western leaders are serious about avoiding a Ukrainian defeat, that can only be achieved by nuclear weapons.
Yeah, they'll give Zelensky some nukes and in a couple of months the whole world will see one of them strapped to some Mexican cartel soldier's truck...
Btw, it's Putin's duty as Supreme Commander to protect citizens of Russia by any means necessary, and judging from Ukraine's latest stunts with blowing the dam, attacking civilians in Belgorod region and so forth we can safely assume that his answer or at least the second best option will be to glass the region of warhead(s) location, be it some city or whatever else
Never underestimate the ability of the corrupt Western leadership to do something seriously stupid.
The problem is in the pattern that we have observed. As soon as the west starts to consider any new weapon delivery to Ukraine, you can guarantee that they have already delivered it.
Anything is possible, and we shouldn't discount anything. The west has made Ukraine their final redoubt. It needn't have been this way, but this is their choice.
The proliferation of nukes is the minimum of our problems if Ukraine receive nukes.
That is a nuclear Apocalipsis scenario.
Ukraine would use that nukes against Russia.
And Russia would retaliate against not only Ukraine but full West.
Ona related note, what about the utterance from the USA warning the RF about “tampering” with some classified nuclear technology at the NPP?
"Giving nukes to Ukraine is a pipe dream. Doing so would destroy the Non Proliferation Treaty."
Since when did the West care about consistency or treaties? And yes, they'd make war on Iran and go nuclear if they must, rather than allow Russia to do the same with Iran.
Yes, millions would die. These are sociopaths we are dealing with here. They could not care less, as long as they seem themselves as "winning".
I'm going to make a shameless plug. Thank you for your considerable effort. You're communication skills are off the charts, positive. The use of grey-matter energy and organizational skill it takes to marshal the information you present is nothing short of superior.
I hope you get more and more subscribers. The more the better. In an age of willful distortion of facts and narrative manipulation voices like yours are not a luxury. They are a necessity.
God bless. Here's to doubling and tripling your subscribers.
Prepare personally for the worst, hope for the best. Have a plan B.
And C, D, E...xxx
And when offered a choice between Door A or B, take Door 397.
I dont sweat the frontest of front line positions changing hands, thats almost the point of them. In fact i have accepted Russias penchant for letting the enemy come to them, clearing them up, moving back the the original position and starting the cycle again in this whole event.
This appears to be the pattern and really one that works fairly well it would seem. With the AFU essentially believing their own propaganda and being press ganged to the front it behooves the RF forces to let them have a bit of leeway. In the end it leads to their destruction.
I am increasingly of the view that Russia will need to kill 3-4 million Ukrainians in order for Ukrainians to turn on their domestic civilian and military leaderships, in order to effect a domestic coup.
The benefit of a domestic coup in Ukraine is it allows for an off-ramp for the US, before the administration decides to use nuclear weapons.
Biden may be inclined to use nuclear weapons in order to prove he is tougher against Russia than Trump.
We are living in batshit crazy times.
+++
With respect to counter-mine operations, there are ways to make mine detection and destruction more effective, in a way that would neutralize the effectiveness of tube-launched scatterables.
"With respect to counter-mine operations, there are ways to make mine detection and destruction more effective, in a way that would neutralize the effectiveness of tube-launched scatterables."
Do share, I'd love to hear your ideas.
How does one contact you via email?
Simplicius prefers coffee shop meetings :)
Reply to this article in your email box.
I tried replying to the article. Please let me know if it worked. Thanks.
I hope you can write about whatever you are told.
We have seen the result of Russian doctrinal defence as Ukies probe for weakness. Russia absolutely has a doctrinal offense to counter that same defence. If it doesn't, then there's no big arrow offensive to be made.
UR-77 Meteorit
M58 MICLIC
I dont know why they dont use it.
If it was as useful in practice, as in theory, they'd obviously use it. They've been using it as yet another form of IDF to destroy trenches, but not really to clear mines. Clearly it's not as effective on the battlefield as it was thought out to be.
If you're referring to Ukraine they use both of them actively. On the Zaporozhye advance there are even videos of them using the UR77.
A gigantic mechanical beast with the lateral reach of a combine harvester, tilling the soils to create huge swaths of mine free territory ?
Trained dogs
...or, blowing up a nearby water dam, maybe?
