Posts Tagged ‘blitzkrieg’

Battle For Kiev Begins

Monday, February 28th, 2022

I’ve been too busy to post earlier today, and the Texas Primary voting day is TOMORROW, so this may be brief.

Yesterday’s post noted: “Russia has failed to encircle and isolate Kyiv with the combination of mechanized and airborne attacks as it had clearly planned to do. Russian forces are now engaging in more straightforward mechanized drives into the capital along a narrow front along the west bank of the Dnipro River and toward Kyiv from a broad front to the northeast.”

That’s what you can see on the Livemap of Kiev here, with that red area being controlled by Russian forces:

If Ukrainian forces can keep them from entering Kiev proper, that will go a long way toward stopping Putin’s invasion cold.

That’s a big If.

Other links on the war:

  • Those sanctions are biting hard:

    The “swift and severe” sanctions of the U.S. and its allies took a while to arrive, not taking effect until 96 hours or so after the first steps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

    But to give credit where its due, once those sanctions did kick in, the consequences were indeed intense:

    • At one point, “The ruble plunged to a record low of less than one U.S. penny” — at one point 118 rubles to a dollar, before recovering to 84 rubles to a dollar.
    • The Economist noted, even with the recovery, that it was “one of the largest one-day slumps in the Russian currency’s modern history, similar in scale to the one-day declines recorded during the worst moments of the country’s financial crisis in 1998, when Russia defaulted on its debt. In mid-morning in Moscow, the Russian central bank raised its key interest rate from 9.5 percent to 20 percent in an effort to stem the ruble’s slump, and the country’s finance ministry ordered companies with foreign-currency revenues to convert 80 percent of their income into rubles.”
    • One analyst on CNBC summarized that the Russian currency has “pretty much lost all value outside of the country. . . . To me, it doesn’t really feel like we’re looking at or at least we’re going to see the bottom in the ruble here. I think there still is plenty more room for weakness to come.”
    • The Moscow stock exchange initially delayed its opening this morning, then declared it would be closed for the day.
    • Russians no longer have faith that their banks will remain solvent: “Russians waited in long queues outside ATMs on Sunday, worried that bank cards may cease to function, or that banks would limit cash withdrawals. ‘Since Thursday, everyone has been running from ATM to ATM to get cash. Some are lucky, others not so much,’ St Petersburg resident, Pyotr, who declined to give his last name, said.”
    • CNN reports that, “One early casualty was the European subsidiary of Sberbank, Russia’s biggest lender that has been sanctioned by Western allies. The European Central Bank said Sberbank Europe, including its Austrian and Croatian branches, was failing, or likely to fail, because of ‘significant deposit outflows’ triggered by the Ukraine crisis.”
  • Chuck DeVore on the fight:

    It’s now five days since Russian President Vladimir Putin sent his mostly conscript army into Ukraine to overthrow the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and it hasn’t gone as planned. In what may signal frustration, Putin has put his nuclear forces on alert in one last desperate move to beat his chest and show the world who’s in charge.

    Time has given some clarity to the operation and allows the drawing of some conclusions.

    I’m a retired Army lieutenant colonel—an intelligence officer. My training, from 1983 to 2007, was a Cold War focus on the old Soviet Union, the predecessor state to the Russian Federation. Never in my time as an intelligence officer was I able to see the worst-case scenario of a large-scale conventional Russian attack in Europe—until now.

    I’ve seen multiple reports of Russian conscripts who didn’t know they were invading Ukraine. They’re confused. They don’t know who to shoot at, as “Ukrainians look the same as us.” The Russian force appears to suffer from: Poor training; poor leadership (bad officers); and a cultural disregard for information-sharing down the chain of command, which prevents lower-ranking soldiers from making informed decisions in the chaos of war.

    The result of all this is a lack of initiative from soldiers when non-commissioned officers and officers are killed or wounded.

    It is important to note that the Russian army hasn’t fought a conventional war against a near-peer enemy since 1945. It’s out of practice, poorly trained, poorly led, and poorly motivated. It does have plenty of heavy armaments—very large thermobaric bombs. It can destroy, but it can’t fight effectively.

    Regarding the “Father of Bombs,” a large thermobaric or “vacuum” bombs capable of destroying a city block, killing 10,000 or more civilians and soldiers. Using one on Kyiv would horrify the world and likely increase calls for war crimes charges on Russian leaders. The Russians have used smaller thermobaric weapons against Ukrainian bunkers.

    This opens another question: How powerful are Russia’s reconstituted zampolit? Putin brought them back in 2018. The zampolit were political officers in the old Red Army, previously called “commissars” until 1942 when the position’s battlefield power was scaled back in response to negative military command implications.

    If a Russian field commander is ordered to use a city-busting thermobaric bomb, will he? Or will he refuse to carry out the order, like German Gen. von Choltitz when Adolf Hitler ordered him to destroy Paris—unless a zampolit is looking over his shoulder with a pistol?

    Logistics is also manifesting itself as a Russian weak spot. Logistics is hard—it’s harder in combat. It requires synchronizing the delivery of fuel, ammo, and food to frontline forces all while the enemy is shooting at your resupply trucks. At four days in, Russian forces are running out of basic supplies. This has a powerfully negative effect on morale.

