Despite last week’s announcement that Russia was going to confine operations to the eastern part of Ukraine, there seems to be a lot of activity around Kiev, possibly of “one last push” variety, though Ukrainian forces have retaken Irpin, and Russian forces have reportedly finally taken Mariupol.
Vladimir Putin has already declared the ‘end’ of the war in Ukraine, officials in Kyiv have claimed, matching the same date Russia celebrates defeating the Nazis in World War Two.
The general staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said Russian propaganda ‘imposes the idea that the war must be completed before the 9th of May 2022’.
Russia holds an extravagant victory day parade in Moscow’s Red Square on that date every year to mark Nazi Germany’s surrender and the end of the Second World War.
In a Facebook post, the general staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said: ‘According to the available information, among the personnel of the armed forces of the Russian Federation, propaganda work is constantly being carried out, which imposes the idea that the war must be completed before the 9th of May 2022.’
Ukrainian forces retake control of irpin, which is northwest of Kiev right at the edge of Hostemel Airport.
Ukrainian intelligence is warning that Russia may attempt to bifurcate the country. This is could very well be part of a pivot to a less ambitious strategy that Moscow is framing as their original intent, which is a lie.
Still, this makes sense as trying to secure a large part of Donbas, or more realistically from the Dnipro River to the south to somewhere east of the Vorskla River to the north, is a far more attainable goal than taking the entire country or even half of it. This would be sold by Putin as a measure to provide security to the newly-recognized (by Russia) ‘republics’ of Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine’s far east, but it could possibly allow Russia to maintain a land bridge to Crimea and control every port on the Sea of Azov. These separatist republics may soon ‘vote’ to actually join the Russian Federation, which would give further pretext to such an operation.
Above all that, it would give Russia a major foothold to degrade, undermine, and outright attack Ukraine over the long haul. It would also be better situated than ever to launch a new invasion of more territory to the west in the future under such a setup.
Some realism from Zelensky:
to launch counteroffensives large enough to regain the strategic initiative. The Russians have suffered a strategic defeat and tactically adapted from failing to achieve their original operational goals, but the Ukrainians can’t push much across the left bank of the Dnieper. /
Russian morale is poor. “Professor Michael Clarke, former director of the Royal United Services Institute think tank, said: ‘The Russians are making almost every tactical mistake it is possible to make.'”
Are Russian troops fragging their own officers? It’s certainly possible, given how unpopular the war is and how ill-prepared Russian troops were for the invasion, but I’d treat this report with several grains of salt. Speaking of things that need to be taken with grains of salt…
Ukraine has lost at least 74 tanks—destroyed or captured—since Russia widened its war on the country starting the night of Feb. 23.
But Ukraine has captured at least 117 Russian tanks, according to open-source-intelligence analysts who scrutinize photos and videos on social media.
In other words, the Ukrainian army might actually have more tanks now than a month ago—all without building a single brand-new tank or pulling some older vehicle out of storage.
The Russians meanwhile have captured at least 37 Ukrainian tanks—a sum inadequate to compensate for the roughly 274 tanks it is believed to have lost to all causes.
1. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. 2. I believe the Russia loss numbers are probably a good floor, given their poor preparation and numerous reports of lack of fuel. But I suspect the Ukrainian loss numbers are probably low. 3. A captured tank is not necessarily a usable, fieldable tank. That said, it is easier for Ukraine and Russia to field each other’s captured armor that most belligerents, given both have the same Soviet roots.
Putin claims he’s come to save the Russian world and the Russians from Nazism — but he’s mostly bombing Russian-speaking cities. Kherson, Mariupol, Odessa, Kharkiv, these are all cities where the majority of the population speaks Russian.
The fact that a big portion of the current Ukrainian leadership is of Jewish descent is no accident — they are fighting for a new, contemporary Ukraine. We want to live like normal people, not like animals: not to be poor, not to be under someone’s thumb, or someone’s boot. We don’t want to be dominated.
Putin doesn’t believe that Ukrainians exist. And he can’t let the new Ukraine state stay alive — he can’t let it slip away from him. So he has to derail the project. He has tried everything. The fact that he had to go to war is already proof that he wasn’t successful, that he couldn’t achieve his goal in any other way.
Another Russia is possible, but for that to happen, Russians have to repudiate today’s Russia — a complex and probably bloody process. They have to repudiate Putinism, the gulag, their nostalgia for the Soviet Union and for the Russian Empire. And if they don’t, then they can’t have a free and democratic Ukraine on their border, since it’s a bad example for Putin’s Russia. Ultimately, this is as much about them as it is about Ukraine.
Fifth Russian general reported dead. “Lieutenant General Yakov Rezantsev, 48, commander of the army’s 49th combined arms division, became the fifth general to be killed after being taken out in a strike by the Ukrainian armed forces, sources in Kyiv said.”
Yakov?
Is Russia suffering from a higher than usual percentage of dud munitions? It’s entirely possible, given the substandard maintenance we’ve seen for the rest of their armed forces over the past month.
For those who claim that #Ukraine was "unprepared" for the war, this is patently not true. @ZelenskyyUa has been trying to purchase missile defense systems, training pilots, producing new weapons, buying drones from #Turkey, restoring fortifications, & even flooding a river. https://t.co/eAjyPtFzri
“Ukrainian forces have seized part of one of Russia’s most advanced electronic warfare systems, which could reveal its military secrets, reports say. The Krasukha-4 command module was found abandoned on the outskirts of Kyiv partly damaged but otherwise intact, The Times of London reported.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Speaking of captured interesting captured Russian tech:
The richest person in Russia, Vladimir Potanin, has a 35% stake in Moscow-listed Nornickel.
The company is the world’s biggest producer of palladium, a metal used in vehicle catalytic converters, and also the world’s largest producer of nickel, an essential metal for EV batteries and renewable energy.
Former First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia and a close associate to President Vladimir Putin, Potanin is a major benefactor of the arts. He recently stepped down from the board of the Guggenheim Museum, after 20 years as a trustee.
Arts and luxury are common among the Russian oligarchs.
The Russian ultra-rich are also among the biggest owners of private jets and superyachts—some of which are getting snagged by law enforcement as part of the sanctions designed to crack down on Russia.
The fifth-richest man in Russia, Alisher Usmanov, owns Dilbar, the largest motor yacht in the world by gross tonnage. The boat is 512-feet long and reportedly cost $800 million, employing 84 full-time crew members.
Named after Usmanov’s mother, the yacht was seized by German authorities who later discovered that it’s really owned by a Malta-based firm and registered in the Cayman Islands.
Besides art and luxury, the Russian oligarchs are also deeply involved with sports.
Roman Abramovich, once Russia’s richest man, is the departing owner of Chelsea Football Club, a London-based soccer team. He was sanctioned by the UK while trying to sell the club for $3.9B.
Besides Abramovich, Mikhail Prokhorov—founder of Onexim Group, a Moscow-based company with interests in banking, insurance, and real estate—owned the Brooklyn Nets basketball team and its home arena from 2009 to 2019.
The list also includes Vladimir Lisin, chairman of the steel group NLMK. A shooting sports enthusiast, he is the president of the European Shooting Confederation.
The big scandal in the Hunter Biden Laptop story isn’t Hunter’s deplorable actions, it’s Joe Biden’s corruption.