Swarms of networked suicide mine seeker drones were my first thought. They can be a bit smaller than the mines they are required to find/detonate.
Earlier I saw demining done with a huge percussive explosion that might have been used to clear a field. Instead of using it for clearing a mine field they used it to destroy a fortification. Wham. Don't know if it would work for all kinds of mines, but that might be what he meant.
I disagree.
Keep in mind the tooth to tail ratio of a military unit - this is turn is the tip of the pyramid on top of the civilian economy.
Soldiers are generally in the prime period of productivity; every single loss is a generational loss for the overall society in question. Ukraine's population has fallen tremendously - half or more on top of which a significant portion of the cream of its manpower is dead or permanently disabled. You don't need to inflict 3 or 4 million casualties on a 20 million population - 500K dead and disabled would be more than enough to cripple it for a generation.
Ordinarily you're probably correct, however Ukraine has been turned into the tip of the NATO spear.
Having their civil service and military funded by the US, EU, and UK has effectively allowed Ukraine to divert far more manpower into its military than what would happen if it was a true country-to-country conflict.
That's why I have such a large number (15-20% of the current population) as needing to be killed or wounded without the ability to return to battle.
My estimate is that Ukraine currently has around 400k KIA. If so x3 = 1.2 million WIA = 1.6 million out of the fight one way or another.
Funding doesn't change the reality of having to grow and transport food, transport fuel ammo and equipment, repair equipment, and run a civilian economy.
The tooth to tail in a combat unit is high precisely because of this - and the real world also requires even greater tooth to tail in order to input into the military logistics equation. Let's not forget that the civilians have to eat and move around too.
The reality is that no society outside of Rome has ever shown the capability of having even 5% of its population killed in combat and still want to fight.
I don't think there's really any historical precedent for a foreign power to pledge resources on such a scale to a proxy on the condition that they commit to endless unwinnable war. Makes it really hard to guess just how far the fanatics and the grifters inside Ukraine could push this.
I would point out that both the Korean war and Vietnam war - there were massive influxes of equipment from foreign powers: the USSR and Communist China.
The question is twofold: are Ukrainians are willing to die in the job lots as the Vietnamese did, and secondly if the US is willing to send in hundreds of thousands of troops as China did in Korea.
My view of the first is: Hell No! given the increasingly draconian recruitment tactics being used by Ukraine. There is certainly no Vietcong equivalent for a Tet offensive in Donbass or Russia; if anything, this is more true in "free" Ukraine.
My view of the second is: Hell No! given that there is neither a handy ex-Nationalist stack of undesirable ex-soldiers to expend nor the military industrial/logistic capacity/national will to do so.
In neither the Korean nor the Vietnam War did the US just hand over military equipment that amounted in value to several times the total defense budget of North Korea or North Vietnam while continuing to deny being direct participants. Nor did they commit to underwriting the entire governmental budget of South Korea and South Vietnam. I still maintain that the current situation is kind of unprecedented. If there's not a general mutiny of the Ukrainian army, Ukraine might well be pushed into fighting on beyond the 3-4% of the population killed that usually results in unconditional surrender.
I hope they gave the remains of that Soviet fighter a proper burial.
Kyrie Eleison
I may not be religious, but I also hope for mercy to come soon.
Labeling your sitrep "superb" can only be understatement.
Mines. The thought of them rips my body apart. On one hand, I don't want them to exist. On the other, they may become a big reason why this war ends sooner than cold-blooded Cold War fans want it to.
This death of tens of thousands is fucking unnecessary. All Ukraine and Europe needed to do was be honest, and honour the Minsk agreement. All NATO had to do was be the defensive agency it claimed to be. Instead, we get faraway little people with big heads, moving murder like its a board game whilst they adjust their ties and lipstick.
