Russia doing preliminary/shaping actions. ISW is predicting a battle for Dvorchnia.
The town has a population of 4-3,000.
Kupiansk has a population of 27,000
However, the areas being contested are not annexed by Russia.
The War in the Ukraine
- Thread starter SampanViking
- Start date
Russia doing preliminary/shaping actions. ISW is predicting a battle for Dvorchnia.
The town has a population of 4-3,000.
Kupiansk has a population of 27,000
However, the areas being contested are not annexed by Russia.
Vuhledar was just a diversion and looks like Bakhmut is the main course for now
Reminder that this is a war, so any amounts of equipment being destroyed or loss is fully expected and shouldn't be unsurprising
Reminder that this is a war, so any amounts of equipment being destroyed or loss is fully expected and shouldn't be unsurprising
Reports that Ukrainian soldiers present in the town of Paraskovivka are almost surrounded by troops from the Wagner Group, with the siege being only 800 meters around the town which lies north of Bakhmut
They say they have 50 000 mens in Ukraine, most of them around Bakhmut. They have the highest concentration of troops available on all the front. They clearly are the tip of the spear.
They have about 80km to cover in Bakhmut salient with Russian regular troops covering their rear while regular Russian troops need to cover more than 1500km of frontline and logistics with 300 000 just in eastern Ukraine, not counting the Belarus parts.
Regular Russian troops are spread all over the front to keep it and support. Wagner are there to strike.
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There's no evidence of that I'm aware of. Whatever it is, Wagner definitely isn't a PMC.
I feel like Wagner is just an attempt by the Russian military to sell itself to a younger generation.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
I can’t think of any other PMC that has its on fighter jets, attack helicopters, tanks, IFVs and artillery, just to name a few of the higher profile stuff off the top of my head. Wagner, for all intents and purposes, is a ‘private’ army in its own right, and one that is better equipped than most conventional national armies.
Secondly, you also need to define what ‘better’ means. They are taking ground a lot faster, but I would bet they are paying for that speed with lives.
That, I think it the main difference. Wagner fights like the old soviet red army, who is willing and able to pay the butcher’s bill demanded for swift and decisive battlefield victories.
The Russian conventional forces are more sensitive to personnel losses, so push at a much slower pace, and sometimes that abundance of caution can end up backfiring if they don’t capitalise on momentary weaknesses of the enemy quickly enough and end up getting caught out in the middle of nowhere when enemy reinforcements and heavy guns are redeployed to counter.
Also, I expect there might be a somewhat similar perverse incentive troop retention situation going on as to what the US military experienced in Iraq, where the much higher pay offered by PMCs makes it hard for the army to retain soldiers, especially the best ones. Who find that rather than re-enlisting after their existing contracts with the military finishes, they can instead sign up with a PMC to do the same thing but get paid many times more money.
That may be why Wagner seems to be able to shrug off fairly significant combat losses and end up with more deployable troops while the Russian regular army is forced to do a fresh round of mobilisation of raw recruits to train up from scratch when the contracts of a lot of their experienced soldiers finished.
solarz
Brigadier
From what I hear, Wagner uses penal troops. I guess the question then is, what kind of man is the Wagner CEO that can convince Putin to give him command of all these heavy equipment and access to prisoners to conscript?
That reminds me of 湘军, 淮军, 甘军 etc. in late Qing dynasty. They were not part of the official state army system (green banner and eight banner), but recruited and established by people who were not even government officials but only later appointed. They fought better than the state army. In today's concept, they would be called PMC. But among Chinese they are just part of the army like green banner and eight banner.
I think the notion of PMC is just a western attempt to demonize Wagner due to the reputation of Blackwater etc. Wagner in essence is like elite/special unit in the army with better training and equipment and specialized in urban warfare.
He is Zeng Guofan (曾国藩) reincarnation.
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Ukraine's own shaheed. Has this been posted tho ?
The benefit of dedicated design over commercial solution like buying Mugin is that optimizations for combat purpose can be better carried out. Mugin or Skyeye drones are apparently cast molded composite, basically the drone body is one big part. This lend well for weight and mass production concern but if radar stealth are desired the shape might be sub-optimal.
The straight wing produces narrow but relatively strong frontal spike as shown in my estimates here also compared with Shahid-136/Geran-2 like model :
Unfortunately the shape of the drone is not very clear. But looks to me it's like Arash.
It remains to be seen however whether this drone will enter serial production and how many can be produced. Massed attacks using them will have similar effect as Russian use of Geran.
The benefit of dedicated design over commercial solution like buying Mugin is that optimizations for combat purpose can be better carried out. Mugin or Skyeye drones are apparently cast molded composite, basically the drone body is one big part. This lend well for weight and mass production concern but if radar stealth are desired the shape might be sub-optimal.
The straight wing produces narrow but relatively strong frontal spike as shown in my estimates here also compared with Shahid-136/Geran-2 like model :
Unfortunately the shape of the drone is not very clear. But looks to me it's like Arash.
It remains to be seen however whether this drone will enter serial production and how many can be produced. Massed attacks using them will have similar effect as Russian use of Geran.