Investigative reporter Peter Schweizer reiterated what he’s said about Hunter being close to criminal indictment. He said The New York Times “got a lot of cooperation from Team Biden” before they ran the story on Hunter that included their admission that the laptop was, indeed, real. He says Biden’s team was “trying to position themselves.” Of course, this case isn’t really about Hunter but the President of the United States, and a criminal indictment would open up “that whole can of worms” concerning dad’s connections to dirty money and the associated tax issues and huge national security concerns.
Snip.
George Soros, probably the most influential man in Ukraine, is a big part of this story, too. He gave $1 million to the humorously named Democratic Integrity Project, headed by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI analyst and staffer for California Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Jones had started the nonprofit (seems pretty profitable to me) after Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS approached him with the idea of forming the organization. Then, after filling its coffers to the tune of $7 million, Jones turned around and wrote a check to Fusion GPS for $3.3 million. I am not making this up. The same players keep turning up again and again.
Fusion GPS’s task: to research how Russian intelligence operations were affecting elections around the world. And they brought in Hillary’s campaign chairman John Podesta to help. Still not making it up, my friends. This was after Podesta’s and the DNC’s emails had been purloined (the narrative became that they were hacked by Russia) and published by WikiLeaks, to the DNC’s embarrassment.
(Incidentally, John’s lobbyist brother Tony was under investigation at that time for “cashing in” in Ukraine. He was paid $1.2 million to promote a plan conceived, ironically, by Manfort and Gates.)
Then there’s the story you know, the investigation of Burisma by prosecutor Viktor Shokin until then-Vice President Biden got him fired by threatening to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee. By now everyone has seen the video of Biden bragging about it before a live audience — without mentioning Hunter was on the Burisma board.
There’s much more, involving Soros and an investigation by Shokin’s replacement into a Soros-funded organization, the ironically named Anti-Corruption Action Center (AntAC). This was when the new U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch (remember her from Trump’s impeachment?) gave the prosecutor a list of people not to prosecute, including a founder of AntAC. Second-in-command George Kent had already tried to discourage the prosecutor from investigating. According to reporter John Solomon, their message to Ukrainian officials was this: “Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an American presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama.”
There are others in Ukraine tied to both the Russia hoax and Trump’s impeachment. California Rep. Adam Schiff, running the impeachment, trotted out our diplomatic “experts” from Ukraine to talk about Trump and his “impeachable” phone call to President Zelenskyy. Those were Americans, our diplomatic corps, who’d been telling Ukrainian prosecutors who they could and could not prosecute and treating a Soros-funded organization like some sort of sacred cow. Soros supported Hillary and was Trump’s political enemy. He funded an organization conceived by Glenn Simpson. Something smells like bad borscht.
Questions asked: “Did The New York Times Admit Joe Biden Is Corrupt So Democrats Can Get Rid Of Him?” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Will Rogers once famously said he did not belong to an organised political party because he was a Democrat. Yet today the traditional factiousness of the Democratic coalition has been engulfed by an almost Stalinist attitude that brooks no dissent on its most treasured policies – even though these do not resonate well with the bulk of the electorate.
To recover, Democrats need to find a way back to their historic base of working-class and minority voters, who now seem to be heading to the GOP. Franklin D Roosevelt’s alliance between big cities, small towns, labour unions and farmers was often awkward, but it still achieved remarkable success in restoring US confidence and winning the war. In contrast, President Biden’s boneheaded embrace of a progressive agenda that is widely detested across most of the population may prove to be one of the greatest political blunders of recent American history.
Given the probability of a significant loss in this November’s Midterms, we should expect – and hope for – a full-scale brawl over the party’s trajectory. There needs to be something equivalent to the New Democrats who, under Bill Clinton, revived the party after the devastating defeats of George McGovern and Michael Dukakis in the 1970s and 80s by moving the party to the centre and connecting it to the country’s diverse regions. ‘Too many Americans’, wrote New Democrats Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck in 1989, ‘have come to see the party as inattentive to their economic interests, indifferent if not hostile to their moral sentiments, and ineffective in defence of their national security’.
Snip.
The economic metrics are awful. Despite nominal GDP gains and higher wages, inflation, largely driven by energy prices, has been particularly cruel to minority and working-class voters. Overall, when asked if they are better off now than a year ago, twice as many Americans said ‘worse’ than better in a recent poll.
The cave-in to the greens has increased the Democrats’ economic vulnerability, particularly in the wake of Russian aggression and the continued role of China as the world’s dominant greenhouse-gas emitter. The well-funded American environmental elite lack the grudging sense of realism of their German counterparts, who have been forced to reconsider some of their energy policies in light of the invasion. But in resource-rich America, the green grandees still oppose boosting fossil-fuel energy supplies, despite 80 per cent of voters, and an equal percentage of Democrats, favouring the use of both fossil fuels and renewables. Public support for Net Zero / the Green New Deal hovers around 20 per cent.
Essentially the Democrats’ Net Zero obsession could result in a political disaster. In February, according to Gallup, only two per cent of voters named climate or the environment as their biggest concern, one-fifth the number who named inflation and barely one-tenth the number who cited poor government leadership. Relentless climate scaremongering has not moved the needle among voters. ‘Climate catastrophism’, notes political strategist Ruy Teixeira, is a political ‘loser’, particularly among working-class voters of all races.
Cultural issues represent another fault line between the bulk of the electorate and the tin-eared elites of the party. Democrats’ have embraced what former Bill Clinton strategist James Carville scathingly labels ‘the politics of the faculty lounge’, such as support for the increasingly discredited Black Lives Matter movement and its calls to ‘defund the police’. This idea may be beloved at places like Harvard, but among the less elevated mortals it is widely unpopular, even among minorities, including two of the nation’s Democratic African-American mayors, Houston mayor Sylvester Turner and New York City’s Eric Adams.
Voters view crime as the second-most pressing issue, after the economy and inflation. Here again the survey results are equally distressing for the progressive agenda. Voters, according to one recent survey, blame the Democrats for the current crime wave by a margin of two to one. Moderate Democrats, like retiring Florida congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, herself a refugee from Vietnam, found her support for legislation that would penalise undocumented criminals got her labeled as ‘anti-immigrant’ by the party’s dominant progressive mob.
“Hispanic Texans Overwhelmingly Believe There Is a Border Crisis and Support Security Measures.” “Almost three-quarters of respondents agreed that there is a crisis at the U.S. border with Mexico with only 23 percent disagreeing with that characterization.”
Turns out even Democratic primary voters don’t think you should be talking to kindergartners about sex:
“U.S. Rep. Filemon Vela will resign early from Congress. The South Texas Democrat announced last year that he wouldn’t seek reelection. He’s leaving early to take a job at a law firm.” Yeah, people don’t leave the United States Congress early for a law firm job. There’s something else going on there. (Hat tip: Push Junction, who noted Republicans have a good chance to flip the seat.)
“Hidalgo Staff Allegedly Plotted to Steer $11 Million Contract, ‘Slam the Door’ on Competing Bid, per Warrants. A grand jury investigation found probable cause of tampering with governmental documents and misuse of official information related to a contract awarded to a woman with ties to local and national Democrats.” My working theory is that whenever you see something like this going on, kickbacks, graft and illegal donations to hard left groups and individuals are all but a certainty.
Also: “Hidalgo Says Communications About $11 Million Vaccine Outreach Contract Were Private, Taken Out of Context.” When you’re talking about a public official discussing a public contract using taxpayer money with her public staff, also paid using taxpayer money, there is no such thing as “private.”
