Things in Ukraine are moving so fast that the only thing I can be sure of is that what I post here will probably be obsolete before I press the Publish button.
What was a very successful Ukrainian counter offensive in Kharkiv Oblast is now a massive rout of Russian forces throughout the extent of their northeast line. All of Kharkiv (save a tiny bit east of the Oskil River) has been liberated.
“Ukraine controls all the land west of the Oskil River.”
The Russians left massive amounts of equipment behind, too much for any sort of orderly withdrawal, and they don’t appear to have torched any of it, either. They just turned tail and fled. “This is an armored brigade worth of vehicles. Looking at this, I think Russia has given more military aid to Ukraine than the United States.” Also, Russian civilians are fleeing the captured territories, only to be refused entry at the border.
“Fuck, every one of us can get a tank.”
Rus, Rus, Rus of the Ukraine
Fleeing as fast as he can flee
Rus, Rus, Rus of the Ukraine
Watch out for that tree!
Got to disagree with the first video: it’s damn hard to see if you’re peering out the forward driver’s port, and it’s quite possible the tank driver was unaware troops were falling off.
It looks like logistical problems and those long-documented Russian morale problems have finally intersected to destroy the ability of numerous Russian units to function as effective fighting forces. Here’s a recorded Russian phone soldier’s phone call from back in August illustrating low morale and how much Russian soldiers hate the war:
Russian soldiers don’t seem to be eager to die for a mistake. The extent to which Russian forces in Kharkiv Oblast have been routed and broken makes it an open question whether any can be reconstituted as effective fighting forces and redeployed to Donbas. That may explain why Russia seems to be trying to carry out a stealth conscription mobilization:
On their way out, the Russian army has given Ukraine a parting gift: destruction of Kharkiv’s civilian infrastructure. “Kharkiv and Donetsk regions were cut off. In Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy there are partial problems with power supply.”
Total dick move, but not necessarily a war crime; power generating facilities are usually considered legitimate military targets. Russia obviously held off attacking them because they expected to control the territory.
Now that Ukraine has that territory back, a lot more Russian logistic routes (especially those out of Belgorod) are under threat of disruption from Ukrainian artillery. Indeed, Belgorod now loses a lot of value as a logistics hub, since it’s farther away from the frontlines, on worse roads. Russia may shift to routing everything through Kamensk-Shakhtinsky or Rostov-On-Don.
Ukraine continues to grind out more modest gains in the Kherson counteroffensive. As for the next phase of the war, it’s an open question whether to attempt to push Russian troops out of Luhansk next, or to apply more pressure toward the center of the Russian line and retake Lysychansk and Severodonetsk. But it’s clear that right now Ukraine enjoys the strategic initiative.
Ukraine is carving out big gains in Kharkiv, Texas is in the money, Biden taps Clinton’s bagman to divy up the graft manage climate change funds, more groomers unmasked, and some big changes in the UK. Plus a bit about tanks. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Ukrainian successes on the Kharkiv City-Izyum line are creating fissures within the Russian information space and eroding confidence in Russian command to a degree not seen since a failed Russian river crossing in mid-May.
Ukrainian forces in the Kharkiv Oblast counteroffensives advanced to within 20 kilometers of Russia’s key logistical node in Kupyansk on September 8.
Ukrainian forces will likely capture Kupyansk in the next 72 hours, severely degrading but not completely severing Russian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) to Izyum.
Ukrainian forces are continuing to target Russian GLOCs, command-and-control points, and ammunition depots in Kherson Oblast.
On Thursday, the state comptroller reported that the Lone Star State’s tax revenue rocketed by 25.6% to a total of $75.21 billion.
It’s only the fifth time since 1988 that revenue grew by a double-digit percentage — and it’s double the next largest increase over that 34-year span.
“Revenues continue to outpace even our most recent forecast as All Funds tax collections closed the fiscal year $841 million above the projection in our Certification Revenue Estimate,” said state Comptroller Glenn Hegar in an official release.
That’s a stark contrast to California, which saw July revenue come in 12% below forecast.
Texas has been a major beneficiary of migration from California: Over the last census cycle, 34% of new Texans arrived from California alone. Meanwhile, New York saw personal income tax collection fall 3.2% from April 1 through July.
