Completely wrong. That's a typical trope passed around by middle-minds who know very little about military or strategy. The whole "Russia has no NCO Corp (yes it does) and their command is 'centralized' with "force-push" rather than 'recon-pull' tactics", which is completely wrong and actually opposite to reality. Russian commanders have MORE leeway and independence than equivalent NATO smaller unit commanders. Everything you were taught by CNN is a lie, but you wouldn't know that without actual research.
No one is holding anything off, AFU is getting pulverized and ground into dust. They're not counter-attacking anywhere, don't fool yourself.
Russia has plenty logistics, more than ALL of NATO combined to launch offensives, you can trust on that.
Nice deflection. I guarantee you I ascribe to much more 'differentiating' opinions than you. I can see the clear signs of 'echochamber' syndrome in your posts, whereas I'm actually reading and digesting from both sides and formulating analyses based on that. You on the other hand have your mind already pre-set and are just sea-lioning for fake answers you'll only reject without basis.
Anyway, what you said about Russian military structure is outright objectively wrong and shows you don't have the requisite knowledge on the topic to really challenge or refute anything here. I instantly saw the sign of the typical vapid tropes parroted by people who don't do any research, i.e. "no NCO corp, Russia is a railway power, blah blah". It's all wrong, buddy. Don't get me at me that you're not doing your due diligence and research, reserve that anger for yourself.
Hi, I see you found yourself a new hobby to keep you busy. ;-)
Here's my two cents. I seriously doubt that we will see a 'major' offensive anytime soon. I believe that Russia will continue with its strategy that has served it so well so far with regards to the demilitarisation of the Ukraine. This has been an artillery war, and I suspect that the Russians will do their best to keep it that way.
What they will do though is to intensify the conflict. You mentioned the 'death by a thousand cuts' approach. What has been happening so far could be characterised as 'death by a thousand PAPER cuts'. With the recent Russian attacks all along the frontline (except for Kherson), it is turning into 'death by a hundred knife cuts'. And it may well grow further in the near future, into 'death by a dozen sword cuts'. But I don't think we will see that single rapier thrust to the heart to finish it in one strike.
Recently Russia hasn't just been attacking in many different places, they've also halted or slowed down many of those attacks after a few days, and in some case, like Vuhledar, even pulled back again. I believe they do so because the objective of those attacks had been achieved. Those objectives were never geographical in nature though. They attacked locations that the Ukrainians 'must hold'. (Often a result of their own propaganda and the need to continue to appear 'victorious' enough to keep western aid coming in) to draw their reinforcements in.
The Ukraine lacks enough capable troops to hold the line everywhere, especially with the Bahkmut black hole having sucked in so many forces. Before the recent Russian attacks, the front along the Zaporozhe line was held almost exclusively by poorly trained, poorly equipped, poorly led, and poorly supplied territorial units who were also understrength. The few regular formations in the area were heavily depleted from fighting elsewhere, and send to the 'quiet' front to rest and recover.
But the Russian attacks changed that. Those weak territorial forces were relatively easily swept aside, and the Russians threatened to take locations the Ukrainians couldn't afford to lose. So what did they do? They send in reinforcements, regular formations with much better equipment and training. And I believe that that was the Russian objective all along. Their attacks are forcing the Ukrainians to commit their best brigades into the frontline, instead of keeping them back as mobile reserves. And by putting them in the frontline, they are now exactly where the Russians want them to be, within range of their artillery. I repeat, this is an artillery war, Russia is demilitarising the Ukraine by forcing them into a never-ending Verdun-like slaughter.
And it makes sense. We've all seen clip after clip of fresh and barely trained Ukrainian conscripts put in the frontline trenches doing little more than await death or injury from artillery, drone or missile strike. If, as the Ukrainian commander, you have the choice of putting your best troops, which are also your most mobile forces, in those trenches or your worst, if you're smart you'll pick the latter. They'll be blown up anyway, so you might as well sacrifice your lower quality troops and save the better ones.
And as long as the Russians kept back their ground attacks, or advanced only very slowly, the Ukrainians got away with it. But not any longer. Now Russia is forcing them to commit their better formations to the front. At Vuhledar itself there's now a mechanised brigade, and a tank brigade (in name at least) directly to the east of it, instead of a single understrength territorial brigade covering the whole area. And those two brigades are being whittled away by long range strike after long range strike. And it's happening along most of the front.
That's what the increased Russian manpower is allowing them to do. They are putting the Ukrainians in a catch-22 situation. If they keep the cheap cannon-fodder up front as they have been doing, they will lose vital ground (such as Vuhledar) all along the frontline, again and again. But if they commit their more capable formations to hold back the attacks, then the Russians will simply hang back and take their time to annihilate them with artillery. Earlier I said that as the Ukrainian high command was choosing to sacrifice low-grade troops rather than their best. Well, they no longer have that luxury. Russia is taking it away from them. And there's no way that the Ukrainians can keep regenerating units and manpower and acquire more weaponry fast enough to make up for those losses (of quality formations).
I believe that the Russians will continue with the strategy of demilitarising the Ukraine in the east of the country for a while yet. That's where the supply lines are the shortest for them and the longest for the Ukrainian forces. That's where Zelensky keeps pouring in troops, despite the advice of his generals, and that's where the Russian artillery already is. They will gradually intensify the pressure (from a hundred knife to a dozen sword cuts) and the amount of destruction that comes with it, but I don't really see the need for a fast and deep mobile advance anywhere.
As to that last remark, the point of a 'cauldron', or cutting of a large group of enemy forces, is to create battlefield circumstances that make it relatively easy for you to defeat that enemy force, by creating more and much larger difficulties for them than the pincer movement itself creates for you (the attacker). That's often overlooked, but those pincers to surround enemy forces have some serious risks and drawbacks for the attacker too, for one the losses they'll incur while attacking. Often those risks and drawbacks are worth it, but does that also apply to this conflict? As I pointed out above, the Ukrainians are already, and quite willingly, putting their troops where it is relatively easy for Russia to decimate them, with little risks and fairly low losses for themselves. So is there enough added benefit to create those cauldrons, with all the costs involved for the attacker, if the end result is going to be pretty much the same?
It is a valid question to ask if a 'big arrow' offensive aimed at encircling a large number of Ukrainian troops, with the costs and risks involved, is actually worth it, or if it is even a smart thing to do, given the specific circumstances of this conflict. Wouldn't it be better to finish of the Ukrainian armed forces east of the Dnjepr once and for all, rather than risk having them flee to the west of the river, and having to go and fight them there at a later stage?
At some point in the not so far away future the whole house of cards that is Ukraine will come crumbling down, militarily, politically and economically anyway. So why make it harder for yourself by forcing the Ukrainians west of the river BEFORE that societal collapse?
Good writeup, I agree it COULD go that way because as you said they are already having great success for the past few weeks and many frontlines for the AFU are completely collapsing like LPR (Kremennaya to Lyman and Siversk) and Bakhmut, and up to recently, Zaporozhe and Ugledar.
However personally I think Russia will still be forced to put the hammer down with a fairly big arrow offensive as per option #3. The reason is that the West sees the utter desperation of the situation, and that AFU is soon ready to entirely fall, and they are now going ALL IN with their arms supplies. Pouring hundreds/thousands of tanks, APC's, IFV's, new GLSDB's and everything in between. If Russia 'sits back' and does the 'thousand cuts' method, they will be allowing this unprecedented ocean of NATO equipment to begin pouring into the AFU lines. And sure, we all know none of that stuff will make a difference in the long run, and it will all be eventually neutralized, but of course still at greater cost. That equipment will inevitably increase the cost to Russian troops, with more casualties, etc., so I think Russia will finally want to stem that tide/flow and begin massively surrounding or demilitarizing the AFU before the vast majority of the most advanced of the NATO equipment can get in theatre.
Of course, another option would be to continue the 'slow roll' offensive by a thousand cuts, yet simply destroy the bridges and cut the supply lines, but it feels unlikely that they'll do that--for whatever reason it seems Putin is intent on keeping those bridges intact so there remains only one alternative, which is to greatly up the escalation before most of the equipment can hit the field. So personally that's what I'm anticipating, but not with 100% certainty, there definitely is to me a 20-30% probability for your option, that they will just continue this slow-boil of the frog at a low-intensity level.
as an example, here's total tally I just saw posted: https://i.imgur.com/ARE2zjQ.jpg almost 500 total tanks allegeldy pledged to Ukraine. Of course I"m not saying that amount would defeat Russia (no amount would, anywya), but surely they would be a big headache, escalate the conflict, increase the costs for Russian servicemen, and in short, do a lot of damage. 500 tanks is not something to scoff at imo, plus that's not counting hundreds more IFV's/APC's and everything in between. So I think in light of that, Russia will have no choice but to do some relatively big arrows to squeeze that threat out.
Though one should mention, these are reportedly 'pledged' but who knows what the delivery time table is, most of that stuff might be promised for 2024+ or something, so there's that argument too
Sure, it looks impressive on paper. But some of these numbers have already been retracted. Portugal and Spain for example, are now set to supple ZERO tanks each. They can't get them operational. The American M1's have to be rebuilt first, so it's going to be a year at least before they are ready, but in truth, this is just a ploy to appear to be supplying tanks, whereas they have zero intention of actually doing.
The Norwegian and Dutch Leo-2's are unlikely to make a presence. Like in many other countries (Germany, UK, France, Spain, Italy, and more) the vast majority of the tanks that are supposed to be in 'active' service are not operational, and unlikely to become so in the foreseeable future. Many of these pledges were made by politicians who did not know this and simply assumed all the tanks in their inventory were ready to go. Now that they're learning the truth, one by one they have to retract those pledges (Spain and Portugal for example).
Then there are the Leopard-1's (the Danish Leopard-1A5DK is not the same as the actual A5, but is an A3 hull with a modified German A5 turret ). The Germans phased out the type 20 years ago, and the Danes 18 years ago. While in storage, they have not had maintenance, and many are missing components. Furthermore, there are no maintenance yards or personnel left who have handled the type before. There's absolutely no way they will able to get a significant number of these tanks ready in time.
The various T72 variants promised, also have to be refurbished, but those are the most likely to actually be available. All in all, realistic numbers that might become available to the Ukraine for combat operations sometime in 2023 are the 159 or so T72 variants, maybe 50 Leo-2's and those 14 Challengers (if they can get them to run), and a handful of Leo-1's. So 250 to 300 tanks over the entire year. And nearly all of them outdated or obsolete. I'm not impressed.
Best of all, all these tanks and most of that other equipment cannot be replaced by these European NATO countries. As far as I know, not a single NATO country is still manufacturing MBT's. These are all legacy tanks. It will take years, assuming they start now setting up the infrastructure, which they won't, before NATO can start churning out new tanks. They can't even produce ammunition in meaningful quantities. So NATO would defacto be demilitarising itself.