    Complicating Russian resupply efforts are indications that Ukrainian light forces hunkered down during the initial Russian wave passed by, only to reemerge when the lightly armored supply columns entered Ukraine. Also of note is the increasingly effective Ukrainian use of Turkish-designed BayraktarTB2 drones. These low-cost, slow, non-stealthy drones have scored dozens of kills on Russian columns. Ukraine has about 60 of them.

    As Ukrainian resistance stiffens and tens of thousands of Ukrainian citizens rush to defend their nation, other nations in the region have been emboldened. Germany is sending 1,000 antitank missiles and 500 Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The Czech Republic and the Netherlands are sending small arms and ammunition.

  • Long thread on how Putin has reversed reforms in the Russian military. Tidbit: Russia’s military commander is Tuvan:

    He also says Russia is only using one echelon of troops:

    Is this true? Maybe. It would explain the logistics problems with out-of-gas convoys. But it might not be true of the main thrust toward Kiev.

    Food for thought.

  • Bank runs everywhere in Russia.
  • Hacker group Anonymous joins the fight against Putin:

  • Even Switzerland is abandoning its vaunted neutrality to impose the same sanctions as the EU on Russian people and entities.
  • Rambo fighting for Ukraine:

    • I cranked this out in haste and have a lot more links to go. Maybe tomorrow…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military | 2 Comments »

    Trumpkrieg: Moving Fast and Breaking Things

    Wednesday, February 1st, 2017

    I suspect very few observers, left or right, predicted that President Trump would hit the ground running quite as fast and hard as he has, and only his most ardent supporters suspected he would govern as conservatively as he has.

    In the lead up to World War II, a new form of armored maneuver warfare was developed that came to be called blitzkrieg. The idea was that armored units, linked by radio coordination and supported by airpower, could move too fast for the enemy to react to, allowing the attacking force to first bypass, then encircle and destroy enemy units. By moving so rapidly, the attacking force induces the equivalent of a “nervous breakdown” in the defending force, which is reacting to maneuvers A or B while the attacking force has already moved on to E or F.

    President Trump appears to be practicing the political equivalent of blitzkrieg. He’s making decisions, submitting cabinet appointees and upending so many sacred Washington applecarts that the Democrat Media Complex can’t react to what he’s doing in any coherent way, still stuck on something he tweeted last night. As Instapundit observed, Trump has gotten inside their OODA loop.

    Another version of the same basic concept embraced by many IT startups: move fast and break things. The idea is that to successfully disrupt an industry, you should implement now and fix later, making your mistakes as quickly as possible. Indeed, Scott Adams says that “disruptive” is precisely the right framing for what President Trump is doing. “No one has ever tried moving at Trump’s speed before.” It’s a strategy that can work with a talented software startup, but its applicability to other venues (especially one as large and unwieldy as the federal government) remains to be proven.

    Right now Trump is trying to implement more changes in Washington in his first two weeks than I’ve seen any administration attempt their first few months in my lifetime. There was no basking in the glow of the inauguration, no quiet period of consultation, just BOOM!, a firehose stream of decisive action.

    Most gratifying for VRWC observers is that the vast majority of Trump’s official actions are solidly conservative. Outside of cancelling TPP and a few populist staff picks, it’s hard to think of any official Trump action (including the superb Neil Gorsuch supreme court pick) that wouldn’t have been carried out by, say, Ted Cruz. But it’s hard to imagine Ted Cruz moving this fast, much less Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush. (One imagines that at this point in a hypothetical Jeb Bush presidency he’d still be in the planning phase for his first illegal alien amnesty summit with congressional democrats.)

    Even more gratifying from an emotional standpoint has been the continued meltdown of the Democratic Media Complex in the face of the Trump onslaught. Democrats remain fractured despite the zillions of dollars George Soros has poured into his astroturf brigades, the loony left has gotten even loonier, the MSM seemed stunned that no one cares what they say anymore, and the DNC still hasn’t healed the Clinton Sanders split. They all know they hate hate hate hate HATE Trump, but their strategies to oppose him have failed miserably. That’s why their actions (scream, protest, call him racist) seem like the result of tribal instinct rather than coordinated action. “Let’s have a violent protest in the middle of a deep blue city! That will certainly stop Trump!”

    Indeed, I can’t help but thinking that the nonstop irrational rage the left have hurled at Trump has made him into much more of a traditional conservative than he was. “Hey, maybe I should pay more attention to the people who aren’t calling me Hitler 24/7!” For things outside his main campaign issues (trade, immigration, etc.), it seems that he’s delegated a lot of the heavy lifting to movement conservatives like Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon (who seems to have become the Trump Administration’s designated “evil mastermind” hate totem role for the left previously held by Karl Rove under Bush43).

    Another side effect: The withering of #NeverTrump. It was never a huge movement to begin with (as Evan McMullin’s 0.53% share of the popular vote in 2016 attests), but the Gorsuch pick and Trump’s immigration executive orders seems to have taken what little wind remained in their sails for all but the hardest core of NeverTrumpers.

    Donald Trump was elected as a change candidate in 2016, and so far he’s delivering more change more rapidly than all but his most ardent supporters expected.

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    Posted in Media Watch, Republicans | No Comments »