Nicholas Moran cautions to avoid drawing too many conclusions from the limited video information coming out of the Russo-Ukranian War. “That tanks unsupported by the other arms are easy prey is tanking 101, and what we are seeing in Ukraine isn’t revolutionary, it’s exactly what you would expect to happen if you send vehicles in unsupported into areas infested with infantry and not denied to enemy air.” Also: We’re only seeing the Ukrainian side because they’re the ones uploading cell phone footage, and an important reminder that an anti-tank hit is not an anti-tank kill. (Previously.)
Borepatch is not impressed with the level of security in the latest online voting scheme.
Heh:
I was robbed at a gas station in NJ last night. After my hands stopped trembling..I managed to call the cops and they were quick to respond and calmed me down….. My money is gone.. the police asked me if I knew who did it..I said yes.. it was pump number 9…
This seems disturbing: “Seven hospitalized ‘including four juveniles’ in mass fentanyl poisoning after deadly drug is released through air vents.” This was in Ohio. So add “aerosolized Fentanyl” to the list of things to worry about…
“United Airlines Rolls Back Vaccine Requirements for Employees. United Airlines announced that it would be changing its policy and that unvaccinated workers would be allowed to return to their normal positions by March 28.” Personally, I’d try to get them to pay through the nose for my return…
Another week, another high-profile staffer quitting Kamala Harris’ office. “On Monday, in the wake of Vice President Kamala Harris’ disastrous visit to Poland, it was reported that her National Security Adviser Nancy McEldowney, will become the latest staffer to leave Harris’ office.”
“Investors at BuzzFeed are reportedly pressuring CEO Jonah Peretti to close down its entire money-losing news operation as senior journalists announced their resignations on Tuesday.” See, the problem here is that they used “Buzzfeed,” “journalists” and “news” all in the same sentence…
Speaking of failing leftwing outlets, the Texas Observer is circling the drain.
In September, the Observer’s editorial staff comprised 13 journalists. As of this month, after a rash of resignations — and one firing — only four of them remain. The five-person business team dwindled to zero in February. This mass exodus, former staffers said, can be traced to a series of board decisions — from the handling of a complaint by former Editor-in-Chief Tristan Ahtone, which led to his resignation; to promising Executive Editor Megan Kimble the top job in the interim, only to pass her over for an outside hire; to unilaterally halting publication of the magazine just days before it went to print.
Read on for the blow-by-blow, but evidently the staff got too uppity for the board of directors and we’re shown the door, with some side orders of “diversity” and “a web-first publication.” I would say this was all good schadenfreude, but I doubt I’ve even thought of the Observer since George W. Bush was governor…
Louis Rossmann finds the same problems plaguing New York City also plague D.C., namely high retail vacancies and general disorder. “It’s literally like somebody just picked up all the problems of New York City, control-C, and control-V them somewhere else.”
Speaking of New York City, Democratic Mayor Eric Adams wants you to know that athletes and actors are simply better than you common peasants, so vaccine mandates don’t apply to them. “The exemption for athletes and entertainers comes ahead of the upcoming baseball season, opening the field for unvaccinated Mets and Yankees to play home games too. Roughly two-thirds of Yankees players and at least ten Mets remain unvaccinated and will now be able to participate, Jon Heyman of the MLB Network noted.” Plus Kyrie Irving on the Brooklyn Nets.
There’s just enough tank-specific news coming out of the Russo-Ukrainian War to justify a roundup. Despite supposedly having the largest tank army in the world, Russia’s tank corps is clearly taking it on the chin in Ukraine.
You know that “largest tank army in the world” bit? Not so much:
#Russia's active tank fleet is actually not 12,000 strong. In reality it is just over 2,500. By active tanks I mean tanks that are actually in service in an organised unit (i.e. a tank battalion, regiment, brigade etc.) and are not undergoing field tests (T-14 Armata). pic.twitter.com/fJYrGjc5L4
Can Russia pull reserve tanks out of its inventory and put them in active duty? Probably, but: A.) The truck tire issued showed that even active equipment hasn’t been well-maintained. How much worse shape are mothballed vehicles in? B.) How quickly can new tank crews be trained to work effectively? Speaking of maintenance problems:
Russia’s main tank factory has reportedly stopped production and repairs due to a lack of parts:
Russia’s largest tank manufacturer, Uralvagonzavod, has halted production because of supply shortages, according to Ukraine’s state media and Ukrainian armed forces.
The Kyiv Independent writes that Uralvagonzavod has stopped operations in its Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant in west-central Russia because of the lack of component parts supplied from foreign countries.
The claim was initially made by a report of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and confirmed by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense on March 21, according to The Kyiv Independent.
Uralvagonzavod had his assets frozen in the U.K. on February 24 and was hit by European Union sanctions on March 15.
Two reasons to take this with a few grains of salt: A.) It’s a Ukrainian source, and B.) Uralvagonzavod is the company manufacturing the T-14 Armata tank as well as the T-90M, and they were only supposed to produce 100 T-14s total, of which none have been spotted in-theater.
One thing that seems notably absent from combat reports is accounts of Russian active protection systems defeating incoming rounds or missiles. Arena-M seems to be the current Russian APS (a replacement for the Afghanit system rumored to be slated for the T-14?), but previous APS systems (Drozd 2) were supposedly available for earlier Russian tanks. (Shtora is a passive protection system used on Russian armor.) But Arena was first tested in 1995, which would make it pretty long in the tooth on the software side. Would you trust your life to Windows 95?
The lack of effective active countermeasures is one reason so many Russian armored vehicles in Ukraine seem to sport improvised metal cages up top, which appear to be doing Jack and Squat.
A LOT OF Russian tanks involved in the invasion of Ukraine have strange cages welded over the roofs of their turrets. Strange and apparently useless—for many pictures have emerged of destroyed vehicles surmounted by them. Sometimes the cage itself has been visibly damaged by an attack that went on to hit the tank beneath.
Stijn Mitzer, an independent analyst based in Amsterdam, has looked at hundreds of verified photographs of destroyed Russian vehicles. He thinks that, far from acting as protection, the cages have done nothing save add weight, make tanks easier to spot, and perhaps give a false and dangerous sense of security to the crew inside. They have thus been mockingly dubbed by some Western analysts as “emotional-support armour” or “cope cages”.
Snip.
The new cages, the fitting of which seems to have begun late in 2021, appear to be a variant of so-called slat or bar armour. Such armour can provide effective lightweight protection if used correctly (as it is, for example, on American Stryker armoured personnel carriers). But in this case that seems not to have happened. They might thus be seen as symbols of Russia’s inadequate preparation for the campaign, as pertinent in their way as its failures to neutralise Ukraine’s air defences and to shoot down that country’s drones.
One of the main threats to armoured vehicles are HEAT (High Explosive Anti-Tank) weapons, such as the Russian-made but widely employed RPG-7. The warheads of these rocket-propelled grenades are shaped charges—hollow cones of explosive lined with metal. When the explosive detonates it blasts the metal lining into a narrow, high-speed jet that is able to punch through thick steel. According to Dr Appleby-Thomas an RPG-7 can penetrate 30cm of steel plate.
And RPG-7s are the babies of the bunch. Other, far more powerful shaped-charge anti-tank weapons used by Ukrainian forces include Javelins supplied by America, NLAWs (Next-generation Light Anti-tank Weapons) supplied by Britain, and drone-borne MAM-L missiles, supplied by Turkey.
