The War in the Ukraine

With Izyum fall, the Russians certainly couldn't close and surround the Balakliya cauldron and also making further attempt of further advances towards Slaviansk severely diminished and further delay the liberation of the entirely of Donbass

A Decisive Ukrainian Victory

I think it’s a bit premature to call the Russians ‘playing it safe’ as a massive defeat. This part of the theater is still ongoing, events still in flux. It was only a couple days ago the Kherson Counter-offensive was destroyed.

Intrepid said:

Support Ukraine to remain a sovereign state.

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Nah, I mean from Russia declaring War compared to the current fiesta. The West can't/won't do much more even if Russia had declared war from the start. So Putin essentially traded domestic popularity for thousands of avoidable dead militia/russian regulars.

Sheleah said:

And why should I talk about Kherson before Kharkov, which is where the Russians are getting the beating of their lives?... Do you want to divert attention?

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Last time I checked, you were pretty hyped about the Kherson offensive and how the Russians were getting beaten there before even Kharkiv popped up. On the other hand, the glee with you dehumanize russian-speaking ukranians in each of your posts is quite concerning

siegecrossbow said:

Say what you want about Poland's performance at Strong Europe, at least it wasn't rigged, which is more than I could say for some other tank competition featuring guided anti-tank spider mines with FOF capabilities.

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More seriously now, Army Games seem a different type of competition than Strong Europe, merely on the fact that almost everybody is forced to use T-72B3 even if they don't operate the type. That said, than in a non-"rigged" competition, Poland couldn't outperform older tanks speaks volumes, which was my point.

zhangjim said:

Maybe they could send some armored divisions and air forces into Ukraine as "volunteers." As long as Putin is unwilling to mobilize, the fragile Russian army will inevitably be destroyed by reinforcements of this scale.

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NATO "volunteers" is the type of stuff that would trigger full mobilization and war footing of Russia

zhangjim said:

If Russia's months of offensive efforts fail utterly in an instant, Putin's position cannot be secure. Don't ignore the influence of Russia's pro-Western faction, who just can't find another opportunity to surrender to the West

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Well, there's also the far right faction to contend with as well. These guys (Strelkov, Dugin) are in favour of full mobilisation and DOW on Ukraine.

It looks like the Ukrainians have devoted a lot more forces to this offensive than originally anticipated. No point in sacrificing soldiers to hold territory that can't be held, withdraw and let the VVS do the job.

Hopefully the Russian high command realise the futility of fighting a limited war against NATO. The solution isn't mass mobilisation, they need to use all tools available to them, including limited use of tactical nuclear weapons in the west. No, the risk of fallout to Russia will be very limited. No one's used a nuclear weapon since Nagasaki, Russia needs to pop the cherry at some point, may as well do it on nazis.

Zichan said:

That's what happens when you take advice from the likes of Shoigu. Putin has surrounded himself with a bunch of incompetent yes men and is now reaping the rewards.

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There are many things with the Russian military that don't make sense

- Lack of a counter to Javelin. Javelin's development was started in 1985. So even the Soviet Union probably knew of it. But we have Russia lacking a counter to it 37 years later. The Soviet Union used to come up with reliable counters to new Western ATGMs in 10 years at maximum.

- Complete lack of SEAD. They weren't planning to wage a war of conquest against a country with Soviet AA legacy. They completely ignored it. We are at the 7th month and the Russian Air Force is still confined to low altitudes.

- Inadequate night vision equipment. This is unacceptable. Even in NERF matches at night a single person with night vision equipment can hold himself against 15 people. Ukraine, with limited numbers of Western supplied night vision equipment, is outperforming Russians at night.

- Inadequate communications equipment. We know a lot of Russian soldiers are using radios that you can buy from a supermarket.

- Artillery use methods are backward. I wrote a dedicated message about this in past. Little to no smoke, guided or cluster munitions. Little mechanization in ammo handling. Artillery pieces that are mostly been left unmodernized since the 1980s. No shoot and scoot. No MRSI. Bad communications with ISR assets and front line units. Lack of proximity fuses in shells. Considering how much they plan their military around their artillery, this is very consequential.

- Not enough infantry for a country as big as Ukraine. This could be corrected between 2014 and 2022. Instead we had scaledowns and partial commitment.

All of these 6 are very confusing. None of these are tech related or even very expensive. We shouldn't be talking about proximity fuses in 2022. What is this? 1955?

Anlsvrthng said:

The USA target is to force Russia for the declaration of war, and start to drain the Russian resources dramatically.

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Exactly. Unfortunately people here are too blinded to see what's the real US strategy.

"But but, the inflation, haha no gas" facepalm..
What's wrong with sacrificing 2 years of (mostly European lmao) hardships for destroying once and for all Russia as a great power??

Would China not take that deal asap if it was available? What if Mao was here now and was told, go back to eating grass for 2 years to ensure that US and the West is effectively destroyed? Would he, or would he not take that deal?

Not much strategic thinking here. I will just say this, this is an excellent deal for the US and if I was them I would take it in a heartbeat (which they did). Its not that often that opportunities like these come enabling you to knock out your enemies with relativily minimal losses

Overbom said:

China already knows this, its not our fault that Putin has a monkey brain.

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Putin made the wrong assumptions. His war was planned as just a quick, short attack. Now he is confronted with a costly, long-lasting war (a second Afghanistan, so to speak).

It's clear that Russia simply doesn't have enough soldiers committed into the conflict.

The idea to build up the separatists to do the bulk of the fighting has shown to be a failure.

With all the video of English speaking "volunteers" popping up, one might question what the degree of involvement from USA is. Right now it is very unclear due to fog of war, but I have a feeling that just as Americans were very confused why a "beaten" KPA could suddenly roll back all their gains in October-November 1950, we will eventually see the true degree of how much of the AFU is actually Ukrainian and how much is NATO.

I think many have underestimated NATO, believing they will not dare to throw troops into the meat grinder and can only fight conflicts against non entities like Afghanistan, but in fact they do have the political capital and courageous soldiers enough to fight a succesful uphill battle with no air cover. Without equal sized amounts of RU troops, LDPR militia will simply not hold.

What remains to do now is for Russia to openly declare war, scrape all the sources of support (both civilian and foreign government) they can find just like Ukraine is doing, and then make a new try.

delta115 said:

Again, Russian give a lesson for China to learn but from their failure not success.

PLA need to take a hard look at this and realized there is no such thing as half-assed war. You either fully commited to it or you don't go to war. This shit is embarassing and will affact China and Taiwan chance of reunification in long term.

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If anything this is a lesson USA who is right now just as Russia trying to "help" some separatist republics secede should pay strong attention to. Don't half ass measures and don't send run down equipment to rebel forces and expect them to do the bleeding. Either openly declare war, throw the whole military at the enemy and win, or don't meddle in other countries' civil wars at all.