I think I should make one thing clear though, I see the conflict in the Ukraine as a part of the much bigger war between Russia and the US. And whatever Russia decides to do, or not do, in the Ukraine, is determined by how it supports the much greater conflict with the US. And as far as I can tell, for now it is in Russia's favour NOT to finish the war in Ukraine, as it is hurting the US and its European vassals far more than it is Russia. Russia has an opportunity here to defeat NATO decisively without having to militarily engage them.
that's true, so the total amount could end up being roughly similar or even much less than what the Poles supplied last time with their T-72M1's etc. Although to be frank, I'm more worried about the total number of IFV's and other light vehicles (patrol / mobility vehicles like Mraps, and other related stuff) as those numbers could be quite high and not addressed in the posted list of MBT's only. They can be a huge headache and prolong the conflict as well as it makes the AFU very mobile (though not very armored) and allows them to run around the long contact line and create exploitations/penetrations at certain key points highlighted by U.S. satellite intel, etc.
But beyond even that the thing I'm concerned most about is simply the number of urgent mobilized formations being created. Yesterday Rybar and some other sources posted the exact numbers and designations of dozens of new brigades being urgently formed in the west which could account for in excess of 120-200k troops (22+ new and reformed/replenished brigades were named I believe) which basically encompasses the 'reserves', as I understand it, that Ukraine intends to utilize as the shockfist against Russia's coming offensive.
I'm a bit late replying, but I have to say, I like how this blog of yours is turning in some low-key debate and opinion-sharing on the conflict.
As to the brigades forming, I wouldn't worry too much about it. The thing is, the Ukraine can only form very few, if any at all, new actual brigades. A brigade is much, much more than just collecting enough men and equipment. It takes a long time to form. The following are general time frames, there will be highly talented people and complete morons who'll need either less or more time, but these numbers hold true for the vast majority of conscripts (the talented ones have usually already signed up and don't need to be conscripted/dragged of the streets).
The biggest problem is qualitative manpower. It takes six months to train a soldier into a somewhat competent basic private: the run-of-the-mill rifleman, tank driver/loader, artillery ammo handler, truck driver, in other words, the simpler military roles (of course in war, even the simplest things are complicated). It takes nine to twelve months to turn them into somewhat specialised privates, or basic NCO's. It takes fifteen to eighteen months to turn that basic NCO into a decent one.
And that's where the real problem begins. A low ranking officer needs from eighteen months (a very basic platoon/section leader) to several years of training and experience. A mid ranking officer (say battalion commander), needs ten years or more , and the high ranking ones, need two decades. And don't forget that a brigade needs large staffs (at brigade and battalion levels) that also have to filled with all sorts of specialised officers (and senior NCO's).
These men do not exist for the Ukraine to call upon. They ran out of them by April or May of last year, with the new formations they formed then. As a rule of thumb, a peacetime conscription based army has a trained reserve cadre to add about 50% additional manoeuvre formations (brigades and up) to its existing order of battle, without compromising the quality of the active units, and the new units fairly decently trained and staffed up to normal requirements.
If you are willing to lower your standards considerably (by pillaging the active formations for experienced officers) you can approximately double the size of the peacetime army, but then the quality of all your formations drops, and you'll have trouble conducting the more complicated manoeuvres and operations (like proper combined arms warfare). Your offensive capabilities in particular drop considerably.
The Ukraine has stood up quite a few more formations than that already, and their operating standards have dropped dramatically, even for their better formations. How many clips have we not seen about Ukrainian troops complaining that they were dumped in the frontline, while their commander left?
In the vast majority of cases, that's not due to cowardice or anything like that by the commander, it's that he has no other option. They are nearly always talking about the company commander, who is often the only officer in the company. He can't be in the trenches with every one of his platoons and squads at the same time, in fact he likely has little or no staff to support him, so he has to do most of the work to keep the company running himself.
It's even worse at battalion and brigade levels. You should look up the 'Peter Principle'. It rules supreme in the Ukrainian army right now, with all those forced promotions, bumping up people into positions they are completely unsuited for. Even back in the early spring, you regularly saw interviews with Ukrainian lieutenants commanding battalions and captains commanding brigades.
That's why so many NATO officers have been sent to the country to take over command of Ukrainian formations. Trained and capable officers is probably the single most crippling bottleneck for any Ukrainian attempt to create new units, or refill the mauled ones.
Very good points. But you did hit on something in the last paragraph, that a lot of these deficiencies you speak of can (and will) be filled by covert NATO officers.
Also, while it takes a long time to form brigades that's true, many of these aforementioned brigades have already been forming for a long time, many months, so they're not just springing up out of the blue.
And lastly, while all these things are true, it doesn't take into account the potential for the new Russian brigades of mobilized being subpar as well.
For instance you mention it takes a long time to train various skills. Well, many of the mobilized, many/most of which have only been called up weeks ago, have not trained or had any part of the military for decades. Many of the mobiks are people who were in the army in the 90's, or even served in the Chechen wars. I know because I've seen interviews with them. The average age of the mobik call up, from what I've seen, is 35, which means there's a ton of them over 40 years old. Which means these are guys who got their basic conscript training way back in the 90's. So for them to be called up now, and given a few weeks training--one must question how effective they will be comparable to the untrained new Ukrainian brigades that we're discussing.
So, the concern of mine is, the Ukrainian brigades might not be great, but this 300k+ called up mobilization may consist of alot of 'not great' troops either, so it could theoretically cancel each other out in terms of the 'qualitative' factor.
Sure we can argue, they'll be better equipped/supplied at least, and thus have the advantage of the Russian logistical/industrial/military advantages over Ukraine, but on the other hand they're attacking while the Ukrainian ones are defending and thus the AFU have the big advantage. You need a highly skilled force to attack effectively as we all know.
Hopefully the situation isn't as grim as I've outlined, as I'm mostly only playing devil's advocate, but I'm concerned by the possibility of it.
The problems facing the Russians with their mobilisation and the ones the Ukrainians have are miles apart, it's an order of magnitude of difference. It's the first Russian mobilisation, and as I pointed out before, it means they still have an ample supply of reservist cadre (senior NCO's and officers) to fill new units with. But many mobiks will go to cadred active formations (where at least part of the senior NCO's and officers are active professionals), so there's no reason to assume that Russia has a shortage of capable cadre for the units the mobiks go to, be they cadred ones or newly stood up ones.
The Ukrainians aren't not short of capable cadre, they have none left to call upon, not even the poorly capable. I'm not saying there aren't issues concerning the mobiks, but it's stuff that can be ironed out, unlike what the Ukrainians are facing.
NATO officers may actually make things worse. They don't speak the language (either Russian or Ukrainian), and those few who do, are unlikely to have mastered it sufficiently to convey the correctly worded orders in a way that they will be clearly understood. Each military develops its own jargon aside from the normal use of the language. When engaged in combat operations the language barrier is going to lead, and has already, to deadly miscommunications. Keep in mind, we're not talking about training by NATO officers here, but them actually commanding Ukrainian units.
And we're not talking about just a handful of slots to be filled, but many hundreds, maybe thousands, that are in desperate need of filling. How many NATO officers speak either Russian or Ukrainian well enough to avoid any miscommunications in battle? How many understand and are trained to handle soviet style equipment and doctrine (which is what the Ukrainian army still predominantly uses)? You can't just pluck officers from one military culture and drop them into a completely different one and expect good results.
Plus there's the problem that NATO can't really afford to have their officers captured. That will seriously limit how useful they can be and how effective they can be at commanding their units.
On the face of it, using NATO officers may seem to partially solve the problem, but they bring a whole set of new problems with them.
And how many officers can NATO armies really spare? Every one sent to the Ukraine leaves a gap back home that will be hard to fill.
Yes, all those extra Ukrainian formations will have some value, but mostly in terms of additional roadblocks for the Russians to overcome. There's nothing they can do to change the trajectory of the conflict though.
Here's a recent overview of the revised and more realistic number of Leo 2's NATO plans to send (and some, like those 8 Norwegian ones still look iffy to me).
More on the Leo 2's, only 17 of them are the A6 model (14 from Germany and 3 from Portugal), the rest would be the A4 model, which dates back to the early 80's.
Denmark and the Netherlands have stated they won't be delivering any Leo 2's, but are looking into the possibility to provide Leo 1's.
Talking about a battalion worth of armor maybe… minus all the support equipment like tankers, ammo trucks or carriers, just not enough…. We did not even get into the discussion about tactics, strategies, or training, none of that is going to make a difference without the later.
All good analysis; however, the Russians using their tactics have to tread carefully it will be one big mistake to think the West is not waiting to have an excuse to enter the war and totally show up Putina and cause his collapse. The use of any tactical nuke will cause the complete loss of air that the Russians have and the West led by US forces could push the Russians back in total disarray… think it could not happen, nor did the Iraqi’s, Afghani’s or others that have faced the US Army. One of your paragraphs talks about NATO prep along the borders but have minimal reporting on the actual preparations for combat. Along with men and material you could visualize a total collapse of the Russian offensive if say an Air Mobile Assault occurred in Crimea along with an Armor punch through the lines to Kharkiv… thinking it will not happen? Politicians are salivating for it all under the guise of defending NATO. This will be a short demonstration to show China keep messing and find out.
Very good analysis. I have to wonder about the ability of Russia to keep Ukrainian artillery far enough away to prevent bombardment of Russian territory and in particular I am thinking about the newly annexed territories. It would seem that Russian forces would have to be permanently stationed far enough into non-annexed territory to push the artillery back 150+km from Russian territory. This could amount to a significant and constant drain on military resources eventually becoming untenable. The only real option is to replace the Kiev admin with a more neutral or Russia friendly regime and I am not sure that would even work. There needs to be either a complete annihilation of Ukrainian forces or such a dire threat that the regime in Kiev capitulates to whatever demands Russia may have.
yes I agree. The 'pushing back 100-150km' thing I was referring to in the report would only be the first phase of the operation in order to stop the shelling of Russian territory, but of course afterwards Russia would continue its objective of TOTALLY destroying/capturing/capitulating the AFU and forcing a complete unconditional surrender, at which point Ukraine will be entirely demilitarized and no further threat will exist.
I had a thought about the possible origins of those extra 200k men of the so-called 'stealth mobilisation'. Back when the original 300k reservists were called up, they weren't the only ones to show up. About 70k additional reservists reported for duty voluntarily. I rarely see those extra 70k men mentioned any more, and almost never in western media. Back in september or so, at the start of the mobilisation, the Russian authorities declared that they would gladly accept the 70k into their forces.
So right there you already have 70k extra troops, on top of the 300k. And that was months ago already. Sure, there was a peak of volunteer reservists when the 300k were mobilised, but I'm willing to bet that in the months since then, many more reservists have come forward to rejoin of their own accord (and without media attention). Probably enough to double that 70k, and maybe enough to triple it. So I can easily see an extra 150k to 200k reservists in total activated in addition to the 300k that were formally mobilised. But as they came forward voluntarily, they've technically not been mobilised, but rejoined the service under special circumstances.
that's a good point. I do strongly recall a vast amount of "volunteers" not only showing up of their own volition, but specific ministerial action from Russian governors and upward, to massively boost volunteer recruitment in local regions. We saw for months, battalion after battalion, dozens of them, of volunteers going to the Chechen training center to train for deployment. However, I simply always considered these volunteer forces as extra, not counting the "mobilized" that everyone was speaking of. However, now that you mention it, it would make sense if that's where the 200k extra would have theoretically come from.