HEAT warheads may be countered by what is known as explosive reactive armour, or ERA. When this is hit, a sheet of explosive sandwiched inside it blows up and disrupts an incoming warhead before it can detonate. Many Russian tanks are indeed fitted with ERA. However ERA may, in turn, be defeated by a so-called tandem warhead, in which a small precursor charge triggers the armour’s explosive before the main warhead detonates.
Slat and bar add-on armours are a lighter and cheaper way to counter RPGs, though even if used correctly they are, literally, hit or miss protection. The spacing of the bars or slats is crucial. If a rocket hits a bar it makes little difference, for its warhead will detonate anyway. But if it gets trapped between bars it will probably be damaged in a way which means that the signal from the nose-mounted fuse cannot reach the detonator.
This approach is known as statistical armour, because the protection it offers is all or nothing. It is typically quoted as having a 50% chance of disrupting an incoming RPG. But Dr Appleby-Thomas notes that it works only against munitions with a nose fuse, which Javelins, NLAWs and MAM-Ls do not have.
Russia has been fitting slat armour to vehicles since 2016, but the design of the new cages, seemingly improvised from locally available materials, is baffling. They appear to be oriented in a way that protects only against attacks from above. In principle, that might help against Javelins, which have a “top attack” mode in which they first veer upwards and then dive to punch through a tank’s thin top armour. But, as Nick Reynolds, a land-warfare research analyst at RUSI, a British defence think-tank, notes, even if the cage sets off a Javelin’s precursor warhead, the main charge is still more than powerful enough to punch through the top armour and destroy the tank—as the Ukrainian army itself proved in December, when it tested one against a vehicle protected by add-on armour replicating the Russian design. As expected, the Javelin destroyed the target easily.
Enjoy this Sad Trombone gif, unearthed from the archives of the ancient, terrible conflict known only as The Pony Wars
Speaking of the Javelin, it and other western-supplied anti-tank weapons are tearing up Russian armor.
Despite amassing an invasion force of nearly 200,000 troops and thousands of armored vehicles supported by combat aircraft and warships, the Russian military has failed to reach its primary objectives in the three weeks since its offensive into Ukraine began.
Russian military planners expected a blitzkrieg campaign that would last 48 to 72 hours and lead to a quick Ukrainian capitulation, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has led a fierce resistance, and major urban centers, including the capital, Kyiv, remain in Ukrainian hands, surprising Moscow and indeed the world.
Ukrainians’ grit and knowledge of the battlefield have played a large part in their effective defense, but weapons supplied by NATO and EU countries have also played a critical role in stalling the Russian advance.
Ukraine has received billions of worth of weapons from the West — the US has provided $1 billion in security assistance just this week — and among that aid, three weapon systems stand out.
Since the invasion began, US-made FGM-148 Javelins and FIM-92 Stingers and the Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon (NLAW) designed by Britain and Sweden have been the terror of Russian troops.
Tanks and armored vehicles are at the heart of the Russian military doctrine.
Actually Russian military doctrine is usually described as artillary-centric, but tanks are a close second in importance.
Russia’s battalion tactical groups — 75% of which have been committed to the invasion, a US official said Wednesday — are largely mechanized formations meant to use heavy firepower to overcome resistance.
But BTGs are vulnerable to anti-tank defenses like the Javelin, a reusable, fire-and-forget guided missile.
Javelins have two parts: a launch tube and a command launch unit, which has the controls and optical sights for day and night use. The Javelin missile’s nose has a homing infrared guidance system that allows the operator to fire the weapon and then relocate in order to dodge return fire.
Snip.
Against a tank or another armored vehicle, the Javelin will strike from a high angle of attack, targeting the top of the vehicle, where the armor is thinnest.
Before the invasion, Russian tankers sought to counter that by building cages on top of their tanks to detonate the Javelin before it struck and reduce its force. Hundreds of destroyed Russian tanks suggest that has not been an effective countermeasure.
Against a stationary target, like a building or bunker, the Javelin will strike from a more direct line of attack.
Snip.
Ukrainian forces have been using the British-supplied NLAW anti-tank weapon. Although less sophisticated than its American counterpart, the NLAW is extremely easy to operate, and with a 150 mm high explosive anti-tank warhead, it’s deadly too.
Like the Javelin, the NLAW can strike targets from above, but its effective range of about 800 meters is more limited than the Javelin’s 2,000-meter range.
Information on Stinger use against Russian aircraft snipped.
The US on Wednesday announced another package of security assistance to Ukraine, which included 800 Stingers and 2,000 Javelins, bringing the total of each provided by the US to 1,400 and 4,600, respectively. The package also includes 1,000 light anti-armor weapons and 6,000 AT-4 unguided, man-portable anti-armor missiles.
Evidently, even some of the equipment Russian tanks supposedly have isn’t actually there:
The Russian military’s one-off T-80UM2 experimental main battle tank has been knocked out during recent fighting in Ukraine, marking one of the more unusual kills attributed to the country’s defenders, who continue to disrupt the Kremlin’s invasion plans. The fact that this unique fighting vehicle was even participating in combat in Ukraine is somewhat surprising, but it would not be the first example of new or experimental Russian weapons systems being deployed in the campaign.
The team of researchers at the Oryx blog, who have been compiling photo and video evidence of materiel losses on both sides of the conflict, identified the wreckage of the T-80UM2 and stated that it was destroyed on March 17, or that its remains were uncovered on this date. The tank is rumored to have been knocked out in Sumy Oblast, in northeastern Ukraine, apparently in the vicinity of the town of Trostyanets.
The T-80UM2 is said to have been part of a larger column of Russian vehicles that came under attack by the Ukrainian Armed Forces and photos show destroyed trucks alongside the T-80UM2. Its turret was knocked off and its hull burnt out, although it’s not immediately clear how it was hit and by what.
The story of the T-80UM2 is a complicated one, tied up with a new-generation tank project with the project name Objekt 640, better known as the Black Eagle. A mock-up of the Black Eagle appeared as long ago as 1997, at which point it was being promoted for the export market.
By 1998 it had become clear that work was also underway on the T-80UM2, as a further development of the Cold War-era T-80. There seems to be substantial overlap between the T-80UM2 and the Black Eagle, to the point that some sources consider them one and the same. If that’s the case, then the T-80UM2 may very well have been intended to serve as a prototype for the Black Eagle which, as it turned out, never entered production.
As for the T-80UM2, this vehicle was based on an upgraded T-80U chassis, the main new addition being a welded-steel turret with advanced armor protection, including Kaktus explosive reactive armor (ERA), panels of which were also applied to the front of the hull. More Kaktus was fitted to the track skirts, while there were anti-fragmentation screens around the front of the turret.
In its ultimate form, the T-80UM2 was also fitted with the Drozd-2 active protection system, a hard-kill system that uses radar to detect incoming anti-tank rockets and anti-tank missiles, before automatically firing high-explosive fragmentation munitions at them, with the aim of destroying, or at last disabling them, at a distance of 20-30 feet from the tank.
The T-80UM2 featured a different crew arrangement compared to the T-80U, with the gunner seated on the right and the commander on the left of the turret, swapping sides compared to the earlier tank.
Otherwise, the new tank used the same main armament as the earlier T-80 series, with a 125mm 2A45M smoothbore gun, but this was now fed ammunition via an improved type of automatic loading system. The magazine was moved from below the turret to the bustle, at the back of the turret, apparently in response to survivability concerns highlighted during fighting in Chechnya.