Joe Biden has hired John Podesta to be the new Clean Energy Czar, citing his experience in progressive causes….
Bottom line, John Podesta is being now being hired to divvy up the $316 billion in Green New Deal money recently authorized by congress. That is what Podesta specializes in, the distribution of taxpayer money to DNC allied groups and networks in advance of the 2022 midterms. Podesta, Hillary’s fixer, is a bagman, nothing more.
Worse, one of the many bag clients he’s adept at channeling money into Democratic pockets for is China.
President Joe Biden on Friday tapped John Podesta to oversee $370 billion in climate spending, a move that has China hawks on Capitol Hill concerned over Podesta’s encouragement of Chinese investment in American infrastructure and praise for the top U.S. adversary on climate change.
Podesta has called for Chinese investment in American infrastructure, arguing in 2013 that there are “great opportunities for Chinese firms to directly invest in this nation, to build American infrastructure, to create American jobs, and generate steady and handsome returns.” He added, “There’s also the ability for Chinese firms to invest here and learn best practices, and take those home to the tremendous and growing middle class market in China.”
Instead, in the intervening decade, the Chinese government has committed widespread economic espionage—one 2017 estimate found that China steals up to $600 billion in trade secrets a year. Engineers in China, meanwhile, use popular social media platform TikTok to access nonpublic data from U.S. users.
Podesta has also praised China’s efforts to combat climate change, arguing in 2015 that the Chinese “are beginning to do a fair amount.” China, which is the world’s top carbon emitter, went on to dramatically accelerate its coal consumption, which reached a record high in 2020.
That record has China hawks on the Hill concerned that America’s top adversary has a new—and powerful—ally in the White House. Podesta’s role will see the liberal consultant implement $370 billion in spending toward alternative energy, a sector that China dominates when it comes to raw materials. As such, alternative energy companies receiving the Podesta-steered funding could turn to China to secure supplies. The new Biden aide will likely take no issue with that dynamic, given that he has argued the United States and China should “align” on a green economy. Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.) and Ted Cruz (R., Texas) argued that the move reflects the White House’s soft-on-China stance.
Democratic County Administrator Robert Telles charged in the death of journalist Jeff German, “an investigative reporter with the Las Vegas Review-Journal who had spent the last few months exposing misdeeds and turmoil in the official’s office.” For all Sundown Joe’s dark mutterings about “UltraMAGA,” it seems like Democrats are the ones doing all the killing…
A now-former elementary school teacher previously charged with sexual abuse of a 7-year-old student was arrested again and charged with sexually assaulting a second victim.
Victor Moreno, 28, was charged in July with continuous sexual abuse of a child, a first-degree felony, and an improper relationship between a student and educator, a second-degree felony.
The accused pedophile’s victim was a second-grade girl in Irving Independent School District, where Moreno was a teacher at the time of the alleged assaults during the 2020-2021 school year.
Snip.
Meanwhile, a teacher’s aide in Mesquite Independent School District was arrested Tuesday after being accused of engaging in inappropriate relationships with students.
Bryan Garcia, 22, was charged with two counts of sexual assault of a child and one count of indecency with a child.
“Higher Ed’s New Woke Loyalty Oaths: A ballooning number of hiring and tenure decisions require candidates to express written fealty to political doctrines.” And you can bet those doctrines have nothing to do with constitutionally limited government based on universal rights…
Indeed, they’re talking about restarting old production lines to start manufacturing older BMP-2s. “The costs and challenges of bringing more modern designs into production are now surely aggravated by Western sanctions cutting access to many basic electrical components, requiring pricey and time-consuming workarounds.”
This is like a scene from a porn movie, only a lot creepier. “Las Vegas landlord requires tenant to sign sex contract in order to lease home.”
“Kim Kardashian Is Starting Her Own Private Equity Company.” Why not? But I’m betting being a genius at self-promotion doesn’t equate to being a genius at investing, especially since she’s starting in the middle of a fierce, widespread downturn…
Easiest way to win Dad of the Year? Pick your son up from school in a tank. Looks like a Scorpion light tank, most likely the FV107 Scimitar reconnaissance variant.