But the only reason I'm still hesitant to say it's 500k total is because everyone adds the mobiks and volunteers, but people rarely subtract the mass amounts that have left the service or rotated out as well. No one knows the real numbers but there's been alot of talk about all the 'ended contracts' and 6 month contracts that ended in September (some believe thousands/tens of thousands). Sure, they report now that Russian MOD has indefinitely paused any contract expiration now, but prior to that many could have possibly left. So if there's 300-500k new bodies, the question is, how much total is there if a lot also left service. So this is the main reason I'm hesitant in announcing a truly overpowering 700k+ force. When all is said and done, I wouldn't be totally surprised if semi parity is maintained even after the big Phase 2.0 starts, though I'm hoping that's not the case
Fantastic article, I really enjoyed your writing style. I have been following developments in this war since it began now, and I think that your analysis is very accurate and realistic. As for where the big arrows will point, my theory is that it will be a smaller more narrow version of your third scenario.
A large section of forces will go down both sides of the Oskil River front all the way to Izium and mainly restore the area that was lost in September. I don't think that Russia will do anything significant on the Sumy and Chernihiv directions, except maybe a smaller incursion to draw away the AFU and stretch the line. I also think that they will start a big front from the west side of Kharkov to isolate the city by linking up with the forces that will go down the Oskil River, however I don't think that Kharkov itself gets captured in the next offensive. The other big push will clearly be from the southern front in my opinion, that part is of vital national importance for Russia and there's already some activity in the Orekhov and Ugledar sections.
Essentially, my theory is that one "new" front will be established, west of Kharkov City all the way to the sensitive road and rail junctions in Lozova Raion. Then two "old" fronts will also be massively reinforced. One is a push from the north down the Oskil all the way to Izium and then west towards Lozova as well. The last push is from the south also towards the Lozova Raion, bypassing Pavlograd and Zaporozhye City.
Such a scenario would isolate and slowly reduce the role of the second largest city in Ukraine, Kharkov, while also putting it on the path of annexation. It would also cut off Zaporozhye without a costly urban battle. Supply and general logistics will be kept quite simple here without any costly detours through Belarus. And the most important gain is that the remaining parts of the Donbass will be encircled. Supplying cities like Kramatorsk would be borderline impossible and the AFU would slowly negotiate a withdrawal. The push would be less than 200 km from each side, which should be more than manageable for such a large force in mostly friendly territory and with good logistics.
Yep, good analysis. I'll be honest, if left to my own guess, I personally would have went exactly with what you just said. This seems the most sensible and logical option. I never really could see them going into Sumy/Chernihov cus it doesn't appear to make any sense or purpose. The only real reason I started to anticipate that is because there has been more and more 'unofficial whispers' from various sources both in AFU and in the RuAF that Sumy/Chernihov will be attacked. Sure they're just rumors but I've heard them so often now that it's hard to ignore. And after analyzing it, I came up with the connecting of the dots that it would theoretically make sense for Putin to do this in order to push back the AFU completely from Russian territory, but it doesn't FEEL like a real serious priority in those regions, compared to everything else on the list. The only real reason I could see them going into Sumy/Chernihov is if they do plan a more serious attempt at Kiev, not necessarily taking it, but perhaps fully surrounding and sieging it, partly for a fixing operation, partly as psychological op to collapse the command. But if they don't go after Kiev then I see little sense in Chernihov/Sumy incursions. So in the end, I give it probably a 50/50 for that front to be substantially activated, so basically I agree with your assessments.
But also in the end it all depends on which troop total force number we're dealing with, if the 'stealth mobilization' really happened, and the allies are going to have 700-800k total then I raise the odds of Chernihov/Sumy to 75-85% because there'll be no where else to put so many troops. But if it's only an additional 220-260k mobiks waiting in the wings, then yeah the odds of Chernihov/Sumy happening are much lower in my book.
The best analysis I have read so far. My guess is that you are totally right about Odessa. I cant see how the Russians can stop that. So, the most likely is the big cauldron scenario, something which will crash the remains of the AFU and will force to some kind of treaty to give time to NATO to put up another wider army of Baltics, Polish, Rumanians and worldaround mercenaries in order to suffocate Russia by endless assault waves. Meanwhile, the US will start something against China.
thanks. Yes we've already seen hints when they were threatening to create a "nuclear event" by bombing the Energodar nuke plant and there were known provocations planned at Chernobyl and others. That was their first attempt was to pretend Russia shelled a nuke plant, caused a melt down which affects neighboring NATO countries, and then U.S. will have to come in under the guise of a "humanitarian corridor" in order to "help civilians" and take over Odessa etc. Russia foiled those attempts so the next plan will be to drive the narrative that Russia is losing so badly that Putin has used a tactical nuke on Ukraine, which will result in the same gameplan. Only issue now is, not even western MSM believes Russia is losing at the moment, at least not badly enough to use a nuke so they're in a bind. However if/when Russia really pushes and the Afu is on the verge of complete defeat, they will be forced to come up with SOMETHING, a desperate nuke falseflag we didn't foresee.
As I type this, there's now buzz on the newswires that:
1. Polish president is allegedly offering Ukraine to "temporarily take over its western territories" under the guise that "Russia can't invade them if we(Nato state) hold onto them" and
2. Arestovich finally admitting that one of the remaining options is the Korea-nization of Ukraine, and that "the West is ready for this option", and that reportedly they will soon be ready to discuss splitting Ukraine down the middle a la the DMZ line in north/south Korea. Of course we already know this because Blinken already offered this very deal recently by offering Russia to keep all the lands it already got but soon I guess they'll escalate this offer to 'everything east of the Dnieper' etc. But, unless Russia is somehow losing badly or in a stalemate, there's no way I see them accepting because at this point their ultimate objective is to completely demilitarize Ukraine and do a regime change on their gov't to install someone pro-Russian or neutral, but the important part being a complete demilitarization under Russian military occupation which ensures that Ukraine no longer can have any NATO weapons to threaten Russia with.
My guess is Russia will continue fighting until there is a full unconditional surrender of Ukraine and its leadership and full lockdown of Ukraine's western borders.
But you're absolutely right, as all of this is going on, NATO will already be focusing on the next pivot point and provocation center which as you said will be Latvia/Moldova/Azerbaijan/Taiwan etc etc etc....
Off topic, but I'd like to thank you for your efforts to provide a steady stream of news on your bitchute channel and PLEASE can you point me to a resource where I can hear the whole of this tune!! https://www.bitchute.com/video/s1xJz7I52ZKQ/
I agree, it's really only the elites that push these conflicts and friction. Russian and British people themselves are in many ways more similar than any other 2 countries in many ways
I dont think they need a plausible excuse to stage a nuclear provocation. MH17 or Nord Stream were open air daylight false flags and they got away with it. Easy. But I think Russia is very much interested in procastinating and putting off things. The western fascist Titanic is sinking. So, why hurry? Russia is in its best all times strategic position, with solid stepholds in Africa, South America and the Mediterranean, direct access to the Indian Ocean through Iran, best terms with China and a loaded gun on Israel headside. This is obviously driving the empires thinking heads crazy. All their Ukranian businesses and investments are now gone forever. Why hurry. Russia just need to see the iceberg melt.
Nice work. In the offensives of 1943-1945 the Red army tended to start offensives all along full fronts. They had plans to pour offensive reserves through at specific points/goals. But it did a lot of the shaping you’re describing by forcing the Wehrmacht to shift defensive reserves. Sometimes the red army acted opportunistically regarding breakthrough. The mask deception was similar too. A lot of shifting offensive reserves around, fake armies, etc because the Wehrmacht had a pretty good idea of the front line but not much beyond that. Those games are obviously harder now, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still have value.
You can argue that Zircon would be even WORSE for hitting the bridges, i.e. it would do even less damage than other types of ordnance. First thing to know is Zircon is not some kind of special warhead and doesn't have any particularly special explosive power. It's a standard missile warhead in terms of its strength. Its specialty is that it travels hypersonically. The problem is if you hit a bridge with a hypersonic missile, there's an argument to be made that the overwhelming speed of it will cause the missile to just "slice" through the bridge like an olympic diver breaking water into the pool. The missile may create a tiny hole in the bridge and keep going under and then explode somewhere underneath, not doing much damage. That's not really the strength of hypersonic missiles that they were designed for. They're designed to go extremely fast in order to bypass enemy defenses which can't track them at such speed, and also just the sake of getting to a target much faster. The Zircon's actual high-explosive warhead is a bit smaller than the Kalibr cruise missile or even the Kh-101.
The real ideal type of munition to destroy bridges would likely be not missiles but some kind of very large jet/bomber-dropped guided bomb. The reason is, missiles' warheads are pretty limited in size compared to bombs. Missiles' warheads usually max out at around 400-500kg in order to keep the missile size realistic. But jets and bombers can drop bombs with warheads as large as 2000-5000kg and even larger which have exponentially more explosive power than any missile (not counting nuclear ones). Russia has things like the Fab-5000 bomb, which is 5000kg and would probably wreck any bridge. But the problem is, that means the bombers/jets would have to fly directly over the bridges, and that's not possible because Ukraine's air defense would shoot them down., so......Russia is left with no choice but to use much weaker missiles which presents a huge issue.
IF Russia feels they have successfully eroded Ukraine's AD in order to take the risk, they could attempt a massive bombing run like this with 'wild weasel' escorts of SEAD jets who protect the bombers by locking onto any Ukrainian anti-air radar stations and destroying them but it would be a risk because Ukraine is being pumped full of western AD systems and it's impossible to destroy them all cus they keep receiving new ones
Great text, and a lot of new info and aspects of looking at stuff. Couple of items to add that could maybe broaden your views as wall:
1) McGregor's route does not really need to go all the way into Moldova. if it was 150-200km deep, rest of the corridor could be threatened by vast array of missiles and artillery at RF AF disposal. As it stands, supply lines are not threatened at all.
- I would actually avoid taking any bigger cities like Zhytomyr, and choose the route bypassing it.
- As a child of Bosnian war, it always puzzled me when I saw civilians staying in the area where opponents army advances. We (all 3 sides in the war) always moved before enemy's army came. Same can be done in this wedge area. Who doesn't want to move, gets forcibly evicted. Which solves civilian population related issue. Russia used what happened in ex-Yu as precedent before, can use it again
- If there is no plan to annex all of Ukraine tip of this salient would be a nice area to set up a large Russian military base, like US has Bondsteel in Kosovo. This is the only way to assure that there will be no funny business in the future. Additionally, any piece agreement between UA and RU would most likely forbid Airforce and Air defence for Ukraine. It would be Russia's responsibility to provide air policing in the future.