In western armies, prototypes are rarely pressed into combat service, they’re generally preserved in tank museums (like Tortoise at Bovington or the T-28 at the Patton Museum of Cavalry and Armor). The fact that this one was pressed into frontline service may suggest a whiff of desperation to throw everything into the fight. Then again, the Russian military has never been known for being overly sentimental…
Some significant changes since the last update, mainly that Russian forces have finally taken Mariupol, allowing Russian forces in the east to linkup through Donetsk. But elsewhere a slow, grinding stalemate seems to prevail.
Ukrainian forces have defeated the initial Russian campaign of this war. That campaign aimed to conduct airborne and mechanized operations to seize Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and other major Ukrainian cities to force a change of government in Ukraine. That campaign has culminated. Russian forces continue to make limited advances in some parts of the theater but are very unlikely to be able to seize their objectives in this way. The doctrinally sound Russian response to this situation would be to end this campaign, accept a possibly lengthy operational pause, develop the plan for a new campaign, build up resources for that new campaign, and launch it when the resources and other conditions are ready. The Russian military has not yet adopted this approach. It is instead continuing to feed small collections of reinforcements into an ongoing effort to keep the current campaign alive. We assess that that effort will fail.
The ultimate fall of Mariupol is increasingly unlikely to free up enough Russian combat power to change the outcome of the initial campaign dramatically. Russian forces concentrated considerable combat power around Mariupol drawn from the 8th Combined Arms Army to the east and from the group of Russian forces in Crimea to the west. Had the Russians taken Mariupol quickly or with relatively few losses they would likely have been able to move enough combat power west toward Zaporizhiya and Dnipro to threaten those cities. The protracted siege of Mariupol is seriously weakening Russian forces on that axis, however. The confirmed death of the commander of the Russian 150th Motorized Rifle Division likely indicates the scale of the damage Ukrainian defenders are inflicting on those formations. The block-by-block fighting in Mariupol itself is costing the Russian military time, initiative, and combat power. If and when Mariupol ultimately falls the Russian forces now besieging it may not be strong enough to change the course of the campaign dramatically by attacking to the west.
Russian forces in the south appear to be focusing on a drive toward Kryvyi Rih, presumably to isolate and then take Zaporizhiya and Dnipro from the west but are unlikely to secure any of those cities in the coming weeks if at all. Kryvyi Rih is a city of more than 600,000 and heavily fortified according to the head of its military administration. Zaporizhiya and Dnipro are also large. The Russian military has been struggling to take Mariupol, smaller than any of them, since the start of the war with more combat power than it is currently pushing toward Kryvyi Rih. The Russian advance on that axis is thus likely to bog down as all other Russian advances on major cities have done.
The Russian military continues to commit small groups of reinforcements to localized fighting rather than concentrating them to launch new large-scale operations. Russia continues to commit units drawn from its naval infantry from all fleets, likely because those units are relatively more combat-ready than rank-and-file Russian regiments and brigades. The naval infantry belonging to the Black Sea Fleet is likely the largest single pool of ready reserve forces the Russian military has not yet committed. Much of that naval infantry has likely been embarked on amphibious landing ships off the Odesa coast since early in the war, presumably ready to land near Odesa as soon as Russian forces from Crimea secured a reliable ground line of communication (GLOC) from Crimea to Odesa. The likelihood that Russian forces from Crimea will establish such a GLOC in the near future is becoming remote, however, and the Russian military has apparently begun using elements of the Black Sea Fleet naval infantry to reinforce efforts to take Mariupol.
The culmination of the initial Russian campaign is creating conditions of stalemate throughout most of Ukraine. Russian forces are digging in around the periphery of Kyiv and elsewhere, attempting to consolidate political control over areas they currently occupy, resupplying and attempting to reinforce units in static positions, and generally beginning to set conditions to hold in approximately their current forward positions for an indefinite time. Maxar imagery of Russian forces digging trenches and revetments in Kyiv Oblast over the past several days supports this assessment.[1] Comments by Duma members about forcing Ukraine to surrender by exhaustion in May could reflect a revised Russian approach to ending this conflict on terms favorable to Moscow.
Stalemate will likely be very violent and bloody, especially if it protracts.
What the invasion revealed about the Russian military:
Lots of problems, including a reiteration of the inability of the Russian air force to conduct combined arms operations, especially given their limited flight training (8 hours a month).
Speaking of limitations:
#Russia's active tank fleet is actually not 12,000 strong. In reality it is just over 2,500. By active tanks I mean tanks that are actually in service in an organised unit (i.e. a tank battalion, regiment, brigade etc.) and are not undergoing field tests (T-14 Armata). pic.twitter.com/fJYrGjc5L4
Lots of tweets wonder aloud why there have been no confirmed T-14 Armata sightings in theater in Ukraine. We’ll know Russia is really desperate if they start hauling T-64s out of mothballs and into service. (Ukraine actually has a lot of modernized T-64 Bulats, as the original T-64 factory is there.)
“We Have Questions About Russia’s Claimed Kinzhal Hypersonic Missile Use In Ukraine.” “In the end, not everything adds up here. That’s just the reality. It is just as possible we are seeing a standard Iskander-M attack in the video as one by Kinzhal.” Russia had produced an awful lot of vaporware when it comes to wonderwaffen, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see their hypersonic missile fall into this category.
And since we’re talking hypersonic and eastern Europe:
Ukrainian civilian drone enthusiasts are carrying out realtime coordinated reconnaissance on Russian troops:
News from St. Petersburg:
St Petersburg, Russia tonight chanting "No to war", "Shame", and "Ukraine is not our enemy!" Russia has been arresting protesters all day and yet the crowd has grown. pic.twitter.com/V6ZtOIam2t
Russia’s war against Ukraine grinds on. Here’s the Livemap snapshot:
Given the usual caveats (the map is not the territory), it doesn’t seem like Russia has made much progress since my last update. Russian forces are taking high casualties as they creep closer to Kiev, and Mariupol is still in Ukrainian hands.
Some perspective on the timelines of previous mechanized invasions:
Twelve days after the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Germany controlled virtually all of Poland west of the Vistula and was rapidly surrounding the capital of Warsaw. (The Soviet Union would jump in five days later on September 17 to help the Nazis finish off the remainder of Polish resistance and annex much of Poland into the Soviet Union. I trust you know that a lot of what was Poland in 1939 is in Belarus today.) And that was back when the vast majority of German logistics support was still supplied via horse-drawn logistics. And if Gerd von Rundstedt and Fedor von Bock had trucks, and had used T-72s and T-80s rather than Panzer Is and IIs, they probably could have done it in half the time.
We’re now some 22 days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and its make other widescale mechanized land invasions look far more competent and successful.
Russia is deploying reserves from Armenia and South Ossetia and cohering new battalion tactical groups (BTGs) from the remnants of units lost early in the invasion. These reinforcements will likely face equal or greater command and logistics difficulties to current frontline Russian units.
President Zelensky created a new joint military-civilian headquarters responsible for the defense of Kyiv on March 15.
Russian forces conducted several failed attacks northwest of Kyiv and no offensive operations northeast of Kyiv on March 16.
Russian forces continue to shell civilian areas of Kharkiv, but will be unlikely to force the city to surrender without encircling it—which Russian forces appear unable to achieve.
Russian forces continued to reduce the Mariupol pocket on March 16. Russian forces continue to commit war crimes in the city, targeting refugees and civilian infrastructure.
Ukrainian Forces claimed to have killed the commander of the 8th Combined Arms Army’s 150th Motor Rifle Division near Mariupol on March 15. If confirmed, Miyaev would be the fourth Russian general officer killed in Ukraine; his death would be a major blow to the 150th Motor Rifle Division, Russia’s principal maneuver unit in Donbas.