“FBI Drops Investigation After Discovering Trump’s Top Secret Nuclear Documents Were Just Print-Outs Of Hillary Clinton Emails.”
Defense analyst Anders Puck Nielsen says there’s a tendency for many to believe that, although Ukraine has put up a good fight, a Russian victory in the Russo-Ukrainian War is inevitable. (I assume he’s seeing these on the various MSM channels I stopped watching a long time ago, as the only place I see such assumptions these days is among comment trolls and the occasional ZeroHedge headline.)
Some takeaways:
“When Russia launched the invasion of Ukraine back in February, many people assumed that it was going to be an easy win. It was not only Vladimir Putin who believed that they could finish this war within days or weeks. Many people thought so. And even after it became clear that there would not be a quick victory, many people still carried over this assumption that Russia is going to win eventually because that is the only possible outcome.” (I too thought a Russian victory was the most likely (though not certain) outcome in the first few days, before it become apparent just how badly bungled the invasion planning was, how fragile Russian supply lines were, how poor the communication was between different branches of the Russian military, and how neglected even basic maintenance was for Russian equipment.)
“They think of Russia as a giant. And then they think about Ukraine as a small country. But that is not really a good comparison.”
Unmentioned by Nielsen is that one reason they thought so is just how much old Soviet military equipment Russia still had lying around. That assumption was somewhat overstated, and, again, a whole lot of that equipment was poorly maintained.
Russia’s massive display of incompetence didn’t change the minds of many who still saw Russian victory as inevitable. “The assumption was that this just means it’s going to take longer, and then Russia is going to figure it out, and they are going to win.”
“We still have analysts who say that Ukraine could never push Russia back from the occupied territories, and that there has to be a negotiated solution where Ukraine gives something to Putin to end the war. And then these analyst also often seem to take it at face value when Putin or Lavrov or somebody else comes with threats about escalation.” (True, but I don’t think anyone pays serious attention to such people any more, if they ever did.)
Nielsen says there are a number of reasons why Russia can’t just carry out a mass mobilization, or start tossing nukes around.
Putin launched the war due an entire chain of bad assumptions, including those about the inevitability of Russian greatness.
“Ukraine is winning the war of attrition, and they will start pushing Russia backwards.”
“That’s why I think this idea that a Russian victory is inevitable is so dangerous. On the Western side, it leads to the belief that it is dangerous to provide Ukraine with heavy weapons. And this can mean that Ukraine won’t be able to finish the war as quickly as they otherwise could. And on the Russian side it means that they won’t be motivated for peace talks, even if the situation on the battlefield is awful.” (Not sure I agree here; The U.S., UK, Germany, and Poland have all transferred significant heavy weapons to Ukraine.)
“It will be extremely hard for the Russian leaders to embrace the idea that a defeat is possible. Like, not even that it is going to happen, but just that it could be a possibility. Because that would require them to question everything they believe to be true about Russia and being a great power. So they will be able to live in denial for a very long time.”
“If we want the war to end, we need Putin to understand that a defeat is a real possibility. And the best way to do that is to equip Ukraine with the weapons they need to win.”
When the Russo-Ukrainian war kicked off back in February, I relied on https://liveuamap.com/ to track military action in the war, just as I had used their similar map when tracking the war against the Islamic State. However, after the initial phase of the war, LiveUAMap seemed to update less and less frequently, and it’s been practically useless for tracking progress in the Kherson counteroffensive.
Today, most video commentators on the war seem to rely on https://deepstatemap.live. Here’s today’s snapshot from Kherson:
Better than nothing, but not as good as LiveUAMap used to be.
Here YouTuber Suchomimus compares different maps of the Kherson offensive, and how the differ on territory captured.
He mentions the War_Mapper Twitter account, which I haven’t been following due to my ongoing Twitter timeout.
Updates:
🇺🇦 have entered the settlement of Arkhanhelske, which is now contested.
🇺🇦 advanced from the Inhulets bridgehead, capturing Sukhyi Stavok and continuing to the outskirts of Kostromka and Brushkyns’ke, briefly cutting the supply route to Davydiv Brid. pic.twitter.com/x1ZiAg4Pig
He also mentions the official Russian-sourced map, which I’m not particularly interested in trusting.
