The War in the Ukraine

Atomicfrog said:

These bridges are quite strong, old soviet design ?

We can add a number 4: SEAD is an essential parts of airforce capacity, SEAD need to be in quality and number. Russian lacks both.

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well, strictly speaking SEAD is essential for offensive air forces. A defensive one won't need it as much, they just need to shoot down enemy planes. A plane has to ditch its strike package if contested, after all.

It has to be noted that even the US failed at SEAD in Vietnam as , 5600 helicopters and 1000 South Vietnamese aircraft over ~9 years of high intensity combat. In fact, US aligned forces lost total 12000 aircraft. The Russian Air Force would not exist if shot down at such high intensities of ~1200 aircraft per year.

Phead128 said:

so "creeping artillery/attritional warfare" was borne out of necessity of the situation, not an original strategic chess move.

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I am not trying to dismiss the limitations that Russia has. It explains why they need to slow down the tempo of the war. The don't have enough cannon shells to bombard everywhere at once. However, whatever limitation the Russians have, the Ukrainians have 10x more. They are low on cannons, armor and money. To go on an offensive against your enemy when you have little armor or cannons, just send in what remains of your reserve equipment and burn through it in such a hurry is the act of desperation. If you throw your spear against a buffalo and pierce the buffalo, then the buffalo charges at you, you want to get the hell out of the way. It does not mean the buffalo will win at the end, but you want to keep yourself safe while the buffalo bleeds out. You will come back to finish killing the buffalo once the animal bleeds out. Much safer that way.

MortyandRick said:

I was one who really though Russia had control of the battlefield but they were treating the SMO like fighting Ukraine with a bit of NATO help. Now is seems with the counter attack, NATO is committed much more than Russia had anticipated. NATO seems to have better intelligence and front line information. According to rybar, it seems they were able to cut off Russian communications as well. This is now a big deal.

Unless something drastically changes I don't see Russia being able to hold off all of NATO. I hope china is watching closely and analyzing NATO electronic warfare carefully. Seems like their electronic warfare really caught Russians off guard.

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Yes, Ukrainians did well with the help of NATO. At the end of the day though, the war will boil down to how much equipment you have. The Ukrainian side, already very short of equipment to begin with, are losing them much faster than the Russians. What is more, NATO has burnt through its stash of Soviet equipment and must decide if we are going to send the Leopard tanks, F-16 etc. As long as we will not send these, the offensive will quickly come to a halt due to irreplaceable loss of equipment. At that time, they will be very vulnerable to a counter-counter-offensive from the Russians.

Any news coming out of Kherson?
Last time i heard the Ukrainians have pushed at the north-eastern part of it and stopped at Durhachnny village, any recent updates of the situation as of now?

RottenPanzer said:

Any news coming out of Kherson?
Last time i heard the Ukrainians have pushed at the north-eastern part of it and stopped at Durhachnny village, any recent updates of the situation as of now?

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That's about it as of now. I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to link up with the salient around Sukhyi Stavok and encircle the Russian groupings Northeast of Kherson. Or, they could try to go for Nova Kakhovka.

MortyandRick said:

I was one who really though Russia had control of the battlefield but they were treating the SMO like fighting Ukraine with a bit of NATO help. Now is seems with the counter attack, NATO is committed much more than Russia had anticipated. NATO seems to have better intelligence and front line information. According to rybar, it seems they were able to cut off Russian communications as well. This is now a big deal.

Unless something drastically changes I don't see Russia being able to hold off all of NATO. I hope china is watching closely and analyzing NATO electronic warfare carefully. Seems like their electronic warfare really caught Russians off guard.

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To be honest, Russians caught themselves being off guard xD. Some really poor decision making on their own.

The current turn of events in this conflict have given some so-called experts and armchair generals too much of an undeserved ego boost. Russia really needs to get their shit together, probably with some escalation.

Pmichael said:

The Serbians were avoiding DEAD with turning off their radars and only herassing NATO planes once in a while. But NATO could freely operate and bomb whatever they wanted.

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Serbian radars continously worked, the USA had only chance to attack the targeting radars.


the NATO hasn't been able to use low level attack in Serbia, except specific places , and for high level attack they had to use SEAD missions for every strike, and usually they was forced to shoot HARM missile toward the possible position of the targeting radars during the missions.

And the Serbs successfully shoot down several USA airplanes during the war, and damaged many more.

Anlsvrthng said:

Serbian radars continously worked, the USA had only chance to attack the targeting radars.


the NATO hasn't been able to use low level attack in Serbia, except specific places , and for high level attack they had to use SEAD missions for every strike, and usually they was forced to shoot HARM missile toward the possible position of the targeting radars during the missions.

And the Serbs successfully shoot down several USA airplanes during the war, and damaged many more.

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Two planes were shoot down. The Serbian assets didn’t deny a single bombing run, though it caused a large share of the forces being bound for SEAD.

And then the experiences caused the development of an improved HARM with alternatively flies to the GPS coordinates of the radar system - making the tactics of turning off the radar obsolete.


And that’s pretty much the difference to Russia which didn’t learn anything. They can’t fly high because they would be easily targeted by anti air assets and are forced to do desperate low level runs which turn them into easy targets for manpads.

Botnet said:

The current turn of events in this conflict have given some so-called experts and armchair generals too much of an undeserved ego boost. Russia really needs to get their shit together, probably with some escalation.

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Last thing Russian military needs is an escalation with countries that are stronger than Ukraine. Putin can still do it as he is a dictator and can't be stopped from making mistakes by Russian military commanders.