- Finally, it is my firm belief that without cutting supplies there will be no end of the war. If you cut them, UA has 3 months to live at most. In addition to this, I would land a task force to close the corridor to Romania. This would be tricky, but necessary. In my view, this would not be adventurism, but only actual way to end the war, and worth the risk. Banging your head on the Donbas wall would eventually produce far more casualties.
2) I think that you attribute MORE resilience to the bridges than they have :D . Example you made was a military bridge leftover from WW2, designed to be resilient. While bridges of similar construction (meaning no overhead support) as the one on the Dnipro example and comparable in size, fell after only 2 Tomahawks.
- You don't need to destroy these, just damaging them not to be usable is enough. Then after one or 2 strikes on the bridge repair crews, Ukraine will give up. This was the exact scenario for Antonovski bridge after all.
Great text, and a lot of new info and aspects of looking at stuff. Couple of items to add that could maybe broaden your views as wall:
1) McGregor's route does not really need to go all the way into Moldova. if it was 150-200km deep, rest of the corridor could be threatened by vast array of missiles and artillery at RF AF disposal. As it stands, supply lines are not threatened at all.
- I would actually avoid taking any bigger cities like Zhytomyr, and choose the route bypassing it.
- As a child of Bosnian war, it always puzzled me when I saw civilians staying in the area where opponents army advances. We (all 3 sides in the war) always moved before enemy's army came. Same can be done in this wedge area. Who doesn't want to move, gets forcibly evicted. Which solves civilian population related issue. Russia used what happened in ex-Yu as precedent before, can use it again
- If there is no plan to annex all of Ukraine tip of this salient would be a nice area to set up a large Russian military base, like US has Bondsteel in Kosovo. This is the only way to assure that there will be no funny business in the future. Additionally, any piece agreement between UA and RU would most likely forbid Airforce and Air defence for Ukraine. It would be Russia's responsibility to provide air policing in the future.
- Finally, it is my firm belief that without cutting supplies there will be no end of the war. If you cut them, UA has 3 months to live at most. In addition to this, I would land a task force to close the corridor to Romania. This would be tricky, but necessary. In my view, this would not be adventurism, but only actual way to end the war, and worth the risk. Banging your head on the Donbas wall would eventually produce far more casualties.
2) I think that you attribute MORE resilience to the bridges than they have :D . Example you made was a military bridge leftover from WW2, designed to be resilient. While bridges of similar construction (meaning no overhead support) as the one on the Dnipro example and comparable in size, fell after only 2 Tomahawks.
- You don't need to destroy these, just damaging them not to be usable is enough. Then after one or 2 strikes on the bridge repair crews, Ukraine will give up. This was the exact scenario for Antonovski bridge after all.
Odessa is important to the us as cargill owns the grain elevator there and probably makes a lot of money and campaign donations.
Keeping Russian border regions safe from attack is difficult, moving the border might be the easier option. I can imagine the meeting.."so what if we just move the border to here?" *intern takes pencil from Generals hand and draws on map*
We are all forgetting what we learned from Crimea. You dont need to stealth mobilize, you put conscripts to work doing the non fighting rear work and that frees up the contract soldiers. Theres no point in having contract soldiers loading grad boxes in Tula. Heck they can ask me to do that, ill figure out the numbers on the side quick enough.
If Russia takes Nikolaev and Odessa, and as a result the Ukraine ends up landlocked at the end of the war, Nato would simply pester Russia in the Black Sea, by instead building their base at Costanta.
if they could do that they might've done it already. Also depending what scale you're talking about might be against the Montreaux Convention limitations. Plus it doesn't quite work the same: by building up Ukraine they can hide behind the non-NATO plausible deniability by using the Ukrainian navy to harass / asymmetrically war against Russian fleet. But they can't do the same with Romania because it's in NATO and pushing Romania into any direct actions/conflict against Russia would be too provocative even for the globalist planners as it would endanger the entire NATO alliance via article 5 issues and be construed as too dangerous. Also Romania retains some sovereignty to the extent of likely refusing certain such escalations whereas Ukraine is under totally compromised surrogate control which gave UK/US a prime host they can do with as they wish, build up any and all NATO military/naval infrastructure without even asking for permission because inside Ukraine they have free reign - anything goes carte blanche.
Well, the SMO started amongst many reasons because Zelenskiyyi announced Ukraine would soon request to join Nato, didn't it?
Romania is another country with half its current population having migrated away, but unlike Ukraine, the outflow of Romanians is purely due to economic reasons. Just start laundry dollars over there, and Romania too will quickly become a failed state totally owned by neocons. Moreover, it has access to the Black Sea so the Montreaux Treaty won't hinder Romania. Practical problems with installing a major military port in Constanta, in reality, may come if the water level is not deep enough around there.
certainly it still is a possibility. However it simply is no where near as effective or ideal as the Odessa scenario for a variety of reasons. One of them is gaining Odessa and its outlying region is a boon not only for them having it, but for the fact that it robs Russia of that highly prized sea corridor as well. And most importantly of all is the utter proximity of Odessa to Russian naval facilities which allows them to keep full 24/7 surveillance on the Russian fleet and on Crimea DIRECTLy in a variety of ways as the 180km to Crimean land even allows radars to reach and constantly surveil the goings-on, whereas Romania is a bit too distant for such direct observation.
But as you said there may also be other unforeseen limitations like the water depth etc.
Also why would Moldova be of so much interest to Russia? It would anchor its borders to the Carpathians mountains. That would require less border troops to surveil than open terrain. That and the loss in prestige if the Russian garrison and Russian ethnics in Transnistria fall under Western control.
Other than that I don't see much strategic value in Transnistria. As a consequence Odessa is a palatable prize in itself, and because completely eliminates the Ukraine as a player in the Black Sea.
Hello! I read with great interest your substack multi part series, they are very good. Now comes my "point of view": From what I "see" on the Internet, Ukraine's strategy at the moment is to send to the front lines, in the vast majority, only recruited soldiers and in the "second line" are the elite soldiers and "so-called mercenaries" (NATO troops). I am sure that this Ukrainian "second line" is very well informed and organized in order to counter-attack any big offensive from the Russian Federation - very careful here. A great offensive on the part of the Russian Federation must be prepared for the destruction of the "second line" of the Ukrainian NATO forces. I am a supporter of a major offensive by the Russian Federation in Ukraine, but it must be thoroughly prepared and take into account the evolution of many different scenarios on the battlefield. And this coming "great offensive" must solve the problem of supplying Ukraine with weapons and NATO soldiers. But at the moment the Russian Federation is doing great with the applied tactic called 'death by a thousand cuts' - the only disadvantage of this strategy is that it allows the supply of weapons and NATO troops to Ukraine, which leads to the prolongation of the conflict and the increase in the number of victims on the part of the Russian Federation. From Romania I send good thoughts to the entire Russian Federation. VICTORY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION!
yep I totally agree with you. I believe one of the very primary objectives of the coming Russian offensive will likely be to cut the supply routes one way or another, whether they take the western route or the Donbass route. Because NATO has a huge amount of escalated supplies intended to come in the next month or two and Russia needs to cut it asap.
Hello! I observe every day the evolution of the situation on the front in Ukraine. And I notice that for almost a year the Russian artillery bombards enemy positions daily, and the effects of these bombardments are not commensurate with the quantity of bombs. I think in the following way, please read very carefully: The Russian Federation should bring artillery units on a stretch of approximately 30 km (in front of the city of Donbas, let's say, as an example) in order to supersaturate this area with artillery units ( 300-400 artillery units). These units should be divided into groups, and some of these groups should be dedicated to the fight against enemy artillery - counter-artillery. Anti-aircraft systems Pantsir-S1/S2 and TOR-M2DT (a lot) should also be brought into this space for anti-aircraft defense. During this time, there should be 24/24 aerial surveillance planes in the air to identify possible attacks with HIMARS: Together with these planes, strategic bombers equipped with Zircon hypersonic missiles should be permanently in the air. Now, when these artillery groups are in place and ready for battle, then each group - let's say a group has 50 artillery pieces, is assigned a target and fires 50 shells simultaneously at a single target. The effect of the breaking forces will be devastating, not even the poop will remain an enemy. In this way, even the strongest enemy strongholds can be destroyed. I greet you with respect!
And a lot of the artillery bombardment you see is not actually Russia, much of it is DPR/LPR and other volunteer units which don't have the same effectiveness/technology as Russian forces.
But you have a creative method. There might be some problems with such a method but it's a good thought
I finished reading Part 1, and I can say that due to the lack of information my "image" about SOM was very poor, and because of it I said a lot of nonsense. Now I can say that I have a much clearer picture of the SMO situation. The front line is huge, and that involves a lot of human and material resources, which makes the situation very complex and very difficult for those in charge. Especially since the situation on the front line is constantly changing, and the challenges are very complex. In the past I made some negative comments to the management of the SMO, now I retract them completely. And with regard to my attack strategy, which I call "Evaporation of Enemy Forces", I add two S-400 air defense regiments to the ground, one in the South and the second in the North, I add to the air squadron + 4 x Su-35 fully loaded with air-to-air missiles and with the mission of protecting the convoy from possible missiles not intercepted by the S-400 - 2 x Su-35 will occupy the front "penetration and protection" positions and 2 x Su-35 will occupy positions in the back for possible help; + 1 x Su-35 equipped with anti-radar missiles. This convoy will not approach the front line more than 10-15 km - between their flight area and the enemy front should be the anti-aircraft defense of the Russian Federation arranged in layers, Pantsir-S1/S2, TOR-M2DT, S- 400. In this way, the Russian Federation will be able to equip 6 to 10 squadrons to ensure constant activity against the enemy forces. I greet you with great respect for the work you do!
Can you post if you know if Ukraine mobilized on the 23rd? Wiki says 24th, the article says 25th, both say it was a response to Ru invasion on the 24th. But the article is published on the 23rd, then edited on the 25th. So it looks like Ukr mobilized on the 23rd then Russia attacked, which would be reasonable. But I don't read Russian or Ukrainian/
I wonder if discrepancy is over timezones. As I recall Russia invaded in very early hours of February 24 in local time. But this would have been evening February 23 of most western countries. So articles reporting the various invasion updates would have been timestamped/dated as February 23 in western circles.
I see in the article you posted a 10:09pm timestamp and it's a Toronto, Canadian publication. 10:09pm Toronto time corresponds exactly with 5:09am Kiev time and that's exactly when Russia invaded so I assume that's what the issue is.
Completely wrong. That's a typical trope passed around by middle-minds who know very little about military or strategy. The whole "Russia has no NCO Corp (yes it does) and their command is 'centralized' with "force-push" rather than 'recon-pull' tactics", which is completely wrong and actually opposite to reality. Russian commanders have MORE leeway and independence than equivalent NATO smaller unit commanders. Everything you were taught by CNN is a lie, but you wouldn't know that without actual research.
No one is holding anything off, AFU is getting pulverized and ground into dust. They're not counter-attacking anywhere, don't fool yourself.