The Institute for the Study of War includes a map with their daily assessment updates, but they’re not interactive or particularly detailed.
There are also a few YouTubers who do daily map updates. There’s Denys Davydov (“Hello, my friends…”). He’s Ukrainian and upfront about his bias, and covers the various clashes across the entire front (which makes his videos a bit long, and I tend to skip around for the bits I’m interested in). He suffers from “The map is the territory” syndrome, and isn’t a deep tactical thinker or versed in the intricacies of combined arms operations, but he’s useful if you understand his limitations.
One of the maps he relies on (in addition to DeepState) is the MilitaryLand map, which looks really useful.
Ukraine News TV relies on the DeepState map, and goes into considerable detail recount the day’s events.
War in Ukraine isn’t great in terms of voiceover, but seem to have a lot of unit-specific information on his maps.
For the sake of completeness, I note WeebUnion, who says he’s objective but seems pro-Russian (and his commenters even more so). He’s not a dynamic voiceover talent, and he begins this video with “Hello, comrades,” so…yeah, I don’t follow him.
For those who think I rely too much on Ukraine updates and Peter Zeihan videos, enjoy this Peter Zeihan video update on Ukraine!
Takeaways:
“Everything that the Russians were bad at before (propaganda, logistics, precision, training, maintenance, equipment), everything they were bad at before, they’re worse at now.”
Ukraine has moved from trying to stop the Russian advance with shoulder-mounted weaponry to longer-range heavy artillery, allowing them to hit ammo dumps, logistical hubs and high-value officers.
“The degree to which the Ukrainians are able to put targeting information, either from their own human network or signal intelligence that is provided by the Americans, and put it to use has been very impressive, and it has snarled the entirety of the Russian advance in both the east and the south.”
“Russia may be running out of ammunition.”
Russian doctrine calls for slow advances prepared by massive artillery barrages.
“They faced a massive industrial collapse in the 1990s that they never really covered recovered from.”
They have fought three artillery intensive wars since the Soviet collapse: two in Chechnya and then one in Syria. So now the Russians are attempting to advance over a front that’s a thousand miles long with a burn rate for their artillery in excess of 40,000 shells a day. Going through a relatively small by Soviet standards arsenal that has been acquired since the Soviet collapse, when the industrial system collapses. Well, any equipment any shells that they’re going to use that are not from that stack are things that were built before 1989, meaning that they’re in excess of 30 years old. We’ve seen reports several a year in Russia going back 30 years that, every once in a while, one of these shells [just] cooks off and the entire ammo dump goes up. It’s entirely possible that some of the explosions were seeing in places like Belograd or Western Russia are not actually being caused by the Ukrainians, but by the Russians manhandling of their own equipment. But regardless, that burn rate 40,000 a day is not something that anyone could maintain at length.
Thus Russia has been shooting at big static targets like train stations and malls. “They have the feel of being a little bit more than the Russians shooting at things to demonstrate to the world that the Russians can still shoot at things. Tanks and infantry are not following up on any of these attacks.”
“Kherson was the only major city that Ukrainians ever lost to the Russians, the only regional capital.”
“All the normal things that plague offensives are appropriate to think about here. They trigger higher casualties among the attackers than the defenders. They require more troops, They require better logistics. They’re more vulnerable to disruption. All of that stands. Also, you have to consider that this isn’t simply Ukraine’s first significant offensive in the war, but this is Ukraine’s first significant offensive ever.”
“The Ukrainians have continually surprised to the upside, and the Russians have continually surprised at the downside. So what should have been a wildly unbalanced war that should have been over four months ago all of a sudden, if not a conflict among equals, is suddenly looking like a little bit more of a fair-ish fight.”
Summary of the Kherson situation so far, including damage to the bridges, covered here and here.
No guarantee that the Ukrainians will win in Kherson, but it obviously offers them the best chance.