Russian warships shelled areas of Odesa Oblast on March 16 but Russian Naval Infantry remain unlikely to conduct an unsupported amphibious landing.
Estimates for deaths from Vlad’s Big Ukraine Adventure top 7,000:
In 36 days of fighting on Iwo Jima during World War II, nearly 7,000 Marines were killed. Now, 20 days after President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia invaded Ukraine, his military has already lost more soldiers, according to American intelligence estimates.
The conservative side of the estimate, at more than 7,000 Russian troop deaths, is greater than the number of American troops killed over 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
It is a staggering number amassed in just three weeks of fighting, American officials say, with implications for the combat effectiveness of Russian units, including soldiers in tank formations. Pentagon officials say a 10 percent casualty rate, including dead and wounded, for a single unit renders it unable to carry out combat-related tasks.
With more than 150,000 Russian troops now involved in the war in Ukraine, Russian casualties, when including the estimated 14,000 to 21,000 injured, are near that level. And the Russian military has also lost at least three generals in the fight, according to Ukrainian, NATO and Russian officials.
Pentagon officials say that a high, and rising, number of war dead can destroy the will to continue fighting. The result, they say, has shown up in intelligence reports that senior officials in the Biden administration read every day: One recent report focused on low morale among Russian troops and described soldiers just parking their vehicles and walking off into the woods.
Insert the usual “anonymous sources” caveat. Though I suspect the estimates of overall Russian deaths is on the low side.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asks U.S. congress for a no-fly zone. I don’t blame him for asking one bit. But it would be a dangerous escalation on the part of the United States and NATO to attempt to implement one.
The tiny problem with offering Putin an “offramp” from his Ukraine invasion: he doesn’t want one.
We’re witnessing a particularly unexpected set of circumstances.
One: The vaunted Russian army is proving to be a shadow of its former self.
While the Russian pounding of Ukrainian cities increases, Kyiv remains in Ukrainian control, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is still, at minimum, safe enough to record videos of himself walking to a hospital to visit wounded Ukrainian soldiers. In just three weeks, the Russian military has likely suffered more killed, wounded, and captured than the U.S. and U.K. did combined over the course of 20 years in Afghanistan. One site attempting to track the damage calculates that the Ukrainians have destroyed, damaged, or captured more than 1,200 Russian military vehicles and shot down or otherwise damaged 15 helicopters, 13 fixed-wing aircraft, six drones, two fuel trains, and more than 400 support vehicles.
If the Russian army was marching across Ukraine as planned, the Russians would not be attempting to recruit Syrian mercenaries.
This doesn’t mean that 200,000 Russian troops, with all their support vehicles, tanks, artillery, guided-missile systems, jets, helicopters, etc., cannot kill many Ukrainians and inflict extraordinary damage on the cities and homes and critical infrastructure of Ukraine. But it does mean that the Russian army is hampered by severe logistics problems, poor intelligence and tactics, persistent communications problems, awful morale, faulty equipment, and long-expired rations. Some significant portion of the great fortune that Russia spent to upgrade its military over the past two decades was skimmed off the top and diverted into someone’s pockets.
Polina Beliakova, a senior research fellow at the Center for Strategic Studies at Tufts University, contends that Putin’s wealthy allies were stealing from the military and shortchanging the troops right under Putin’s nose:
Most companies responsible for providing food to the Russian military are connected to Yevgeny Prigozhin — the patron of PMC Wagner, the mercenary organization, and sponsor of the Internet Research Agency, which has been accused of meddling in the United States elections. Several years ago, Prigozhin’s companies were accused by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny of forming a cartel and gaming the state’s bidding system for defense orders, receiving contracts for several hundred million dollars. The quality of food and housing in the Russian military is reportedly worse than in its prisons, with unreasonably small meals and some carrying harmful Escherichia coli bacteria.
Putin is now learning that hard lesson of former U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
The army Russia has is nowhere near as effective as Putin thought it was. And the Eastern Europeans have noticed:
“Today what I have seen is that even this huge army or military is not so huge,” said Lt. Gen. Martin Herem, Estonia’s chief of defense, during a news conference at an air base in northern Estonia with Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Herem’s colleague and the air force chief, Brig. Gen. Rauno Sirk, in an interview with a local newspaper, was even more blunt in his assessment of the Russian air force. “If you look at what’s on the other side, you’ll see that there isn’t really an opponent anymore,” he said.
Two: The Russian economy continues to freefall.
The Russian government announced that they intend to pay back their debts in now-almost-worthless rubles. The Moscow Stock Exchange will stay closed until at least March 18. The Financial Times’ European banking correspondent, Owen Walker, says the Russian Ministry of Finance can keep the big Russian banks going for a while, but in the end, the Russian companies will have no money coming in from countries enacting sanctions.
Maybe India can help with this problem, but it will cost Russia; the Indian government is reportedly interested in buying Russian oil at a discount. Russia not only wants economic assistance from China, but has reportedly asked for military assistance as well, in the form of drones.
Three: Despite all of this, Putin is not only undeterred, he wants to double down.
Back in 2014, when Russian military forces moved into Crimea and annexed it, then-secretary of state John Kerry and other Obama administration officials kept talking up the option of a “diplomatic off-ramp” that would end Russia’s military occupation. Those proposals never went anywhere; Kerry seemed to be in denial of the fact that Putin was on precisely the highway he wanted to be on, headed toward exactly the destination he wanted. Putin wasn’t looking for an “off-ramp.”
Today, you hear the same refrain — that if the West just tried hard enough, it could find some “diplomatic off-ramp” that would be acceptable to Putin:
Axios: “President Biden now faces a great unanswered question — how to give Vladimir Putin an off-ramp to avoid even greater calamity.” The Irish Times: “While the prospect of a ceasefire in the short-term may seem remote, there will come a point where Putin needs an off-ramp. The West can keep applying pressure on Putin while showing him that a negotiated peace is there for the taking.” NPR: “Diplomats are trying to find an off ramp to Putin’s war in Ukraine.”
How can Putin make it any clearer? He doesn’t want an “off ramp!” He doesn’t want to end his war, he wants to win his war. He doesn’t care how gargantuan a price he or his country must pay in blood and treasure to achieve victory. To a certain degree, Putin is dealing with the sunken-cost fallacy. He has already committed so much, nationally and personally, into this war that he cannot accept a relatively modest prize of Donetsk and Luhansk and a guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO. Russia’s big sacrifices in this war means Putin must bring home a big prize to justify the bloody endeavor.
1. Vladimir Putin may be unable to achieve his expected goals, which puts Russia in a tight spot. The purpose of Putin’s attack was to completely solve the Ukrainian problem and divert attention from Russia’s domestic crisis by defeating Ukraine with a blitzkrieg, replacing its leadership, and cultivating a pro-Russian government. However, the blitzkrieg failed, and Russia is unable to support a protracted war and its associated high costs. Launching a nuclear war would put Russia on the opposite side of the whole world and is therefore unwinnable. The situations both at home and abroad are also increasingly unfavorable. Even if the Russian army were to occupy Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and set up a puppet government at a high cost, this would not mean final victory. At this point, Putin’s best option is to end the war decently through peace talks, which requires Ukraine to make substantial concessions. However, what is not attainable on the battlefield is also difficult to obtain at the negotiating table. In any case, this military action constitutes an irreversible mistake.