Russia has plenty logistics, more than ALL of NATO combined to launch offensives, you can trust on that.
Nice deflection. I guarantee you I ascribe to much more 'differentiating' opinions than you. I can see the clear signs of 'echochamber' syndrome in your posts, whereas I'm actually reading and digesting from both sides and formulating analyses based on that. You on the other hand have your mind already pre-set and are just sea-lioning for fake answers you'll only reject without basis.
Anyway, what you said about Russian military structure is outright objectively wrong and shows you don't have the requisite knowledge on the topic to really challenge or refute anything here. I instantly saw the sign of the typical vapid tropes parroted by people who don't do any research, i.e. "no NCO corp, Russia is a railway power, blah blah". It's all wrong, buddy. Don't get me at me that you're not doing your due diligence and research, reserve that anger for yourself.
Hi, I see you found yourself a new hobby to keep you busy. ;-)
Here's my two cents. I seriously doubt that we will see a 'major' offensive anytime soon. I believe that Russia will continue with its strategy that has served it so well so far with regards to the demilitarisation of the Ukraine. This has been an artillery war, and I suspect that the Russians will do their best to keep it that way.
What they will do though is to intensify the conflict. You mentioned the 'death by a thousand cuts' approach. What has been happening so far could be characterised as 'death by a thousand PAPER cuts'. With the recent Russian attacks all along the frontline (except for Kherson), it is turning into 'death by a hundred knife cuts'. And it may well grow further in the near future, into 'death by a dozen sword cuts'. But I don't think we will see that single rapier thrust to the heart to finish it in one strike.
Recently Russia hasn't just been attacking in many different places, they've also halted or slowed down many of those attacks after a few days, and in some case, like Vuhledar, even pulled back again. I believe they do so because the objective of those attacks had been achieved. Those objectives were never geographical in nature though. They attacked locations that the Ukrainians 'must hold'. (Often a result of their own propaganda and the need to continue to appear 'victorious' enough to keep western aid coming in) to draw their reinforcements in.
The Ukraine lacks enough capable troops to hold the line everywhere, especially with the Bahkmut black hole having sucked in so many forces. Before the recent Russian attacks, the front along the Zaporozhe line was held almost exclusively by poorly trained, poorly equipped, poorly led, and poorly supplied territorial units who were also understrength. The few regular formations in the area were heavily depleted from fighting elsewhere, and send to the 'quiet' front to rest and recover.
But the Russian attacks changed that. Those weak territorial forces were relatively easily swept aside, and the Russians threatened to take locations the Ukrainians couldn't afford to lose. So what did they do? They send in reinforcements, regular formations with much better equipment and training. And I believe that that was the Russian objective all along. Their attacks are forcing the Ukrainians to commit their best brigades into the frontline, instead of keeping them back as mobile reserves. And by putting them in the frontline, they are now exactly where the Russians want them to be, within range of their artillery. I repeat, this is an artillery war, Russia is demilitarising the Ukraine by forcing them into a never-ending Verdun-like slaughter.
And it makes sense. We've all seen clip after clip of fresh and barely trained Ukrainian conscripts put in the frontline trenches doing little more than await death or injury from artillery, drone or missile strike. If, as the Ukrainian commander, you have the choice of putting your best troops, which are also your most mobile forces, in those trenches or your worst, if you're smart you'll pick the latter. They'll be blown up anyway, so you might as well sacrifice your lower quality troops and save the better ones.
And as long as the Russians kept back their ground attacks, or advanced only very slowly, the Ukrainians got away with it. But not any longer. Now Russia is forcing them to commit their better formations to the front. At Vuhledar itself there's now a mechanised brigade, and a tank brigade (in name at least) directly to the east of it, instead of a single understrength territorial brigade covering the whole area. And those two brigades are being whittled away by long range strike after long range strike. And it's happening along most of the front.
That's what the increased Russian manpower is allowing them to do. They are putting the Ukrainians in a catch-22 situation. If they keep the cheap cannon-fodder up front as they have been doing, they will lose vital ground (such as Vuhledar) all along the frontline, again and again. But if they commit their more capable formations to hold back the attacks, then the Russians will simply hang back and take their time to annihilate them with artillery. Earlier I said that as the Ukrainian high command was choosing to sacrifice low-grade troops rather than their best. Well, they no longer have that luxury. Russia is taking it away from them. And there's no way that the Ukrainians can keep regenerating units and manpower and acquire more weaponry fast enough to make up for those losses (of quality formations).
I believe that the Russians will continue with the strategy of demilitarising the Ukraine in the east of the country for a while yet. That's where the supply lines are the shortest for them and the longest for the Ukrainian forces. That's where Zelensky keeps pouring in troops, despite the advice of his generals, and that's where the Russian artillery already is. They will gradually intensify the pressure (from a hundred knife to a dozen sword cuts) and the amount of destruction that comes with it, but I don't really see the need for a fast and deep mobile advance anywhere.
As to that last remark, the point of a 'cauldron', or cutting of a large group of enemy forces, is to create battlefield circumstances that make it relatively easy for you to defeat that enemy force, by creating more and much larger difficulties for them than the pincer movement itself creates for you (the attacker). That's often overlooked, but those pincers to surround enemy forces have some serious risks and drawbacks for the attacker too, for one the losses they'll incur while attacking. Often those risks and drawbacks are worth it, but does that also apply to this conflict? As I pointed out above, the Ukrainians are already, and quite willingly, putting their troops where it is relatively easy for Russia to decimate them, with little risks and fairly low losses for themselves. So is there enough added benefit to create those cauldrons, with all the costs involved for the attacker, if the end result is going to be pretty much the same?
It is a valid question to ask if a 'big arrow' offensive aimed at encircling a large number of Ukrainian troops, with the costs and risks involved, is actually worth it, or if it is even a smart thing to do, given the specific circumstances of this conflict. Wouldn't it be better to finish of the Ukrainian armed forces east of the Dnjepr once and for all, rather than risk having them flee to the west of the river, and having to go and fight them there at a later stage?
At some point in the not so far away future the whole house of cards that is Ukraine will come crumbling down, militarily, politically and economically anyway. So why make it harder for yourself by forcing the Ukrainians west of the river BEFORE that societal collapse?
Good writeup, I agree it COULD go that way because as you said they are already having great success for the past few weeks and many frontlines for the AFU are completely collapsing like LPR (Kremennaya to Lyman and Siversk) and Bakhmut, and up to recently, Zaporozhe and Ugledar.
However personally I think Russia will still be forced to put the hammer down with a fairly big arrow offensive as per option #3. The reason is that the West sees the utter desperation of the situation, and that AFU is soon ready to entirely fall, and they are now going ALL IN with their arms supplies. Pouring hundreds/thousands of tanks, APC's, IFV's, new GLSDB's and everything in between. If Russia 'sits back' and does the 'thousand cuts' method, they will be allowing this unprecedented ocean of NATO equipment to begin pouring into the AFU lines. And sure, we all know none of that stuff will make a difference in the long run, and it will all be eventually neutralized, but of course still at greater cost. That equipment will inevitably increase the cost to Russian troops, with more casualties, etc., so I think Russia will finally want to stem that tide/flow and begin massively surrounding or demilitarizing the AFU before the vast majority of the most advanced of the NATO equipment can get in theatre.
Of course, another option would be to continue the 'slow roll' offensive by a thousand cuts, yet simply destroy the bridges and cut the supply lines, but it feels unlikely that they'll do that--for whatever reason it seems Putin is intent on keeping those bridges intact so there remains only one alternative, which is to greatly up the escalation before most of the equipment can hit the field. So personally that's what I'm anticipating, but not with 100% certainty, there definitely is to me a 20-30% probability for your option, that they will just continue this slow-boil of the frog at a low-intensity level.
as an example, here's total tally I just saw posted: https://i.imgur.com/ARE2zjQ.jpg almost 500 total tanks allegeldy pledged to Ukraine. Of course I"m not saying that amount would defeat Russia (no amount would, anywya), but surely they would be a big headache, escalate the conflict, increase the costs for Russian servicemen, and in short, do a lot of damage. 500 tanks is not something to scoff at imo, plus that's not counting hundreds more IFV's/APC's and everything in between. So I think in light of that, Russia will have no choice but to do some relatively big arrows to squeeze that threat out.
Though one should mention, these are reportedly 'pledged' but who knows what the delivery time table is, most of that stuff might be promised for 2024+ or something, so there's that argument too
Sure, it looks impressive on paper. But some of these numbers have already been retracted. Portugal and Spain for example, are now set to supple ZERO tanks each. They can't get them operational. The American M1's have to be rebuilt first, so it's going to be a year at least before they are ready, but in truth, this is just a ploy to appear to be supplying tanks, whereas they have zero intention of actually doing.
The Norwegian and Dutch Leo-2's are unlikely to make a presence. Like in many other countries (Germany, UK, France, Spain, Italy, and more) the vast majority of the tanks that are supposed to be in 'active' service are not operational, and unlikely to become so in the foreseeable future. Many of these pledges were made by politicians who did not know this and simply assumed all the tanks in their inventory were ready to go. Now that they're learning the truth, one by one they have to retract those pledges (Spain and Portugal for example).
Then there are the Leopard-1's (the Danish Leopard-1A5DK is not the same as the actual A5, but is an A3 hull with a modified German A5 turret ). The Germans phased out the type 20 years ago, and the Danes 18 years ago. While in storage, they have not had maintenance, and many are missing components. Furthermore, there are no maintenance yards or personnel left who have handled the type before. There's absolutely no way they will able to get a significant number of these tanks ready in time.
The various T72 variants promised, also have to be refurbished, but those are the most likely to actually be available. All in all, realistic numbers that might become available to the Ukraine for combat operations sometime in 2023 are the 159 or so T72 variants, maybe 50 Leo-2's and those 14 Challengers (if they can get them to run), and a handful of Leo-1's. So 250 to 300 tanks over the entire year. And nearly all of them outdated or obsolete. I'm not impressed.
Best of all, all these tanks and most of that other equipment cannot be replaced by these European NATO countries. As far as I know, not a single NATO country is still manufacturing MBT's. These are all legacy tanks. It will take years, assuming they start now setting up the infrastructure, which they won't, before NATO can start churning out new tanks. They can't even produce ammunition in meaningful quantities. So NATO would defacto be demilitarising itself.
I think I should make one thing clear though, I see the conflict in the Ukraine as a part of the much bigger war between Russia and the US. And whatever Russia decides to do, or not do, in the Ukraine, is determined by how it supports the much greater conflict with the US. And as far as I can tell, for now it is in Russia's favour NOT to finish the war in Ukraine, as it is hurting the US and its European vassals far more than it is Russia. Russia has an opportunity here to defeat NATO decisively without having to militarily engage them.
that's true, so the total amount could end up being roughly similar or even much less than what the Poles supplied last time with their T-72M1's etc. Although to be frank, I'm more worried about the total number of IFV's and other light vehicles (patrol / mobility vehicles like Mraps, and other related stuff) as those numbers could be quite high and not addressed in the posted list of MBT's only. They can be a huge headache and prolong the conflict as well as it makes the AFU very mobile (though not very armored) and allows them to run around the long contact line and create exploitations/penetrations at certain key points highlighted by U.S. satellite intel, etc.