“If it proves that the Ukrainians are successful [Russian] forces are going to have to evacuate on foot, they are going to have to leave all of their gear behind…this would be the single biggest military transfer to Ukraine of the post-war environment, and certainly of this war…all of a sudden, the Ukrainians might actually have what they need.” Sometimes Zeihan has a tendency to overstate things, and I think he does that here. Yes, they’ll probably capture some usable heavy equipment, but the estimates I hear are some 20,000 Russian troops in Kherson, and I’m not sure how many functional military vehicles will be left in usable condition after such heavy fighting. They might well pick up significant quantities of towed artillery.
He talks about the importance of taking Nova Kakhkovka, and controlling the irrigation gates for the canals that feed occupied Crimea.
If Ukraine retakes Kherson, they might theoretically be able to take out the Kerch Strait Bridge. (Note that this is only true if they actually have the ATACMS missiles for their HIMARS that the Biden Administration says we haven’t given them yet, as I calculate a distance of roughly 179 miles from Nova Kakhkovka to the bridge.) “Crimea goes from being an incredibly strategically valuable platform that the Russians can use to launch into Ukraine proper, into the most significant military vulnerability that post-war Russia has ever had.” Eh, I think I have to go with the Atomic Bomb between 1945 and August of 1949.
“If Ukraine is going to win this war, this is how it’s going to start.”
There are some people whose staggering failures are so awesome that they put ordinary successes in the shade. Like Christopher Columbus trying to find a quicker route to India and discovering the New World instead.
Such is the case with Mikhail Gorbachev, who died yesterday at age 91.
Gorbachev never meant to destroy Soviet Communism, he merely meant to reform it so that it could run more efficiently, allowing the Soviet Union to compete more effectively with capitalist nations that were stomping their communist counterparts both economically and technologically. Moore’s Law was creating a tech boom racing so far ahead that the Soviets couldn’t even copy technology fast enough to keep up. Reagan’s obvious resolve and the threat posed by SDI scared them even more. To compete with the west, Gorbachev had to reform his stagnant nation.
His means for doing so were glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reform, or restructuring). Those two methods, meant to rejuvenate Soviet communism, actually ended it. Glasnost made it clear that a majority of Soviet citizens across the various republics hated the oppressive nature of communism. Perestroika was a hard sell to stagnant and ossified state agencies and enterprises. While some well-connected oligarch’s got rich on the first green shoots of capitalist reform, western companies proved unenthusiastic about investing in Soviet co-ventures.
Politically, Gorbachev’s reforms eventually resulted in the draft New Union Treaty, which would have devolved more power to the constituent Republics. This was deemed so threatening to the status quo that an abortive coup was launched against Gorbachev by communist hardliners the day before it was supposed to be signed. The coup, opposed by Russian President Boris Yeltsin and a large swath of Soviet citizens, collapsed in a matter of days, sealing the fate of the Soviet Union, which would dissolve on December 25, 1991.
In the process trying to reform the Soviet system, Gorbachev would stop funding communist movements around the world and withdraw troops from eastern Europe. These were great, liberating decisions, but they were committed in support of reforming Soviet communism, not ending it. By that grand mistake, Mikhail Gorbachev did more to make the world a better place than all previous Soviet Premiers combined.
This morning I’m seeing a lot of reports that that long-rumored Kherson counteroffensive is finally beginning.
The Odesa-based newspaper Dumskaya reports that the Units of the Defense Forces of Ukraine concentrated in the southern direction have launched a counteroffensive at night on the right bank of the Dnipro river in Kherson Oblast.
Dumskaya says that soldiers deployed on the front lines informed the newspaper that they have already managed to liberate several settlements and advance in the direction of Kherson.
This information, however, hasn’t yet been confirmed by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Update:
The Command of the Ukrainian operational group of troops Kakhovka reported that a Ukrainian counterattack knocked out the 109th regiment of the “people’s militia” of the so-called “DNR” from its defensive positions. The Russian paratroopers, who were sent to help them, reportedly fled from the battlefield under the pressure of Ukrainian troops.
The Kakhovka group command also noted that the Russian forces in Kherson Oblast have been cut off from the supply of weapons and troops from the territory of occupied Crimea.
Update:
According to information available to Dumskaya, Ukrainian troops are advancing in at least two directions towards Kherson.
