The War in the Ukraine

Maikeru said:

Putin's mobilisation is unlikely to change the military balance on the ground. The quality of the new recruits will be very poor.

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Maikeru said:

Putin's mobilisation is unlikely to change the military balance on the ground. The quality of the new recruits will be very poor.

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MilitaryLand update. Quiet in the South.

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supersnoop said:

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Who is going to pay the bills?
Just look at what happened after the 1856 Crimean War

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Interviews with dozens of commanders, ordinary soldiers, medics, village leaders and civilians who recently escaped the conflict zone portray a more difficult and costly campaign: The fighting is grinding, grueling and steep in casualties, perhaps the most heartbreaking battle in Ukraine right now.

Russian forces are deeply dug in here, and this weekend, the Kremlin is trying to cement its gains by holding highly contentious referendums in occupied areas to annex them. Ukrainian officials say they have little choice but to attack.

They are racing to recapture territory before the October rains turn the roads here into impassable sludge. And they need to keep showing to the world, especially before a nasty winter sets in and tests their allies’ resolve, that they can push the Russians out.

The Ukrainian government does not usually disclose casualty figures, but the soldiers and commanders interviewed in the past week portrayed the battlefield losses as “high” and “massive.” They described large offensives in which columns of Ukrainian tanks and armored vehicles tried to cross open fields only to be pounded mercilessly by Russian artillery and blown up by Russian mines.

One Ukrainian soldier, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to publicly discuss casualties, said that during a recent assault, “we lost 50 guys in two hours.” In another place, said the soldier, who works closely with different frontline units, “hundreds” of Ukrainian troops were killed or wounded while trying to take a single village, which is still in Russian hands.

Across the occupied south — a wide crescent of fields, villages and cities along the Dnipro River and the Black Sea — the Russians have built formidable defenses: trenches zigzagging along irrigation canals; fortified bunkers; pillboxes; foxholes; even tank trenches carved out of the earth by bulldozers and covered with concrete slabs that enable the Russians to blast shells from positions that are very difficult for the Ukrainians to hit.

The Russians are determined to keep this chunk of Ukraine because it guards the Crimean Peninsula that Russia annexed in 2014. It also serves as a nexus of vital waterways and energy facilities, like the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, Europe’s biggest.

Despite the high stakes, there is little face-to-face combat between the two sides, like there was in the early days of the war in the suburbs of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Each Ukrainian soldier along the southern front carries an assault rifle, but few have fired their weapon.

In the south, death comes at long range. It is indiscriminate and total. When the artillery shells hit, young men press themselves to the earth, hands cupped over their ears, mouths open to let the blast wave ripple through their bodies.
“This is a different kind of war,” said Iryna Vereshchagina, a volunteer doctor working near the front lines. “We’re attacking the Russians but there’s a big payment for this.”
She said that of the hundreds of battlefield casualties she has treated, she has not seen a single gunshot wound.

“So many people are getting blown up,” she said.

She looked down at her boots.

“Sometimes,” she said, “there are just pieces of people left.”

Part of the reason Ukraine is facing stiff resistance in the south is because of its highly effective information campaign about the counteroffensive. The signals it sent were so convincing that the Russians hastily redeployed tanks, artillery and thousands of troops, including some of their better trained units, from the northeast to the south.

That left the Kharkiv region wide open for the taking, which is what happened two and a half weeks ago. But it also left the south defended by tens of thousands of well-equipped Russian soldiers. And going on the attack is always more perilous than defending an entrenched position, especially when the enemy knows the other side is coming.

All of this has unsettled some Ukrainian soldiers fighting along the front line.

“The problem is that we are advancing with no artillery preparation, without suppressing their firing positions,” said Ihor Kozub, the commander of a volunteer military unit near the southern city of Mykolaiv.

He said the Ukrainian army was suffering “great losses” because “we don’t have ammunition,” and he begged for the United States to send more.

“All these heroic attacks are made with so much blood,” he said. “It’s terrible.”

A military spokeswoman defended the Ukrainian strategy.

“The enemy’s superiority in artillery does not decide the outcome,” said Nataliia Humeniuk, the head of the communications division for Ukraine’s southern command. “History knows cases of unique battles where the quality of combat was decisive. Not the number of weapons.”

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Biscuits said:

If one were to say the industrial capability of US is a dwarf compared China, it would also not be wrong to say that Russia's industrial capability is a dwarf compared to US.

So vis a vis Russia, I'm sure that if US prioritizes arms, they will easily be able to supply Ukraine and their volunteer forces with adequate equipment.

But in practice it is not that easy. America's real target is China, if the world's largest economy with a huge bloc of the world's population under them can't be defeated or at least contained, then any US ambitions of imposing their "order" on the world is gone.

Each equipment, each value of currency, each industrial sacrifice sent to Ukraine, is a distraction of much needed resources. The Ukraine front will never hurt China no matter what the result becomes, but it can hurt NATO if they fumble it.

If NATO overcommits their industry and manpower, they will have weakened themselves at 0 cost to China while the latter is just continously growing stronger. So if US mobilize their economy, they need to defeat Russia in the shortest amount of time, but the chances of that are low, and there is no telling how a defeated Russia would even react. Plus there is always a (large) risk that China will put its own industry behind Russia if Russians are being defeated due to NATO openly marching in with state of the art equipped "volunteers".

Then, the situation will turn around. Instead of US fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian, it will be China fighting NATO to the last Russian. This is not favorable for NATO.

The ideal situation for NATO is probably that Russia can be battlefield defeated by light volunteers and donated equipment only, driving Russia deep into the Donbass and away from the South(Kherson, Mariupol area). Then, Ukraine can sign peace with only minimal territorial losses around donetsk and luhansk, while keeping complete access to the black sea. Pushing any further than that, risks involving the whole Eastern bloc.

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redion said:

And the first clear sighting of the use by the Ukrainian Army in combat of the TOW missile systems mounted on top of one of their Humvees.

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