But beyond even that the thing I'm concerned most about is simply the number of urgent mobilized formations being created. Yesterday Rybar and some other sources posted the exact numbers and designations of dozens of new brigades being urgently formed in the west which could account for in excess of 120-200k troops (22+ new and reformed/replenished brigades were named I believe) which basically encompasses the 'reserves', as I understand it, that Ukraine intends to utilize as the shockfist against Russia's coming offensive.
This is something I'm keeping an eye on myself.
I'm a bit late replying, but I have to say, I like how this blog of yours is turning in some low-key debate and opinion-sharing on the conflict.
As to the brigades forming, I wouldn't worry too much about it. The thing is, the Ukraine can only form very few, if any at all, new actual brigades. A brigade is much, much more than just collecting enough men and equipment. It takes a long time to form. The following are general time frames, there will be highly talented people and complete morons who'll need either less or more time, but these numbers hold true for the vast majority of conscripts (the talented ones have usually already signed up and don't need to be conscripted/dragged of the streets).
The biggest problem is qualitative manpower. It takes six months to train a soldier into a somewhat competent basic private: the run-of-the-mill rifleman, tank driver/loader, artillery ammo handler, truck driver, in other words, the simpler military roles (of course in war, even the simplest things are complicated). It takes nine to twelve months to turn them into somewhat specialised privates, or basic NCO's. It takes fifteen to eighteen months to turn that basic NCO into a decent one.
And that's where the real problem begins. A low ranking officer needs from eighteen months (a very basic platoon/section leader) to several years of training and experience. A mid ranking officer (say battalion commander), needs ten years or more , and the high ranking ones, need two decades. And don't forget that a brigade needs large staffs (at brigade and battalion levels) that also have to filled with all sorts of specialised officers (and senior NCO's).
These men do not exist for the Ukraine to call upon. They ran out of them by April or May of last year, with the new formations they formed then. As a rule of thumb, a peacetime conscription based army has a trained reserve cadre to add about 50% additional manoeuvre formations (brigades and up) to its existing order of battle, without compromising the quality of the active units, and the new units fairly decently trained and staffed up to normal requirements.
If you are willing to lower your standards considerably (by pillaging the active formations for experienced officers) you can approximately double the size of the peacetime army, but then the quality of all your formations drops, and you'll have trouble conducting the more complicated manoeuvres and operations (like proper combined arms warfare). Your offensive capabilities in particular drop considerably.
The Ukraine has stood up quite a few more formations than that already, and their operating standards have dropped dramatically, even for their better formations. How many clips have we not seen about Ukrainian troops complaining that they were dumped in the frontline, while their commander left?
In the vast majority of cases, that's not due to cowardice or anything like that by the commander, it's that he has no other option. They are nearly always talking about the company commander, who is often the only officer in the company. He can't be in the trenches with every one of his platoons and squads at the same time, in fact he likely has little or no staff to support him, so he has to do most of the work to keep the company running himself.
It's even worse at battalion and brigade levels. You should look up the 'Peter Principle'. It rules supreme in the Ukrainian army right now, with all those forced promotions, bumping up people into positions they are completely unsuited for. Even back in the early spring, you regularly saw interviews with Ukrainian lieutenants commanding battalions and captains commanding brigades.
That's why so many NATO officers have been sent to the country to take over command of Ukrainian formations. Trained and capable officers is probably the single most crippling bottleneck for any Ukrainian attempt to create new units, or refill the mauled ones.
Very good points. But you did hit on something in the last paragraph, that a lot of these deficiencies you speak of can (and will) be filled by covert NATO officers.
Also, while it takes a long time to form brigades that's true, many of these aforementioned brigades have already been forming for a long time, many months, so they're not just springing up out of the blue.
And lastly, while all these things are true, it doesn't take into account the potential for the new Russian brigades of mobilized being subpar as well.
For instance you mention it takes a long time to train various skills. Well, many of the mobilized, many/most of which have only been called up weeks ago, have not trained or had any part of the military for decades. Many of the mobiks are people who were in the army in the 90's, or even served in the Chechen wars. I know because I've seen interviews with them. The average age of the mobik call up, from what I've seen, is 35, which means there's a ton of them over 40 years old. Which means these are guys who got their basic conscript training way back in the 90's. So for them to be called up now, and given a few weeks training--one must question how effective they will be comparable to the untrained new Ukrainian brigades that we're discussing.
So, the concern of mine is, the Ukrainian brigades might not be great, but this 300k+ called up mobilization may consist of alot of 'not great' troops either, so it could theoretically cancel each other out in terms of the 'qualitative' factor.
Sure we can argue, they'll be better equipped/supplied at least, and thus have the advantage of the Russian logistical/industrial/military advantages over Ukraine, but on the other hand they're attacking while the Ukrainian ones are defending and thus the AFU have the big advantage. You need a highly skilled force to attack effectively as we all know.
Hopefully the situation isn't as grim as I've outlined, as I'm mostly only playing devil's advocate, but I'm concerned by the possibility of it.
The problems facing the Russians with their mobilisation and the ones the Ukrainians have are miles apart, it's an order of magnitude of difference. It's the first Russian mobilisation, and as I pointed out before, it means they still have an ample supply of reservist cadre (senior NCO's and officers) to fill new units with. But many mobiks will go to cadred active formations (where at least part of the senior NCO's and officers are active professionals), so there's no reason to assume that Russia has a shortage of capable cadre for the units the mobiks go to, be they cadred ones or newly stood up ones.
The Ukrainians aren't not short of capable cadre, they have none left to call upon, not even the poorly capable. I'm not saying there aren't issues concerning the mobiks, but it's stuff that can be ironed out, unlike what the Ukrainians are facing.
NATO officers may actually make things worse. They don't speak the language (either Russian or Ukrainian), and those few who do, are unlikely to have mastered it sufficiently to convey the correctly worded orders in a way that they will be clearly understood. Each military develops its own jargon aside from the normal use of the language. When engaged in combat operations the language barrier is going to lead, and has already, to deadly miscommunications. Keep in mind, we're not talking about training by NATO officers here, but them actually commanding Ukrainian units.
And we're not talking about just a handful of slots to be filled, but many hundreds, maybe thousands, that are in desperate need of filling. How many NATO officers speak either Russian or Ukrainian well enough to avoid any miscommunications in battle? How many understand and are trained to handle soviet style equipment and doctrine (which is what the Ukrainian army still predominantly uses)? You can't just pluck officers from one military culture and drop them into a completely different one and expect good results.
Plus there's the problem that NATO can't really afford to have their officers captured. That will seriously limit how useful they can be and how effective they can be at commanding their units.
On the face of it, using NATO officers may seem to partially solve the problem, but they bring a whole set of new problems with them.
And how many officers can NATO armies really spare? Every one sent to the Ukraine leaves a gap back home that will be hard to fill.
Yes, all those extra Ukrainian formations will have some value, but mostly in terms of additional roadblocks for the Russians to overcome. There's nothing they can do to change the trajectory of the conflict though.
Here's a recent overview of the revised and more realistic number of Leo 2's NATO plans to send (and some, like those 8 Norwegian ones still look iffy to me).
https://twitter.com/Cyberspec1/status/1625725054968549377
More on the Leo 2's, only 17 of them are the A6 model (14 from Germany and 3 from Portugal), the rest would be the A4 model, which dates back to the early 80's.
Denmark and the Netherlands have stated they won't be delivering any Leo 2's, but are looking into the possibility to provide Leo 1's.
btw check this funny Ukrop quote on Russian T90's https://i.imgur.com/A4IS7yP.png
Talking about a battalion worth of armor maybe… minus all the support equipment like tankers, ammo trucks or carriers, just not enough…. We did not even get into the discussion about tactics, strategies, or training, none of that is going to make a difference without the later.
All good analysis; however, the Russians using their tactics have to tread carefully it will be one big mistake to think the West is not waiting to have an excuse to enter the war and totally show up Putina and cause his collapse. The use of any tactical nuke will cause the complete loss of air that the Russians have and the West led by US forces could push the Russians back in total disarray… think it could not happen, nor did the Iraqi’s, Afghani’s or others that have faced the US Army. One of your paragraphs talks about NATO prep along the borders but have minimal reporting on the actual preparations for combat. Along with men and material you could visualize a total collapse of the Russian offensive if say an Air Mobile Assault occurred in Crimea along with an Armor punch through the lines to Kharkiv… thinking it will not happen? Politicians are salivating for it all under the guise of defending NATO. This will be a short demonstration to show China keep messing and find out.
You think the U.S. army could push the Russian army back? What are you smoking buddy?
oh ok you're probably just joking, right?
Very good analysis. I have to wonder about the ability of Russia to keep Ukrainian artillery far enough away to prevent bombardment of Russian territory and in particular I am thinking about the newly annexed territories. It would seem that Russian forces would have to be permanently stationed far enough into non-annexed territory to push the artillery back 150+km from Russian territory. This could amount to a significant and constant drain on military resources eventually becoming untenable. The only real option is to replace the Kiev admin with a more neutral or Russia friendly regime and I am not sure that would even work. There needs to be either a complete annihilation of Ukrainian forces or such a dire threat that the regime in Kiev capitulates to whatever demands Russia may have.
yes I agree. The 'pushing back 100-150km' thing I was referring to in the report would only be the first phase of the operation in order to stop the shelling of Russian territory, but of course afterwards Russia would continue its objective of TOTALLY destroying/capturing/capitulating the AFU and forcing a complete unconditional surrender, at which point Ukraine will be entirely demilitarized and no further threat will exist.
Hi,
I had a thought about the possible origins of those extra 200k men of the so-called 'stealth mobilisation'. Back when the original 300k reservists were called up, they weren't the only ones to show up. About 70k additional reservists reported for duty voluntarily. I rarely see those extra 70k men mentioned any more, and almost never in western media. Back in september or so, at the start of the mobilisation, the Russian authorities declared that they would gladly accept the 70k into their forces.
So right there you already have 70k extra troops, on top of the 300k. And that was months ago already. Sure, there was a peak of volunteer reservists when the 300k were mobilised, but I'm willing to bet that in the months since then, many more reservists have come forward to rejoin of their own accord (and without media attention). Probably enough to double that 70k, and maybe enough to triple it. So I can easily see an extra 150k to 200k reservists in total activated in addition to the 300k that were formally mobilised. But as they came forward voluntarily, they've technically not been mobilised, but rejoined the service under special circumstances.
that's a good point. I do strongly recall a vast amount of "volunteers" not only showing up of their own volition, but specific ministerial action from Russian governors and upward, to massively boost volunteer recruitment in local regions. We saw for months, battalion after battalion, dozens of them, of volunteers going to the Chechen training center to train for deployment. However, I simply always considered these volunteer forces as extra, not counting the "mobilized" that everyone was speaking of. However, now that you mention it, it would make sense if that's where the 200k extra would have theoretically come from.