Nataliia Humeniuk, Head of the United Coordination Press Center of the Defense Forces of Southern Ukraine, says that “the offensive actions are being carried out in many directions in the south of Ukraine.”
“The counteroffensive has been going on for a long time — it is exhausting the enemy and not giving him the opportunity to advance. And today we started offensive actions in different directions, including in Kherson Oblast,” Nataliia Humeniuk said.
Sources of Ukrainska Pravda in the Ukrainians Armed Forces stationed in the south note that in some areas there was a breakthrough of the Russian first line of defense, but “it’s too early to say anything concrete, the front is big.”
Update 13:48
Oleh Bratchuk, the Odesa Oblast Military Administration’s spokesman, says that so far today the Ukrainian troops hit the following facilities in occupied Kherson Oblast in the Russian rear:
Machine-building factory in Beryslav that was used as a Russian base
Having repeatedly announced plans for a counterattack on Kherson, it seems that today the Ukrainian army has begun implementing orders to liberate the South of Ukraine from Russian occupiers.
According to an operational group of Ukrainian troops, “Kakhovka,” on August 29, the Armed Forces of Ukraine broke through the occupying force’s first line of defense near Kherson, and the 109th DPR regiment withdrew from its positions. Russian paratroopers, who were the DPR regiment’s support, also fled the battlefield.
“Ukraine has a brilliant chance to regain the territories, with the help of HIMARS. Almost all the large bridges in Kherson have already been destroyed – the Russian army have been cut off from the supply of weapons and personnel from Crimea,” the message stated.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine have launched offensive actions in many directions in the south of Ukraine, the head of the joint press center of the Security and Defense Forces “South”, Nataliya Humenyuk, announced on Ukrainian T.V. news.
Explosions can be heard throughout Kherson region. Massive attacks on Russian bases in Beryslav and Nova Kakhovka, Kherson Region, have been recorded. There are also reports of strikes on Russian infantry.
Here’s a quick video from Suchomimus, a YouTuber who generally concentrates on analyzing weapon footage from the war:
He notes the reports of HIMARS hitting Russian infantry positions, something we haven’t seen before and which suggest a counteroffensive is indeed underway. Plus a video of a single Russian soldier freaking out and reporting that Ukraine troops are attacking in force.
Some relevant tweets:
So – the Ukrainian military has launched multiple attacks on Russian positions in the Kherson region. We’ll see how huge the situation is.
Something very serious is definitely happening in the Kherson direction. I do not remember such an intense flow of information about explosions and attacks on Russian positions during the entire war. There are also serious reports about a counteroffensive operations .
— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) August 29, 2022
The Armed Forces of Ukraine have breached the occupiers' first line of defence near Kherson. They believe that Ukraine has a real chance to get back its occupied territories, especially considering the very successful use of Western weapons by the Ukrainian army.
This footage of Ukrainian planes pounding Russian positions is all over Twitter:
Ukrainian aviation covers the positions of the occupiers in the Kherson direction, video from a soldier from the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade. pic.twitter.com/DpiqeXcSXx
A lot of questions have popped up about the much-talked about Ukrainian counteroffensive for Kherson, among the biggest of which is “Where is it?”
Anders Puck Nielsen, a military analyst at the Royal Danish Defence College, has some answers. What Ukraine is doing right now is not a traditional counteroffensive, but a prolonged attrition strategy to degrade Russian logistics and forces.
Some takeaways:
Usually you want some level of operational secrecy, but Ukrainian officials have been talking up the “Kherson Offensive” since at least June.
“I think it was meant as a kind of trap. It was not enough for Ukraine to liberate Kherson, but they also wanted to take out a lot of Russian soldiers in the process.”
“This area west of Dnipro is probably the one area in the whole operational theater where Ukraine has all the advantages, and Russia has all the disadvantages. So it is better for Ukraine to fight as many Russians as possible in this area than it is to fight them later on somewhere else.”
Putin was faced with withdrawing or reinforcing. “And of course Putin was not going to give up Kherson without a fight, so Russia started pouring reinforcements into the area.”
