Look like they will be pushing way farther than the Dnieper river, getting the south to cut maritime access bu it look like they want both banks of the river, they want to get all hydroelectric plants and control water supply ? I don't see them getting the west without enormous sacrifice. They are getting supply out there.
I think once the East and South get under control the Russian Railway Troops will move in and fix the railways sabotaged by the Ukrainians to move more equipment and supplies in.
Germany sending further military aid to Ukraine, this time in the form of... 9K32 Strela-2 and 9K38 Igla
Europe is sending all its obsolete trash weapons to Ukraine courtesy of the European Union which setup a fund for this.
They send obsolete weapons to Ukraine, that they would need to pay money to dispose of, and get cash in return. It is a steal really.
The logistics to actually deliver these weapons and their actual suitability for their defense? Not relevant. This "generous" EU support package is covered by the cynically named "European Peace Facility".
The hardest resistance has been on the eastern front against the most experienced Ukrainian soldiers. Very little resistance to zero difficulties around Kiev. The population in the west may be the most anti Russian but the military resistance seems to be lacking, e.g. Chernobyl.
Well the thing is all these years that they rotated troops in and out of Donbass the Ukrainians should have 400k trained personnel they could use. I hear reports the largest pocket in the East has 60K troops. Let us say this is 80-90K deployed. Where is the rest? How much equipment do they have? Are command structures and staff still operational? Should the Russians let them assemble and move so they can engage them as a mass and make the mop up easier? Of course they still have little chance. This is not the XIXth century anymore.
It may also explain why Russia has had unusually high logistical related losses. They expected to overrun the east and fight heavily and slowly towards Kiev, so most of their engineering corps and supplies were deployed on the eastern front.
Instead the exact opposite happened. Slow advances on the east against a dogged army and lightening fast advance to Kiev within 1-2 days.
Uh, I really doubt this. They knew the Ukrainians had their forces arrayed against the Donbass line and the rest was wide open. I say
was because I suspect the Ukrainians might be aiming to concentrate resistance in the West close to Polish border and lines of supply from NATO. But... the thing is human losses in the West might be way more palatable to the Russian public than in the East and South. There is next to no Russian ethnic population there. The Russians could just decide to simply flatten the whole thing.
I wonder if it would have been better for the Ukrainian army to have withdrew from the eastern regions and fought from defensive positions somewhere around the Dnieper river. With their current strategy by the Russian army reach the Dnieper, the best Ukrainian soldiers will be dead or captured.
Without air power? No way. Best place for defense in whole country is either inside the cities or in the swamps around Chernobyl. You can forget about the swamps since they already bypassed those. And the Russians have their two largest cities basically encircled.
While this war will undoubtedly create much bad blood and an insurgency, insurgencies live and die by outside support. Is NATO prepared to risk direct war with Russia to destabilise a conquered Ukraine when it was not willing to do so to keep an independent Ukraine from being conquered in the first place?
Oh but they are. Did you watch the YouTube video with Scott Ritter I posted here in this thread? The US supported an insurgency in Ukraine, based around West Ukraine region, since end of WW2 to 1990 when Soviet Union collapsed. With money and weapons. This led to the loss of 20,000 Soviet soldiers and 200,000 Ukrainians. It is the home of the Banderite cult.
Already a million Ukrainian refugees have flooded into the EU. How many millions more will the neighbouring countries who will pick up the lion share of the tab to support them be willing to tolerate just to screw with the Russians before their willingness to allow continued arms to flow into Ukraine across their boarders starts to waiver? Especially in the face of Russian military threats?
I think six million people left Ukraine after 2014 Euromaidan coup. The largest fractions are either in Poland or Russia. I think one single million this time will just be the start.
