The weather forecast for Eastern Ukraine shows that at least a full week of rain is coming up. This makes it more likely that the Russians will delay their upcoming offensive until late April at the very least, assuming that this time they actually want to spread out and advance across a front, instead of just driving down well-paved roads where they're easier to attack and ambush. The offensive could also start in early May. By then, the Russians will be in full control of Mariupol and the Donbas reinforcements will be well-rested and prepared for the coming fight. The best idea is definitely for the Russians to wait until at least April 20th before starting anything, just to have some time to consolidate and fully prepare. This new phase of the war should be more advantageous for them. The terrain in Eastern Ukraine is wide open, Russia will face fewer logistical issues, and the Ukrainians will have fewer places to hide, because none of the contested cities in the east are anywhere near as large as Kyiv. It's going to be an interesting month.
Ukrainian War Developments
- Thread starter james smith esq
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More retarded journalism from the western press.... The days of The Guardian being a credible media have long passed.
British mercenary 'cossackgundi' has surrendered to the Russians, which is slightly better than surrendering to the Chechens.
LOL, a bit like the Nazis surrendering to the US is better than surrendering to the Soviet Red Army during WW2.
Edit: Sorry, didn't realise this was posted already by Abominable.
LOL, a bit like the Nazis surrendering to the US is better than surrendering to the Soviet Red Army during WW2.
Edit: Sorry, didn't realise this was posted already by Abominable.
Good news. Free labour for building these gas pipelines to China
LOL, but not before he helps rebuild DPR, LPR and other places in east Ukr; dude's got a busy work schedule ahead.
I don't think he'll be useful for physical labour. Have you seen how fat he is? He's supposedly been fighting for a month with no supplies and yet still looks like a pig.
Get him to speak to some of the Mariupol refugees on video. No doubt he'll quickly change his tune and claim he was deceived by the Ukrainians and that the situation is more complicated than "Russia bad". I'm sure he'll have his own stories about what the Azov Nazis did. Record it for propaganda value and broadcast it.
Then execute him for being an illegal combatant.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
I think it may be around May before they launch their big new offensive. It may well be May 9th to add to the occasion.
On top of poor weather, I think the Russians should be re-organising their forces to pre-BTU mass rollout configurations, with a much small number of actual proper BTUs reconstituted to the way they were supposed to be, rather than the watered down bootleg version they tried to do on the cheap.
That kind of reorganisation takes time, and the Russians should know better than to rush into things half arsed a second time.
However, once the reconfiguration is complete, the Russians should be able to fight far more effectively since they will be falling back on their old tried and true combat tactics rather than trying to be overly fancy with massed BTUs.
The whole concept of BTUs relies on speed, firepower and information superiority. You are supposed to hit the enemy hard and fast and win with minimal losses through superior skill, technology and co-ordination of a smaller but much more agile and deadly elite combat force. The goal is to crush the enemy’s core fighting force and shatter them as effective fighting units for follow up conventional forces to mop up.
Instead the Russians ended up throwing armour with insufficient infantry support at dispersed and dug in small unit enemy defences with literal piles of ATGMs and who had better situational awareness, communication and co-ordination than themselves.
So the BTU main thrusts were punching air because they couldn’t find the enemy main strengths to properly engage. All the while they are being bleed white from a thousand little cuts from the Ukrainian small hit and run ATGM teams, and sometimes taking a solid counterpunch when the Ukrainians manage to bring massed heavy artillery to bare once the Russian BTUs outran their logistics tail and were forced to stop and wait for refuelling and rearming.
The traditional combat methods should be far more effective for the Russians in the kinds of large scale pitched battles they will be fighting once they engage the Ukrainian main defensive lines.
The scale of the offensive will massively limit Ukrainian ability to play hide and seek with their main strengths (also why the Russians have been hitting their fuel reserves lately); and the blunt brutality of massed armoured general advance under the cover of rolling massed artillery and air strikes will simply steamroll the Ukrainians.
Their ATGM teams can still fight and be dangerous, but it will be more suicidal kamikaze bonsai attacks than the hit and run they have been managing.
That means that once their experienced veterans gets attritioned to pink mist, the overall combat effectiveness of Ukrainian ATGM teams are going to fall off a cliff as inexperienced raw recruits gets thrown in with limited training and experience.