But the only reason I'm still hesitant to say it's 500k total is because everyone adds the mobiks and volunteers, but people rarely subtract the mass amounts that have left the service or rotated out as well. No one knows the real numbers but there's been alot of talk about all the 'ended contracts' and 6 month contracts that ended in September (some believe thousands/tens of thousands). Sure, they report now that Russian MOD has indefinitely paused any contract expiration now, but prior to that many could have possibly left. So if there's 300-500k new bodies, the question is, how much total is there if a lot also left service. So this is the main reason I'm hesitant in announcing a truly overpowering 700k+ force. When all is said and done, I wouldn't be totally surprised if semi parity is maintained even after the big Phase 2.0 starts, though I'm hoping that's not the case
Fantastic article, I really enjoyed your writing style. I have been following developments in this war since it began now, and I think that your analysis is very accurate and realistic. As for where the big arrows will point, my theory is that it will be a smaller more narrow version of your third scenario.
A large section of forces will go down both sides of the Oskil River front all the way to Izium and mainly restore the area that was lost in September. I don't think that Russia will do anything significant on the Sumy and Chernihiv directions, except maybe a smaller incursion to draw away the AFU and stretch the line. I also think that they will start a big front from the west side of Kharkov to isolate the city by linking up with the forces that will go down the Oskil River, however I don't think that Kharkov itself gets captured in the next offensive. The other big push will clearly be from the southern front in my opinion, that part is of vital national importance for Russia and there's already some activity in the Orekhov and Ugledar sections.
Essentially, my theory is that one "new" front will be established, west of Kharkov City all the way to the sensitive road and rail junctions in Lozova Raion. Then two "old" fronts will also be massively reinforced. One is a push from the north down the Oskil all the way to Izium and then west towards Lozova as well. The last push is from the south also towards the Lozova Raion, bypassing Pavlograd and Zaporozhye City.
Such a scenario would isolate and slowly reduce the role of the second largest city in Ukraine, Kharkov, while also putting it on the path of annexation. It would also cut off Zaporozhye without a costly urban battle. Supply and general logistics will be kept quite simple here without any costly detours through Belarus. And the most important gain is that the remaining parts of the Donbass will be encircled. Supplying cities like Kramatorsk would be borderline impossible and the AFU would slowly negotiate a withdrawal. The push would be less than 200 km from each side, which should be more than manageable for such a large force in mostly friendly territory and with good logistics.
Yep, good analysis. I'll be honest, if left to my own guess, I personally would have went exactly with what you just said. This seems the most sensible and logical option. I never really could see them going into Sumy/Chernihov cus it doesn't appear to make any sense or purpose. The only real reason I started to anticipate that is because there has been more and more 'unofficial whispers' from various sources both in AFU and in the RuAF that Sumy/Chernihov will be attacked. Sure they're just rumors but I've heard them so often now that it's hard to ignore. And after analyzing it, I came up with the connecting of the dots that it would theoretically make sense for Putin to do this in order to push back the AFU completely from Russian territory, but it doesn't FEEL like a real serious priority in those regions, compared to everything else on the list. The only real reason I could see them going into Sumy/Chernihov is if they do plan a more serious attempt at Kiev, not necessarily taking it, but perhaps fully surrounding and sieging it, partly for a fixing operation, partly as psychological op to collapse the command. But if they don't go after Kiev then I see little sense in Chernihov/Sumy incursions. So in the end, I give it probably a 50/50 for that front to be substantially activated, so basically I agree with your assessments.
But also in the end it all depends on which troop total force number we're dealing with, if the 'stealth mobilization' really happened, and the allies are going to have 700-800k total then I raise the odds of Chernihov/Sumy to 75-85% because there'll be no where else to put so many troops. But if it's only an additional 220-260k mobiks waiting in the wings, then yeah the odds of Chernihov/Sumy happening are much lower in my book.
The best analysis I have read so far. My guess is that you are totally right about Odessa. I cant see how the Russians can stop that. So, the most likely is the big cauldron scenario, something which will crash the remains of the AFU and will force to some kind of treaty to give time to NATO to put up another wider army of Baltics, Polish, Rumanians and worldaround mercenaries in order to suffocate Russia by endless assault waves. Meanwhile, the US will start something against China.
thanks. Yes we've already seen hints when they were threatening to create a "nuclear event" by bombing the Energodar nuke plant and there were known provocations planned at Chernobyl and others. That was their first attempt was to pretend Russia shelled a nuke plant, caused a melt down which affects neighboring NATO countries, and then U.S. will have to come in under the guise of a "humanitarian corridor" in order to "help civilians" and take over Odessa etc. Russia foiled those attempts so the next plan will be to drive the narrative that Russia is losing so badly that Putin has used a tactical nuke on Ukraine, which will result in the same gameplan. Only issue now is, not even western MSM believes Russia is losing at the moment, at least not badly enough to use a nuke so they're in a bind. However if/when Russia really pushes and the Afu is on the verge of complete defeat, they will be forced to come up with SOMETHING, a desperate nuke falseflag we didn't foresee.
As I type this, there's now buzz on the newswires that:
1. Polish president is allegedly offering Ukraine to "temporarily take over its western territories" under the guise that "Russia can't invade them if we(Nato state) hold onto them" and
2. Arestovich finally admitting that one of the remaining options is the Korea-nization of Ukraine, and that "the West is ready for this option", and that reportedly they will soon be ready to discuss splitting Ukraine down the middle a la the DMZ line in north/south Korea. Of course we already know this because Blinken already offered this very deal recently by offering Russia to keep all the lands it already got but soon I guess they'll escalate this offer to 'everything east of the Dnieper' etc. But, unless Russia is somehow losing badly or in a stalemate, there's no way I see them accepting because at this point their ultimate objective is to completely demilitarize Ukraine and do a regime change on their gov't to install someone pro-Russian or neutral, but the important part being a complete demilitarization under Russian military occupation which ensures that Ukraine no longer can have any NATO weapons to threaten Russia with.
My guess is Russia will continue fighting until there is a full unconditional surrender of Ukraine and its leadership and full lockdown of Ukraine's western borders.
But you're absolutely right, as all of this is going on, NATO will already be focusing on the next pivot point and provocation center which as you said will be Latvia/Moldova/Azerbaijan/Taiwan etc etc etc....
Off topic, but I'd like to thank you for your efforts to provide a steady stream of news on your bitchute channel and PLEASE can you point me to a resource where I can hear the whole of this tune!! https://www.bitchute.com/video/s1xJz7I52ZKQ/
thank you. try this: https://youtu.be/XGoO7ZHoZLI
https://youtu.be/NmfrVgSpxi8
https://youtu.be/c2jsK8b28mI
Thanks for that. You guys do techno very well!
I am convinced it would only take a tiny change somewhere, for the Russian and British animosity to dissolve, and a viable partnership to emerge.
In the "based" section of our society, there is a lot of support and admiration for the Russian people.
I agree, it's really only the elites that push these conflicts and friction. Russian and British people themselves are in many ways more similar than any other 2 countries in many ways
I dont think they need a plausible excuse to stage a nuclear provocation. MH17 or Nord Stream were open air daylight false flags and they got away with it. Easy. But I think Russia is very much interested in procastinating and putting off things. The western fascist Titanic is sinking. So, why hurry? Russia is in its best all times strategic position, with solid stepholds in Africa, South America and the Mediterranean, direct access to the Indian Ocean through Iran, best terms with China and a loaded gun on Israel headside. This is obviously driving the empires thinking heads crazy. All their Ukranian businesses and investments are now gone forever. Why hurry. Russia just need to see the iceberg melt.
Nice work. In the offensives of 1943-1945 the Red army tended to start offensives all along full fronts. They had plans to pour offensive reserves through at specific points/goals. But it did a lot of the shaping you’re describing by forcing the Wehrmacht to shift defensive reserves. Sometimes the red army acted opportunistically regarding breakthrough. The mask deception was similar too. A lot of shifting offensive reserves around, fake armies, etc because the Wehrmacht had a pretty good idea of the front line but not much beyond that. Those games are obviously harder now, but that doesn’t mean they don’t still have value.
Isn't Zircon able to destroy these bridges?
You can argue that Zircon would be even WORSE for hitting the bridges, i.e. it would do even less damage than other types of ordnance. First thing to know is Zircon is not some kind of special warhead and doesn't have any particularly special explosive power. It's a standard missile warhead in terms of its strength. Its specialty is that it travels hypersonically. The problem is if you hit a bridge with a hypersonic missile, there's an argument to be made that the overwhelming speed of it will cause the missile to just "slice" through the bridge like an olympic diver breaking water into the pool. The missile may create a tiny hole in the bridge and keep going under and then explode somewhere underneath, not doing much damage. That's not really the strength of hypersonic missiles that they were designed for. They're designed to go extremely fast in order to bypass enemy defenses which can't track them at such speed, and also just the sake of getting to a target much faster. The Zircon's actual high-explosive warhead is a bit smaller than the Kalibr cruise missile or even the Kh-101.
The real ideal type of munition to destroy bridges would likely be not missiles but some kind of very large jet/bomber-dropped guided bomb. The reason is, missiles' warheads are pretty limited in size compared to bombs. Missiles' warheads usually max out at around 400-500kg in order to keep the missile size realistic. But jets and bombers can drop bombs with warheads as large as 2000-5000kg and even larger which have exponentially more explosive power than any missile (not counting nuclear ones). Russia has things like the Fab-5000 bomb, which is 5000kg and would probably wreck any bridge. But the problem is, that means the bombers/jets would have to fly directly over the bridges, and that's not possible because Ukraine's air defense would shoot them down., so......Russia is left with no choice but to use much weaker missiles which presents a huge issue.
IF Russia feels they have successfully eroded Ukraine's AD in order to take the risk, they could attempt a massive bombing run like this with 'wild weasel' escorts of SEAD jets who protect the bombers by locking onto any Ukrainian anti-air radar stations and destroying them but it would be a risk because Ukraine is being pumped full of western AD systems and it's impossible to destroy them all cus they keep receiving new ones
Great text, and a lot of new info and aspects of looking at stuff. Couple of items to add that could maybe broaden your views as wall:
1) McGregor's route does not really need to go all the way into Moldova. if it was 150-200km deep, rest of the corridor could be threatened by vast array of missiles and artillery at RF AF disposal. As it stands, supply lines are not threatened at all.
- I would actually avoid taking any bigger cities like Zhytomyr, and choose the route bypassing it.
- As a child of Bosnian war, it always puzzled me when I saw civilians staying in the area where opponents army advances. We (all 3 sides in the war) always moved before enemy's army came. Same can be done in this wedge area. Who doesn't want to move, gets forcibly evicted. Which solves civilian population related issue. Russia used what happened in ex-Yu as precedent before, can use it again
- If there is no plan to annex all of Ukraine tip of this salient would be a nice area to set up a large Russian military base, like US has Bondsteel in Kosovo. This is the only way to assure that there will be no funny business in the future. Additionally, any piece agreement between UA and RU would most likely forbid Airforce and Air defence for Ukraine. It would be Russia's responsibility to provide air policing in the future.