The reasons for this war go way beyond 2014. I read a book about war in Ukraine by Gleb Bobrov (he lives or at least lived in Lugansk) called "The Epoch of Stillborn" and the fun is - it's been written in the middle of 2000`s, or maybe 2006-2007. The whole generation of ukrainians were raised and taught in schools that "the russians are the worst that ever happened to them, but we'll get our revenge soon" or smth. like that
Watch this video and read the article to see how far back it truly goes: https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/prophetic-1992-interview-with-putin
It goes way beyond CIA meddling. Presumably the first guys who started stirriing the shit up (that i know of) were the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I think you've heard of Hrushevsky, somewhat like father of ukrainian national idea?
https://www.gazeta.ru/army/2022/11/08/15654355.shtml
The Ukrainian national idea and the Ukrainian language date to ~1880's. The vicious Ukrainian nationalism we see now was birthed ~1919 after the October Revolution. And dating back at least to the 1820's, they were running pogroms on Jews. Odessa is/was full of Jews because so many Jews migrated from the countryside in the West to Odessa where they thought they could be relatively protected as it was a hardcore "Russian" city. On the other hand, when they got there, they found the same pogroms.
Interesting, I have heard people in Kharkov say they can hardly understand Odessa Russian, although this is controversial. They appear to speak an extremely pure Russian language from ~1800 that has not changed much. Sort of like the 1800 French they speak down in Louisiana.
The West was the first part to split off or want to split off. They didn't have much in common with those in the center or east for a few hundred years.
Pogroms had nothing to do with Ukrainian nationalism. They were all over Russian empire at the time. Fun is, the first pogrom took place in Odessa :)
If u believe what wiki says there were another couple of pogroms there, inspired by greek merchants (market competition was a bitch these days).
As for the language, Russian language in Odessa isn't as much different. Sounds funny, like Texas variant to some NY bloke, but that's it.
Btw, there are some words from jewish languages that are now widespread and as they say initially they came from that region
I dunno, supposedly people in Kharkav say they can't understand Odessans.
Pogroms have everything to do with Ukrainian nationalism. They were biggest in the West as far back as the 1820's. The Ukrainians launched their first Jewish pogrom in 1919 after the October Revolution. They killed 20.000 Jews. That was the birth of the true Nazi Ukrainian nationalism. It consolidated and got even more Nazi-like in the 1920's when there were a few other huge pogroms. Some may have occurred in what is now Poland.
Well, I had heard that Odessa got full of Jews due to all of the Jews escaping pogroms in the Western Ukrainian countryside. Apparently they thought it was a safer place. Looks like they were wrong though.
Greeks have never been much into Jew-killing AFAICT. The Slavs were a lot worse as far as that went, and even there, the Croats and Slovenians were much worse than the Serbs. Catholicism has been tied into murderous antisemitism forever. The Orthodox, not so much.
The Pale was created as a place to toss all the Jews in the Russian Empire so they were someone else’s problem.
Nearly all of the stories of pogroms are awash in propaganda, and the reality is quite different than the fairy tales.
https://www.unz.com/article/myth-and-the-russian-pogroms/
Well yes like most Jewish 'suffering'.................highly exaggerated and more than dubious
Even in the 1980's in the USSR, Western Ukraine was considered a dangerous place. Russians report being threatened there by Ukrainians who heard them speaking Russian. The Ukrainian language is huge in the West.
One of my Austrian friends partly blames the Hapsburg Empire. When Galicia was part of the empire from the late eighteenth century onwards until WW1 there was allegedly a state policy of encouraging anti Russian sentiment as a way of keeping the province. Governments and elites drawing often artificial boundaries around peoples and then accentuating differences with others such as language and religious practice to maintain control seems to be a feature of history.
"Divide and conquer" (or rule) wasn't a new technique when Machiavelli wrote his political manual. Or when the English conspired to move hordes of Scottish protestants into the conquered Irish Island and "lease" them the former lands of Irish they'd murdered or driven off.
http://www.ulsterancestry.com/ulster-scots.htm#gsc.tab=0
Please note 1600s contemporary references in this link to parts of the "Dublin colonization" project being financed by "City of London".
The US funded several operations supporting fascist nationalists in Ukraine: Project Icon, Project Aerodynamic, QRPLUMB, etc. from the late 1940s to 1990. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its militant arm UPA helped take part in the Holocaust.
Although there were factions within the OUN, the Bandera led faction proved more militant and the primary one the US backed. Bandera's father, Andrii, was a homicidal nationalist before Nazis existed in Germany. He took part in pogroms to hunt Jews and minorities long before there was any fascist government anywhere.
The OUN formed in the 1920s. It formed when the older League of Ukrainian Fascists (creators of 'Slava Ukaini') joined with other nationalist groups and rebranded. Ukrainian fascism continued under OUN and Bandera's leadership.