On top of poor weather, I think the Russians should be re-organising their forces to pre-BTU mass rollout configurations, with a much small number of actual proper BTUs reconstituted to the way they were supposed to be, rather than the watered down bootleg version they tried to do on the cheap.
That kind of reorganisation takes time, and the Russians should know better than to rush into things half arsed a second time.
However, once the reconfiguration is complete, the Russians should be able to fight far more effectively since they will be falling back on their old tried and true combat tactics rather than trying to be overly fancy with massed BTUs.
The whole concept of BTUs relies on speed, firepower and information superiority. You are supposed to hit the enemy hard and fast and win with minimal losses through superior skill, technology and co-ordination of a smaller but much more agile and deadly elite combat force. The goal is to crush the enemy’s core fighting force and shatter them as effective fighting units for follow up conventional forces to mop up.
Instead the Russians ended up throwing armour with insufficient infantry support at dispersed and dug in small unit enemy defences with literal piles of ATGMs and who had better situational awareness, communication and co-ordination than themselves.
So the BTU main thrusts were punching air because they couldn’t find the enemy main strengths to properly engage. All the while they are being bleed white from a thousand little cuts from the Ukrainian small hit and run ATGM teams, and sometimes taking a solid counterpunch when the Ukrainians manage to bring massed heavy artillery to bare once the Russian BTUs outran their logistics tail and were forced to stop and wait for refuelling and rearming.
The traditional combat methods should be far more effective for the Russians in the kinds of large scale pitched battles they will be fighting once they engage the Ukrainian main defensive lines.
The scale of the offensive will massively limit Ukrainian ability to play hide and seek with their main strengths (also why the Russians have been hitting their fuel reserves lately); and the blunt brutality of massed armoured general advance under the cover of rolling massed artillery and air strikes will simply steamroll the Ukrainians.
Their ATGM teams can still fight and be dangerous, but it will be more suicidal kamikaze bonsai attacks than the hit and run they have been managing.
That means that once their experienced veterans gets attritioned to pink mist, the overall combat effectiveness of Ukrainian ATGM teams are going to fall off a cliff as inexperienced raw recruits gets thrown in with limited training and experience.
Is changing organization structure possible in matter of weeks? I don't know.... Maybe it is easier to just pretend the BTGs are not BTGs and have them push as fast as the rest of the formation.
Don't know if there is better way to deal with ATGM ambushes, maybe force recon model? Have some recon unit backed up with UAV yolo ahead, once they get hit have the UAV tag enemy position and pound with artillery. But then well trained ATGM team can choose to conceal themselves until they see big fishes....
Interesting confession? from retired Maj. General James "Spider" Marks that E/A-18G Growlers may be used to suppress Russian air defense forces to support Ukrainian operations. Wouldn't electronic attack qualify as hostile action and a major escalation?
plawolf
Lieutenant General
Normally it would be hard to reconfigure to a new structure, but this would be a reversal of a recent change back to a much more traditional and simpler structure that experience NCOs should be very familiar and used to.
Russian NCOs have proven to be a major weakness because they seem to struggle badly across the board, requiring senior officers to literally come down and sort things out themselves, much closer to the front line than their rank should have them.
I think a major contributing factor to this is a lack of adequate training to bring NCOs up to speed on how they should do their jobs in BTUs as opposed to h they were initially trained and used to operating in a more traditional formation.
NCOs are like the nervous system of the military, while soldiers are like the muscle and bones and officers the brains.
What the Russians did with their massed BTU conversion was like giving a career boxer an idiots guide to MMA, a change of clothes, a few leg days at the gym and expect them to win MMA fights.
The brain might think of fancy combo attacks involving fists, feet, knees and elbow, but the nervous system just couldn’t get the body to move quickly and effectively enough to pull those moves off.
Moving back to a more traditional formation for the bulk of the military would see the combat effectiveness of NCOs restored and allow the Russian chain of command to work properly again. That alone should seem the overall combat effectiveness of the Russian military multiply.
Besides, the whole point of the traditional Russian formation and combat tactics is to Keep It Simple, Stupid (KISS). Where things are kept simple by design to allow fresh raw recruits to be able to slot right in as replacements with minimal fuss or specialist training and achieve combat effectiveness as quickly as possible since high attrition was expected. It’s a trade off between combat sophistication for ease of use and quick regeneration of combat attritioned units and formations.
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