2. The conflict may escalate further, and the West’s eventual involvement in the war cannot be ruled out. While the escalation of the war would be costly, there is a high probability that Putin will not give up easily given his character and power. The Russo-Ukrainian war may escalate beyond the scope and region of Ukraine, and may even include the possibility of a nuclear strike. Once this happens, the U.S. and Europe cannot stay aloof from the conflict, thus triggering a world war or even a nuclear war. The result would be a catastrophe for humanity and a showdown between the United States and Russia. This final confrontation, given that Russia’s military power is no match for NATO’s, would be even worse for Putin.
3. Even if Russia manages to seize Ukraine in a desperate gamble, it is still a political hot potato. Russia would thereafter carry a heavy burden and become overwhelmed. Under such circumstances, no matter whether Volodymyr Zelensky is alive or not, Ukraine will most likely set up a government-in-exile to confront Russia in the long term. Russia will be subject both to Western sanctions and rebellion within the territory of Ukraine. The battle lines will be drawn very long. The domestic economy will be unsustainable and will eventually be dragged down. This period will not exceed a few years.
4. The political situation in Russia may change or be disintegrated at the hands of the West. After Putin’s blitzkrieg failed, the hope of Russia’s victory is slim and Western sanctions have reached an unprecedented degree. As people’s livelihoods are severely affected and as anti-war and anti-Putin forces gather, the possibility of a political mutiny in Russia cannot be ruled out. With Russia’s economy on the verge of collapse, it would be difficult for Putin to prop up the perilous situation even without the loss of the Russo-Ukrainian war. If Putin were to be ousted from power due to civil strife, coup d’état, or another reason, Russia would be even less likely to confront the West. It would surely succumb to the West, or even be further dismembered, and Russia’s status as a great power would come to an end.
II. Analysis of the Impact of Russo-Ukrainian war On International Landscape
1. The United States would regain leadership in the Western world, and the West would become more united. At present, public opinion believes that the Ukrainian war signifies a complete collapse of U.S. hegemony, but the war would in fact bring France and Germany, both of which wanted to break away from the U.S., back into the NATO defense framework, destroying Europe’s dream to achieve independent diplomacy and self-defense. Germany would greatly increase its military budget; Switzerland, Sweden, and other countries would abandon their neutrality. With Nord Stream 2 put on hold indefinitely, Europe’s reliance on US natural gas will inevitably increase. The US and Europe would form a closer community of shared future, and American leadership in the Western world will rebound.
2. The “Iron Curtain” would fall again not only from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, but also to the final confrontation between the Western-dominated camp and its competitors. The West will draw the line between democracies and authoritarian states, defining the divide with Russia as a struggle between democracy and dictatorship. The new Iron Curtain will no longer be drawn between the two camps of socialism and capitalism, nor will it be confined to the Cold War. It will be a life-and-death battle between those for and against Western democracy. The unity of the Western world under the Iron Curtain will have a siphon effect on other countries: the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy will be consolidated, and other countries like Japan will stick even closer to the U.S., which will form an unprecedentedly broad democratic united front.
3. The power of the West will grow significantly, NATO will continue to expand, and U.S. influence in the non-Western world will increase. After the Russo-Ukrainian War, no matter how Russia achieves its political transformation, it will greatly weaken the anti-Western forces in the world. The scene after the 1991 Soviet and Eastern upheavals may repeat itself: theories on “the end of ideology” may reappear, the resurgence of the third wave of democratization will lose momentum, and more third world countries will embrace the West. The West will possess more “hegemony” both in terms of military power and in terms of values and institutions, its hard power and soft power will reach new heights.
Nor is he thrilled at China’s chance might fare in this scenario:
4. China will become more isolated under the established framework. For the above reasons, if China does not take proactive measures to respond, it will encounter further containment from the US and the West. Once Putin falls, the U.S. will no longer face two strategic competitors but only have to lock China in strategic containment. Europe will further cut itself off from China; Japan will become the anti-China vanguard; South Korea will further fall to the U.S.; Taiwan will join the anti-China chorus, and the rest of the world will have to choose sides under herd mentality. China will not only be militarily encircled by the U.S., NATO, the QUAD, and AUKUS, but also be challenged by Western values and systems.
His advice to China? Cut Putin loose and join the west:
China cannot be tied to Putin and needs to be cut off as soon as possible. In the sense that an escalation of conflict between Russia and the West helps divert U.S. attention from China, China should rejoice with and even support Putin, but only if Russia does not fall. Being in the same boat with Putin will impact China should he lose power. Unless Putin can secure victory with China’s backing, a prospect which looks bleak at the moment, China does not have the clout to back Russia. The law of international politics says that there are “no eternal allies nor perpetual enemies,” but “our interests are eternal and perpetual.” Under current international circumstances, China can only proceed by safeguarding its own best interests, choosing the lesser of two evils, and unloading the burden of Russia as soon as possible. At present, it is estimated that there is still a window period of one or two weeks before China loses its wiggle room. China must act decisively.
Speaking of China: “China has refused to supply Russian airlines with aircraft parts, an official at Russia’s aviation authority was quoted by Russian news agencies as saying on Thursday, after Boeing (BA.N) and Airbus (AIR.PA) halted supply of components.” Coincidence? Probably.
The Russians are in trouble, and they know it. That’s why they have reached out to China for help and why they are now recruiting Syrians.
Russian generals are running out of time, ammunition, and manpower. That’s not based on any inside intelligence — it’s clear from open source information and my own experience. I could be way off, but I am confident of this assessment.
An essential caveat to my assessment is that we, the West, led by the US, must accelerate and expand the support we are providing to Ukraine on the scale and with the sense of urgency of the Berlin Airlift (June 1948-May 1949). They need the weapons and ammunition to destroy the rockets, cruise missiles, and long-range artillery that are causing most of the damage to Ukrainian cities, as well as the intelligence to locate those systems, and the ability to hit Russian Navy vessels that are launching cruise missiles into cities from the Black Sea and the Azov Sea.
The time challenge for Russia is not just military. The effects of sanctions are growing — Russia may soon default on $150bn of foreign currency debt —and Russian domestic resentment is also growing (we should remember that it’s unusual as well as extreme brave for ordinary people to protest in Putin’s Russia and for television editors to suddenly interrupt their own programs waving anti-war placards.) We should do all we can to fuel that discontent and to let courageous Russians know they have our support.
Ammunition shortages
The Russians are experiencing ammunition shortages. Their transition to attrition warfare is driving up consumption rates beyond what they had planned and what they can sustain. They will still have a lot of the conventional artillery and so-called dumb bombs. But as we know from past US military operations, the most sophisticated munitions are very expensive and so more limited in availability. The Russians are likely to be having the same experience; in addition, they thought the campaign would end within a few days so large stocks were probably not prepared. Wartime consumption always exceeds planning numbers, and urban combat exacerbates that. Sanctions will also have assisted —Finland and Slovenia used to provide some munitions to Russia, and those have now stopped.
Manpower shortages
The Pentagon has said that 50% of Russian combat power was committed in Ukraine. At the height of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were about 29% committed. And it was difficult to sustain that.
This plays directly into the discussion of the encirclement of Kyiv. Russia does not have the manpower or firepower to encircle the Ukrainian capital, let alone capture it. I have been to Kyiv several times. I was there in Kyiv five weeks ago, met President Zelenskyy. It is a very large, dense major urban center on the banks of one of Europe’s largest rivers. It is a difficult, complex urban terrain.