The phrase that describes Ukraine’s strategy is “accelerated attritional warfare.”
Ukraine’s strategy: “To cause the Russians to have as many casualties as possible rather than defending specific pieces of terrain. And then what we see around Kherson is that Ukraine has figured out a way to accelerate that attrition among the Russians by luring them into a trap where they send reinforcements into an essentially undefendable area.”
So the frontline isn’t moving, but “the Ukrainians expect them to run out of supplies eventually, and then it will be easy.”
“I talked about the bridges, and how Ukraine can target the Russian logistics by destroying the bridges. And I also talked about how this war seems to have entered into what can be called the third phase of the war.”
Phase 1: Russia invades, tries to take Kiev, and fails, because their logistics suck. Advantage Ukraine.
Phase 2: Russia grinds out gains in Dobas, with logistics adequate to the task. Advantage Russia.
Phase 3 (current): Ukraine starts degrading vulnerable Russian forces in the south. “So they are going very hard after the Russian logistics systems. And that is what the attacks in Crimea and other places long behind the frontlines are about.”
“But the point of the attacks is exactly to make the Russian logistics as complicated as possible. To make the supply lines as long as they can possibly be. Because Russia now has to pull the ammunition depots even further away from the frontline, and they have to use trucks instead of railroads and stuff like that.”
“And the supply lines in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts are actually beginning to look very much like they did in northern Ukraine in phase one of the war.”
“That accelerated attrition [and] the sustained attacks on the Russian supply lines will mean that Ukraine can be in a pretty good position after the battle of Kherson. They will have all the territory west of the Dnipro. And it will be very easy to defend afterwards, because Russia is not going to come back across the river once they have lost that foothold. And then Ukraine will have freed up all those forces from the Kherson area that they can redeploy for a new counteroffensive somewhere else. So that could for example be an attack from the north down toward the Melitopol area. And Russia would be in a really tough position for such a fight. Because they don’t have more forces they can move from the Donbas area, because they already did that for the battle for Kherson. And they don’t have good logistics because Ukraine will have been hitting the infrastructure for months.
Conclusion: There’s no guarantee of Ukrainian success, but it’s hard to see what Russia can do to counter this strategy. “After that Ukraine will redeploy and make a new counteroffensive somewhere else. Perhaps a Christmas offensive or something like that.”
Winter offenses are always a hard sledding in this part of Europe, but the rest of his analysis accords pretty closely with what we’ve been seeing.
Looks like more Russian bases in Crimea are blowing up despite being hundreds of miles from the front lines.
First up: France 24 reports explosions on a base in NE Crimea:
Caveat: The video map calls the location Mayskoye, which isn’t in Crimea, but across the Kerch strait in Russia proper. Later, they show a tweet with the location as Dzhankoi, which matches up with the location shown on the map.
More video, where you can see subsequent munitions explosions, and which says that Mayskoye is 14 miles from Dzhankoi:
I assume that the Crimean Mayskoye is a local town or subdivision too small to show up in Google Maps.
The Russian mass media report of clouds of black smoke over the military airfield in the village of Hvardiiske, Simferopol district of Russian-occupied Crimea.
Source: Kommersant publication with reference to local residents, Christo Grozev, head of Bellingcat on Twitter
Details: Local residents also confirm that clouds of black smoke are seen above the airbase in Hvardiiske.
According to them, several explosions were heard earlier on the territory of the military base.
According to the source, local military departments and law enforcement agencies assume it could be an attack by a small unmanned aerial vehicle that hit an ammunition storage.
Supposedly this is video of the explosion. Usual caveats apply.
3 seconds from flash to bang, she was about a kilometer from the explosion, gives you some idea how big this was ~ pic.twitter.com/Q8RIRIxYbz
The size of the explosions suggest that Ukraine continues to receive good location intelligence about Russian military infrastructure and ammo dumps.
From the beginning of Russia’s invasion to last week, reports of major Ukrainian strike on Crimea were all but non-existent. Since then we’ve had several. Clearly Ukraine sees a new need and/or ability to strike these farther targets.
This may be an attempt to cripple Russian supply lines and air support in support of Ukraine’s slow-developing Kherson counteroffensive.