- Finally, it is my firm belief that without cutting supplies there will be no end of the war. If you cut them, UA has 3 months to live at most. In addition to this, I would land a task force to close the corridor to Romania. This would be tricky, but necessary. In my view, this would not be adventurism, but only actual way to end the war, and worth the risk. Banging your head on the Donbas wall would eventually produce far more casualties.
2) I think that you attribute MORE resilience to the bridges than they have :D . Example you made was a military bridge leftover from WW2, designed to be resilient. While bridges of similar construction (meaning no overhead support) as the one on the Dnipro example and comparable in size, fell after only 2 Tomahawks.
- You don't need to destroy these, just damaging them not to be usable is enough. Then after one or 2 strikes on the bridge repair crews, Ukraine will give up. This was the exact scenario for Antonovski bridge after all.
I hope I provided some additional insight :)
Great text, and a lot of new info and aspects of looking at stuff. Couple of items to add that could maybe broaden your views as wall:
1) McGregor's route does not really need to go all the way into Moldova. if it was 150-200km deep, rest of the corridor could be threatened by vast array of missiles and artillery at RF AF disposal. As it stands, supply lines are not threatened at all.
- I would actually avoid taking any bigger cities like Zhytomyr, and choose the route bypassing it.
- As a child of Bosnian war, it always puzzled me when I saw civilians staying in the area where opponents army advances. We (all 3 sides in the war) always moved before enemy's army came. Same can be done in this wedge area. Who doesn't want to move, gets forcibly evicted. Which solves civilian population related issue. Russia used what happened in ex-Yu as precedent before, can use it again
- If there is no plan to annex all of Ukraine tip of this salient would be a nice area to set up a large Russian military base, like US has Bondsteel in Kosovo. This is the only way to assure that there will be no funny business in the future. Additionally, any piece agreement between UA and RU would most likely forbid Airforce and Air defence for Ukraine. It would be Russia's responsibility to provide air policing in the future.
- Finally, it is my firm belief that without cutting supplies there will be no end of the war. If you cut them, UA has 3 months to live at most. In addition to this, I would land a task force to close the corridor to Romania. This would be tricky, but necessary. In my view, this would not be adventurism, but only actual way to end the war, and worth the risk. Banging your head on the Donbas wall would eventually produce far more casualties.
2) I think that you attribute MORE resilience to the bridges than they have :D . Example you made was a military bridge leftover from WW2, designed to be resilient. While bridges of similar construction (meaning no overhead support) as the one on the Dnipro example and comparable in size, fell after only 2 Tomahawks.
- You don't need to destroy these, just damaging them not to be usable is enough. Then after one or 2 strikes on the bridge repair crews, Ukraine will give up. This was the exact scenario for Antonovski bridge after all.
I hope I provided some additional insight :)
Odessa is important to the us as cargill owns the grain elevator there and probably makes a lot of money and campaign donations.
Keeping Russian border regions safe from attack is difficult, moving the border might be the easier option. I can imagine the meeting.."so what if we just move the border to here?" *intern takes pencil from Generals hand and draws on map*
We are all forgetting what we learned from Crimea. You dont need to stealth mobilize, you put conscripts to work doing the non fighting rear work and that frees up the contract soldiers. Theres no point in having contract soldiers loading grad boxes in Tula. Heck they can ask me to do that, ill figure out the numbers on the side quick enough.
If Russia takes Nikolaev and Odessa, and as a result the Ukraine ends up landlocked at the end of the war, Nato would simply pester Russia in the Black Sea, by instead building their base at Costanta.
if they could do that they might've done it already. Also depending what scale you're talking about might be against the Montreaux Convention limitations. Plus it doesn't quite work the same: by building up Ukraine they can hide behind the non-NATO plausible deniability by using the Ukrainian navy to harass / asymmetrically war against Russian fleet. But they can't do the same with Romania because it's in NATO and pushing Romania into any direct actions/conflict against Russia would be too provocative even for the globalist planners as it would endanger the entire NATO alliance via article 5 issues and be construed as too dangerous. Also Romania retains some sovereignty to the extent of likely refusing certain such escalations whereas Ukraine is under totally compromised surrogate control which gave UK/US a prime host they can do with as they wish, build up any and all NATO military/naval infrastructure without even asking for permission because inside Ukraine they have free reign - anything goes carte blanche.
Well, the SMO started amongst many reasons because Zelenskiyyi announced Ukraine would soon request to join Nato, didn't it?
Romania is another country with half its current population having migrated away, but unlike Ukraine, the outflow of Romanians is purely due to economic reasons. Just start laundry dollars over there, and Romania too will quickly become a failed state totally owned by neocons. Moreover, it has access to the Black Sea so the Montreaux Treaty won't hinder Romania. Practical problems with installing a major military port in Constanta, in reality, may come if the water level is not deep enough around there.
certainly it still is a possibility. However it simply is no where near as effective or ideal as the Odessa scenario for a variety of reasons. One of them is gaining Odessa and its outlying region is a boon not only for them having it, but for the fact that it robs Russia of that highly prized sea corridor as well. And most importantly of all is the utter proximity of Odessa to Russian naval facilities which allows them to keep full 24/7 surveillance on the Russian fleet and on Crimea DIRECTLy in a variety of ways as the 180km to Crimean land even allows radars to reach and constantly surveil the goings-on, whereas Romania is a bit too distant for such direct observation.
But as you said there may also be other unforeseen limitations like the water depth etc.
Also why would Moldova be of so much interest to Russia? It would anchor its borders to the Carpathians mountains. That would require less border troops to surveil than open terrain. That and the loss in prestige if the Russian garrison and Russian ethnics in Transnistria fall under Western control.
Other than that I don't see much strategic value in Transnistria. As a consequence Odessa is a palatable prize in itself, and because completely eliminates the Ukraine as a player in the Black Sea.
Hello! I read with great interest your substack multi part series, they are very good. Now comes my "point of view": From what I "see" on the Internet, Ukraine's strategy at the moment is to send to the front lines, in the vast majority, only recruited soldiers and in the "second line" are the elite soldiers and "so-called mercenaries" (NATO troops). I am sure that this Ukrainian "second line" is very well informed and organized in order to counter-attack any big offensive from the Russian Federation - very careful here. A great offensive on the part of the Russian Federation must be prepared for the destruction of the "second line" of the Ukrainian NATO forces. I am a supporter of a major offensive by the Russian Federation in Ukraine, but it must be thoroughly prepared and take into account the evolution of many different scenarios on the battlefield. And this coming "great offensive" must solve the problem of supplying Ukraine with weapons and NATO soldiers. But at the moment the Russian Federation is doing great with the applied tactic called 'death by a thousand cuts' - the only disadvantage of this strategy is that it allows the supply of weapons and NATO troops to Ukraine, which leads to the prolongation of the conflict and the increase in the number of victims on the part of the Russian Federation. From Romania I send good thoughts to the entire Russian Federation. VICTORY OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION!
yep I totally agree with you. I believe one of the very primary objectives of the coming Russian offensive will likely be to cut the supply routes one way or another, whether they take the western route or the Donbass route. Because NATO has a huge amount of escalated supplies intended to come in the next month or two and Russia needs to cut it asap.
Hello! I observe every day the evolution of the situation on the front in Ukraine. And I notice that for almost a year the Russian artillery bombards enemy positions daily, and the effects of these bombardments are not commensurate with the quantity of bombs. I think in the following way, please read very carefully: The Russian Federation should bring artillery units on a stretch of approximately 30 km (in front of the city of Donbas, let's say, as an example) in order to supersaturate this area with artillery units ( 300-400 artillery units). These units should be divided into groups, and some of these groups should be dedicated to the fight against enemy artillery - counter-artillery. Anti-aircraft systems Pantsir-S1/S2 and TOR-M2DT (a lot) should also be brought into this space for anti-aircraft defense. During this time, there should be 24/24 aerial surveillance planes in the air to identify possible attacks with HIMARS: Together with these planes, strategic bombers equipped with Zircon hypersonic missiles should be permanently in the air. Now, when these artillery groups are in place and ready for battle, then each group - let's say a group has 50 artillery pieces, is assigned a target and fires 50 shells simultaneously at a single target. The effect of the breaking forces will be devastating, not even the poop will remain an enemy. In this way, even the strongest enemy strongholds can be destroyed. I greet you with respect!
You should read my Part 1 first to acquaint yourself with the real reason why such is likely the case. Because Russia has used far less forces in the conflict so far than most think. https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/the-coming-russian-offensive-2023
And a lot of the artillery bombardment you see is not actually Russia, much of it is DPR/LPR and other volunteer units which don't have the same effectiveness/technology as Russian forces.
But you have a creative method. There might be some problems with such a method but it's a good thought
I finished reading Part 1, and I can say that due to the lack of information my "image" about SOM was very poor, and because of it I said a lot of nonsense. Now I can say that I have a much clearer picture of the SMO situation. The front line is huge, and that involves a lot of human and material resources, which makes the situation very complex and very difficult for those in charge. Especially since the situation on the front line is constantly changing, and the challenges are very complex. In the past I made some negative comments to the management of the SMO, now I retract them completely. And with regard to my attack strategy, which I call "Evaporation of Enemy Forces", I add two S-400 air defense regiments to the ground, one in the South and the second in the North, I add to the air squadron + 4 x Su-35 fully loaded with air-to-air missiles and with the mission of protecting the convoy from possible missiles not intercepted by the S-400 - 2 x Su-35 will occupy the front "penetration and protection" positions and 2 x Su-35 will occupy positions in the back for possible help; + 1 x Su-35 equipped with anti-radar missiles. This convoy will not approach the front line more than 10-15 km - between their flight area and the enemy front should be the anti-aircraft defense of the Russian Federation arranged in layers, Pantsir-S1/S2, TOR-M2DT, S- 400. In this way, the Russian Federation will be able to equip 6 to 10 squadrons to ensure constant activity against the enemy forces. I greet you with great respect for the work you do!
https://globalnews.ca/news/8641948/ukraine-russia-putin-war/
Can you post if you know if Ukraine mobilized on the 23rd? Wiki says 24th, the article says 25th, both say it was a response to Ru invasion on the 24th. But the article is published on the 23rd, then edited on the 25th. So it looks like Ukr mobilized on the 23rd then Russia attacked, which would be reasonable. But I don't read Russian or Ukrainian/
I wonder if discrepancy is over timezones. As I recall Russia invaded in very early hours of February 24 in local time. But this would have been evening February 23 of most western countries. So articles reporting the various invasion updates would have been timestamped/dated as February 23 in western circles.
I see in the article you posted a 10:09pm timestamp and it's a Toronto, Canadian publication. 10:09pm Toronto time corresponds exactly with 5:09am Kiev time and that's exactly when Russia invaded so I assume that's what the issue is.