supercat
Major
Russia may have deliberately left the encirclement around Severodonetsk open and may have trapped up to 200,000 members of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the potential cauldron.
The War in the Ukraine
- Thread starter SampanViking
- Start date
200 000 ? That's a lot ! At this rate, what do they eat ?
Carpet bombing with FOAB ? Mass surrender would be problematic at this number and they are a lot to stop if they do a focalized berserk push. If it's true, it's quite huge if they manage to crush them there.
Seems like a stretch
Wasn't only like tens of thousands of Ukrainian servicemen trapped in the cauldron instead of hundreds of thousands?
200k are stupendously huge numbers to be in that cauldron. Wth are they all doing there?
Elensky and his "don't give an inch to the invaders, never retreat" 5 year old tactics are cathing up to him.
And yes, 200k are far too many to accept their surrender. Russia might have to be "innovative" on how it is going deal with them
Btw, 200k sounds too good to be true. Someone might playing mind games
Does not sound credible. The cities did not even have that many population before the war.
I don’t know how credible it is but what does the population of cities have to do with anything? The battle of the Somme involved ~3.5 million when it had a population of 510k in 1911 and Stalingrad (Volgograd) had about 445k in 1939 before the battle of Stalingrad with ~2 million men.
Both Somme and Stalingrad were fought on both sides by real field armies that has the logistic tail to support themselves from the rear while in the field, at least in the beginning. It is not clear to me if the Ukrainian army is largely supplied from the rear, or is it partially or mainly supplied in situ. If it is supplied in situ, then the issue of the foraging and carrying capacity of the land they control becomes important. The pre-war civilian population of the region is one indicator of the carrying capacity.
Seems well within population limits even if you factor in recent pre-war census data.
Almost like in a game of HOI4 player would deliberately create a pocket and the AI will happily fill it, didn't think this trick ever worked against human player....
Now that Elensky must've realized his mistakes and Ukrainian military and NATO all urges him to pull back his troops, I think Russians really need to close the pocket asap, any sign of it happening?
How much of pre-war census population is still there, and still using up the carrying capacity of the region?