He and his supporters worked directly with the German Nazis till Bandera and the Germans parted ways. They did not part because Bandera opposed their philosophy. Bandera wanted Ukraine for Ukrainians without being controlled by Germany.
Bandera wanted a seat at the fascist table as an equal along with Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler. The Germans disagreed. Their difference was who would run fascist Ukraine, not should Ukraine be fascist?
Post war the US continued working with OUN using Bandera's 2nd in command, Mykola Lebed. The US CIA director, Allan Dulles wrote a personal letter overriding USCIS and State Dept to get Lebed in the US under a fake name, with a job at the US CIA run Ukrainian nationalist publishing house, Prolog. Lebed worked there till 1990.
After 1990 US Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland said the US continued to back regime change by spending over $5 billion from 1990 - the end of 2013. She said this publically briefing at the National Press Club. The money paid for a coup in 2004 and in 2014.
All the time the US continued to back fascist groups with the intent of destabilizing Ukraine to attack and weaken Russia.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are over 4,000 documents describing US support for Ukrainian fascists from the late 1940s to 1990. The US also used actual Nazis under LtGen Gehlen working for the US CIA to recruit and train fascists in Ukraine. So, the roots of this conflict go back over 70 years. They are informed by geoplolitical perspectives outlined by US official Zig Brzenzinski who was echoing British Prof MacKinder revealing an ideology and policy framework that the US and UK have pursued for over 130 years.
Many Ukrainian fascist groups try to soften their appearance. The modern Svoboda party started as the Social-National Party of Ukraine (literal Ukrainian Nazis). Their youth wing, C14, openly declared their Nazi affiliation on Ukrainian national TV.
The US knew what it was dealing with, who it was funding and training for over 70 years. There is a lot more to the conflict in Ukraine than this last year or the period from 2014 after.
"All Ukraine and Europe needed to do was be honest, and honour the Minsk agreement."
From the start there was no intention to honor this agreement.
"All NATO had to do was be the defensive agency it claimed to be."
From Day One, NATO has never been a defensive organization and has always been an offensive one dedicated first to destroying the USSR and now to the destruction of Russia.
Organizations are like living beings. None of us higher types want to die, and organizations don't wish to die either. Many organizations continue on for a long time after the purpose for which they were formed has been fulfilled. They often retrofit themselves and change gears to adopt new goals.
In particular, militaries, especially the US military, are always itching to start wars. Even read documents by Pentagon intellectuals operating out their various stink tanks like Rand? They're all about starting new wars in a wide variety of places. We shouldn't valorize the US military too much. It was a crap organization all through the Cold War, and it sucks even more now. And the US military absolutely has an ideological view! The US complains about other countries "politicizing their militaries," but ours become ideologized long ago.
Keep in mind that I came out of the Cultural Revolutions of the 1960's. I used to be on the mailing list for the Weathermen. Remember those urban guerrilla bombers? I've been a Pentagon-hater for a long time.
These guys get tired of shooting at targets after a while. They start to want to shoot at real targets and enemy soldiers.
Further, the Pentagon wants to fight wars all the time so it can try out its new weapons systems.
Furthermore, in our sleazed-out political system, both parties start wars to distract people from the party's problems or for other partisan reasons. As far as party politics go, starting a war is like a massive campaign contribution. It's usually great for your party's poll numbers.
Nato has always been a tool of US foreign policy. And US foreign policy has always been about imposing US hegemony worldwide. All that talk about fighting the Nazis, the Commis, the Jihadists, etc., is just nonsense. It's all about US hegemony.
At least since WWII.
Note that billions are lavished upon Ukraine, while the citizens of East Palestine cannot get so much as a hotel voucher.
This shows where the real priorities of the Empire lie.
Yes, what nobody ever tells you is that NATO is run by the US and everyone else is just taking orders and saying yes sir. I'm not sure how long it's been like this, but the US is the boss of NATO. It's odd because a lot of those countries are rather leftwing countries, but then they support fascism and Nazism in NATO.
Also, NATO has been supporting fascists and Nazis from the day it was born. Barely was the German signature on the armistice papers and we were already forging ties with the Banderist Nazis in Ukraine to run an anti-Soviet insurgency. The Gladio Stay at Home Network was set up by NATO as a guerrilla army to fight the Soviets if the USSR ever overran Western Europe, which was probably never going to happen. This was a network of almost entirely fascists and Nazis in all NATO countries. In the East such as in Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine, it was underground.
They went on a crazy bombing spree in Italy in the 1970's called "the Strategy of Tension" where they would set off terrorist bombs in railway stations, killing up to ~100 people at a time. They would claim these attacks as either some rightwing or leftwing organization. If they set off a bomb disguised as a rightwing group, the next bomb was set off disguised as a leftwing group.
I think they were even somehow involved in the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro claimed by the Red Brigades. I had a friend in Trieste who told me that the Red Brigades were extremely popular in his part of Italy when they were active.
I've also heard that Maidan was set off by a reinvigorated and resurrected Gladio Network in Ukraine, Lithuania, Georgia, and Poland. I know those snipers who shot both cops and protesters were trained at a NATO base in Poland. The snipers were Lithuanians and Georgians disguised as musicians. They brought their guns in via musical instrument cases. I've seen footage of these snipers leaving Ukraine with those cases in their hands. Some of them were women!
Remember the Fulda Gap? The Soviets were supposed to invade via this corridor.
@ Robert Lindsay
Are you indeed the author of "The Falcon and the Snowman"?
All true, Robert. We're all gonna die so some people cling to purpose as empowerment of their weaker selves. That's as human as it gets but so is choice. They could have chosen to help people which is as purposeful as killing them.
"None of us higher types want to die, and organizations don't wish to die either."
And people don't run organisations, organisations run people.
And it goes much deeper than that. Every organisation has the same two primary goals:
1. to survive
2. to grow stronger (as it allows for more control over it's environment which increases the chances of survival)
All other stated goals are circumstantial.
Nice! I would add also that organizations are not really nonhuman entities. They are made up of humans, so in a way, they are almost living beings like you or I. As noted, they don't like get hurt and don't wish to die, etc. just like us.
I'd also like to point out that if you study psychology, especially defense mechanisms, you will find that not only do we humans use defenses every minute of every day (and you're lying if you say you don't), but organizations, states, etc., as conglomerations of humans, also use the same defenses as we do. Conglomerations of humans don't act a whole lot different from we differentiated autonomous higher mammals do.
I've done my masters in organisational theory, so yeah, all of that is true, and it still only scratches the surface of how much of our daily lives are run and determined by organisations over which no human or group of humans has any real control.
There's a common belief that people can fundamentally change organisations. That is only sometimes true for pretty small ones, and even then it's a real struggle. Organisations change the people exposed to them far more than the other way around. It's a fascinating phenomenon, as there appears to be no conscious will or effort involved in it, and yet it happens. It's almost like it's a mass-subconscious that reprograms the minds of those it touches. The more exposure, the bigger the changes.
The most obvious example is religion of course (and similar belief structures, like the cult of woke). The influence and change can also be negative by the way, like how among radical believers exposure to their counterparts only reinforces their own beliefs and increases their hostility towards 'the Other'.
A great deal of the tendencies in human social behaviors (organizations of all kinds ARE societies) are fairly hard wired, evolved to get your band of pre humans more territory/food and you, personally, more sex.
It is bloody difficult to subsume all of that knee jerk level social tendency to mere logic, and while you are trying, someone who sees no reason to change any of that is apt to shove a pointy stick into your heart or bash your head in with a rock.
First comment: Let them advance into what will become a valley of death. Just another form of meatgrinder.
Second comment: Thanks for recognizing the forward spotters and their teams. Properly trained, equipped and deployed they can wreck immense havoc with the sort of artillery and CAS they can call upon. Without their tenacity, the Ukies would have an easier time.
Third comment: One of the first comments I made here was on the Minefield article and the vast complications posed. There're only two solutions via tech I envision: assault hovercraft that float over the ground or the same sort of capability using anti-gravity. Air-mobile assaults vaulting such obstacles can only do so safely with local air supremacy at minimum, which Russia seems to currently enjoy. I researched Russian hovercraft early in the SMO; some formidable prototypes were produced but never made in any quantity. If such a craft could be engineered to ford minefields, but that still doesn't allow your heavy equipment through. Oh the toil of the Sapper!
Last comment: In Russian comms we hear Russian troops calling Ukie/Nato forces Nazis. The trenches unearth Great Patriotic War remains. As I've written, that emotional motivator can be enormous. And combined with superior weapons and leadership is extremely hard to defeat. Let the NATO "vols" attack too so they can do their share of dying.
Let's throw the anti-gravity out the window, since it doesn't exist and implies that gravity simply vanishes, which is impossible - nowhere do we see force, energy or matter simply disappearing without a trace.
So that leaves us with hovercraft. Do you know how they function? Yes, it looks like magic, but it isn't. I guess your idea is based on that James Bond movie, where 007 is crossing the Korean DMZ in a hovercraft and the mines don't go off.
In reality, to stay afloat hovercraft has to project about as much force as its own weight, meaning that at least weight-based mines would trigger, not to mention other, more sophisticated ones.
The only realistic advantage a hovercraft gives is its superior all-terrain capabilities, however it struggles when crossing trenches, ditches and uneven ground in general, as the force that it project to lift itself dissipates very quickly.
The disadvantages are many, however: it has to be light, it's skirt is vulnerable to explosives, it's relatively hard to maneuver, it's very loud and bulky.
Ekranoplan enters the chat.....
>>>> Let's throw the anti-gravity out the window,
with or without gyroscope?
I had posted a video long ago of large agricultural drones being outfitted as possible mine-disabling vehicles by flying over a battlefield and using some form of EW to disable mines but I think it's a very immature technology and there are a lot of problems why it won't really work. Unfortunately mines are simply an intractable problem there's no way of solving neatly in an *active* and contested battlefield. THey're easy to solve if you don't have an enemy ATGM'ing you and dropping artillery shells on you while you're doing it.
It will remain an intractable problem for a long time even if the technology you describe can be developed. Not all mines can be activated via EW, sympathetic vibration, or wide-area overpressure (e.g., UR-77 Meteorit, etc.). The most basic (basic does not necessarily mean primitive) mines are those that are actuated via a purely mechanical action with literally zero electric/electronic components. In addition, mines can be made that are undetectable via normal magnetic, etc. sensor technology. Thus, the "best" minefield is one which has a combination of mechanically and otherwise actuated mines, which will require several different and independent methods (to include physical probing for individual mines) to clear - thus precluding any contested, "big arrow" advances unless one is willing to incur horrendous equipment and personnel losses.
As we speak, Chinese engineers are experimenting with air born + land traveling AI controlled & interactive drone swarms to saturate and neutralize mine fields. The technology is made somewhat easier as these "scatterable" mines are mostly going to be on the surface-
We will get to a point where a mine scattering artillery round or MLRS is counter battery fired on towards the launcher/gun tube PLUS a counter mine drone swarm deploy is dispatched towards the mine impact zone. Probably by 2024, if we have not begun to glow in the dark by then...
It won't be perfect, but if it even reduces minefield saturation by 80%? It will be a game changer.
You do understand that just because there is an air cushion - there is still weight on the ground? And that the skirts on an air cushion vehicle are MORE vulnerable to damage than tracks?
Anti-gravity - please stick to reality and not fantasy. Anti-gravity isn't even real science fiction anymore.
...but, the weight is dispersed over larger surface (air cushion), isn't it?
And what is your thought on giroscope? It does not exist?
The surface area is higher, but it isn't 10x. And it isn't a feather amount of weight, either. AFAIK: anti-vehicle mines are triggered mostly by overhead magnetic proximity, otherwise tanks would only ever suffer tread damage. Why exactly would that not work on a hovering vehicle? It is a minor sensor adjustment.
If anything, between the fans, enormous power consumption and really being loud - hovertanks are always going to remain a 1980s era science fiction myth.
I don't know what giroscope is - please provide a link.
The surface area of a hovercraft looks at least ~100x bigger, so I'd say the weight is 100x smaller per m2, but even if it was only 10x different, it would likely deceive the fuse/trigger, wouldn't it? Also, the magnetic proximity might require a metal approaching instead of air cushion?
Btw, I meant a gyroscope. Of course I don't need to explain to military person what gyroscope is. I love the kinetic toys people play with all the time on youtube:)
The surface area of a hovercraft compared to a tank tread might be 100x bigger, but again it isn't like a mine is finely calibrated to a tank's weight nor are they triggered just by weight.
The Channel hovercraft were 300 tons vs. 56x24 meter size = 220 kg per square meter - not exactly light even on a per square meter basis. An armored hovercraft would certainly have far, far higher weight per square meter.
As for gyroscopes: I have no idea how it is relevant to this discussion.
On an unrelated note this was shown to actually work by MythBusters.
On a related note to your note?
Mythbusters was about flashy entertainment. Not engineering. Don't bet your life on anything you saw there-
It was done by two guys who were/are movie/video SFX people. Every thing I saw them do made my hands twitch, I do SFX too- But I came to it through engineering, snd explosives handling, not the arts department!
thanks for the excellent overview here.. very thorough..
After the war the mine situation will be terrible for people in Ukraine/Russia. People still cant clear out mines in Vietnam and Cambodia, and African states are still having daily struggles in mined areas. What a nightmare.
There's no interest in de-mining Global South countries in an industrial way. Post war Ukraine, with its highly fertile soil, will be a test bed for de-mining at scale.
A Cat D11 could push all 3 mine ploughs AND the Leopards they were attached to, in the pictures above, no problem. On the other hand a D11 can be sidelined with a rifle shot.
After this is over, you might even see attachments for John Deeres to de-mine with, but good luck getting insurance cover!!
If you had read the specs you'd know the mines can simply be set to go inert or self destruction since they're all wirelessly networked.
Will some of them slip the net? That's a guarantee. But it's not gonna be like the global south with millions of buried mines that people just gotta live with.
They are not wirelessly networked, you can simply set them to self-destruct before launch.
The only system with networking capabilities that i know of is NVU-P "Okhota" and you must install it old-fashioned way
https://cat-uxo.com/explosive-hazards/firing-devices/nvu-p2-firing-device
They literally give you a real-time update of their deployment zone
No, they aren't. Why the hell will someone want to use mines that are screaming their position to anyone with a radio? And if you can disable them wirelessly, then somebody else can reverse-engineer and hack them.
As for the map - the system is figuring it out according to launch parameters then sends an info to "Google maps, military version" or whatever Russians are using
That's what it says in the article my guy so check your attitude at the door
And vehicles all got wifi now so it really doesn't matter
"Secondly, it gives you a networked computer-mapped image of roughly where the mines are spread so you can keep track of the minefields on digital maps" - direct quote.
I really don't know how "networked computer-mapped image of roughly where the mines are spread" turned into wirelessly networked minefields in that mind of yours :)
Well I think how it works is they don't give you a real time networked update to your computer but rather the computer on the launcher maps out the likely position of where it launched them and where they landed so that on the map it can keep track of the 'rough' minefields. But I don't think it's as granular as each individual mine giving off its own bluetooth/wifi signal and giving an exact precise mapping to the launching computer. At least that's how I understood it from reading the precis on it long ago but I'll try to research it again for future update.
It is certainly possible to put a wireless receiver and a CPU on a mine, but it would be extremely stupid.
For one thing, it would allow much more trivial detection of the mine.
For another, it creates an attack portal on the mine via the wireless connection/CPU.
And for the last: mines can't have antennas sticking up. Buried, wireless range is crap and on the surface - range wouldn't be great either.
Look up RFID Wardriving attack kits to get an idea of what even civilian getups can accomplish with a store bought antenna and gain amplifier.
"After the war the mine situation will be terrible for people in Ukraine/Russia."
- much less terrible than after the Great Patriotic War. We have a lot of experience in mine clearance of our territory. Hitler and his bastards tried very hard for this...
P. S. However, one of the last mine explosions of those times was 13.09.2022. The tractor driver died in the hospital, the tractor was destroyed. Such is the "potato".
Most of the legacy mines were produced with the cheapest of purely mechanical, no self destruct/deactivate feature old technology. They were also frequently made sweep resistant and with as little metal as possible- The recent generations being fielded by MLRS and tube artillery deployment at least TRY to be timed self destructing/self neutralizing, they are not 100% perfect, though.
US is looking at this as.the do-or-die battle so the stupid Europeans are being pushed to send in their military "independently" instead of as "NATO".
Russia must be defeated before the war against China can start.