The Ukrainians are going to be able to keep it open and prevent encirclement, especially if we can get the flow of weapons and ammunition up to the levels needed. There will be, unfortunately, be increasing attacks on the city by air and ground systems, and many more innocent Ukrainian citizens will be murdered, injured, or displaced. But I don’t believe it will fall.
Russia’s dilemma is only worsened by its combat casualties. Although I am always skeptical about enemy body counts, I do believe the numbers of dead are in the thousands (possibly in the 5,000-6,000 range suggested by US sources) and the numbers of wounded much higher. The modern battlefield is extremely lethal, especially for poorly trained or disciplined soldiers. These are very high numbers for just the first two weeks of war and many come from Russia’s elite units — they are hard to replace (and the Kremlin won’t be able to conceal these losses from the Russian public and all those for long.)
Reports of low morale, dissension between commanders, mutiny on at least one vessel, desertion, and so on, all within the first two weeks are indicators of major manpower problems. And in pure numbers, the Ukrainian armed forces still outnumber or closely match Russian forces actually on the ground in Ukraine.
There is no suggestion that the Russians have big units lurking in the woods somewhere (and the Pentagon has said it sees no signs of significant reinforcements.) So it’s apparent that the notional 900,000 strength of the Russian military is a hollow number. Their public call for 16,000 troops from Syria and elsewhere indicates this. Employment of “stop loss” by Russia on conscripts whose time is about up is another indicator. The Ukrainian diaspora is flocking home to help the fight; Russians are not coming back home — and indeed, many are leaving to avoid Putin’s fight.
Russia paused its offensive in Ukraine in recent days in order to rush in reinforcements and rebuild shattered units.
The problem, for the Kremlin, is that Ukraine is doing the same—and potentially to much greater effect. As the wider war in Ukraine enters its fourth week, the Russian army might be able to restore some of the combat power it has lost to poor planning, poorer execution and heroic resistance by the Ukrainian armed services.
But Ukraine almost certainly can double its fighting strength.
That mobilization imbalance, the consequence of strong foreign support for Kyiv, the natural logistical advantages any defender enjoys against an attacker and—most importantly—Ukrainians’ incredible determination to fight, has led one analyst to a perhaps surprising conclusion.
Russia “can’t win this war,” wrote Tom Cooper, an author and expert on the Russian military.
The Russian army built up a force of nearly 200,000 troops with thousands of armored vehicles before launching its assault on southern, eastern and northern Ukraine on the night of Feb. 23.
The invasion force encountered stiff resistance. Not only from the 145,000-person regular Ukrainian army, but also local territorial defense forces and even everyday people who improvised weaponry or found other ways to slow the Russians. Digging ditches. Destroying bridges. Texting Ukrainian artillery units with the locations of approaching Russian tanks.
As the war enters its fourth week, the Russian offensive has stalled. And the scale of Russian losses is becoming clear. The Kremlin on March 2 copped to losing fewer than 500 troops killed in action and another 1,500 wounded. The Ukrainian defense ministry a few days ago posited a much higher total: a combined 12,000 Russians “lost”—presumably meaning killed, wounded or captured.
From the perspective of someone who actually trained Ukrainian troops in Ukraine, commanded US forces, and attended the US Army War College – though it’s kind of the Chico State of war colleges – the whole way our elite is approaching the crisis is an epic clusterfark. Don’t believe anything anyone tells you – and certainly, sanity check whatever I’m telling you, too – most of these insta-experts on intra-Slavic conflict know absolutely squat-ski. Moreover, their remarkably dumb observations and credulous acceptance of conventional wisdom, which has proven long on conventional and short on wisdom, are being presented without any kind of strategic context. They don’t know where this crisis came from and certainly have no clear notion of where they want it to go beyond the vague and unhelpful idea that they want Putin (which they use interchangeably with Russia) to “lose” without knowing what that even means.
Biases are important, and here are mine. I sympathize with the Ukrainian people, partly because I worked with them and partly because I was an end-stage Cold Warrior who came up training to fight Russians. I understand that this mess is not merely the result of Putin being bad or Trump being insufficiently anti-Putin, like LTC Sausage and the rest of the failed foreign policy elite and regime media insist. Putin’s badness plays a part, but he’s merely exploiting thousands of years of bloody history, of ethnic hatred, and of Orthodox mysticism, as well as totally misguided and poorly-considered Western interference. The idea that we could just make Ukraine part of NATO and the Russians would just lump it is remarkable for its dumbness, but it is fully in keeping with our foreign policy elite’s unbroken track record of failure since the old-school military’s victory in the Gulf War…
The expectation was that the Russian forces would smash through, surround the Ukrainian forces pinned down facing the Russians in the occupied regions to the east, and isolate the main cities. I did not expect them to go into the cities immediately since Russians 1) generally bypass hard defenses; 2) they have bad experiences with city fighting (Stalingrad, Grozny); and 3) that would not necessarily be necessary. It would not be necessary if the idea was to neutralize the main Ukrainian combat formations and force the government in the cities to capitulate, then have the West pressure the Ukrainians to accept a ceasefire and “peace” that recognized Russian gains and ended the idea of Ukrainian allying with the West. In fact, that is pretty much what the Russian “peace plan” consists of. But that did not work for a couple of reasons.
First, the Russians did not fight as well as expected. You should always treat the enemy as if it is the best possible enemy. We did in the Gulf. We prepared to fight elite Republican Guard divisions of highly trained and motivated soldiers using top-shelf Soviet equipment and tactics. None of that was so; we crushed an entire national army in 100 hours.
The Russians are poorly-led, with very weak synchronization among maneuver forces and fires. Their plan is okay – in fact, you look at a map, and it’s obvious what they would do. But their gear is badly-maintained, and their troops are unsuited to the task of supporting a rapid advance. Look at all the evidently intact gear simply abandoned by the side of the road. Lots of it looks like it broke down (note all the flat tires). Much of it seems to have run out of gas. And, of course, lots of stuff had been blasted apart.
That’s the second part of the equation – the Ukrainians fought back hard. If you are a Lord of the Rings nerd, think of the Ukrainians as the dwarves. Not super-sophisticated but tough and ready to fight, and also often drunk.
If you want to see the future of this war, look at videos of Ukrainian infantry patrolling near the front. Every second guy has an anti-tank weapon, like a Javelin or some other system, and the rest are carrying spare missiles. Mechanized forces unprotected by infantry are vulnerable to ambush by anti-tank teams. The Russian armor outstripped its ground pounders and is getting pounded itself. Further, Ukrainians seem to have success with drones firing anti-tank weapons. The war is not going to be won by conventional battalions of Ukrainians operating with conventional aircraft. It will win with light infantry and drones armed with missiles.
Russian soldiers have shot people dead in the street as they took over Ukrainian villages, according to fleeing residents.
Soldiers shot randomly at buildings, threw grenades down roads and went from house to house confiscating phones and laptops, witnesses said.
Online groups created for family members or friends looking for information about people in affected areas are receiving hundreds or even thousands of requests a day.
One witness, Mykola, described how soldiers arrived in Andriivka, a village near Kyiv. “They threw grenades down the street. One man lost his leg and the next day this person died,” he said. “They then came down the central street and started shooting at the windows and hit one woman. Her children managed to hide.”
Mykola lived within walking distance of his brother, Dymtro. “My brother came out the house with his hands in the air. They beat him and then executed him in the street,” he said.
Dymtro’s wife said she saw the killing of her husband from a window. She said she also witnessed their neighbour being killed in the same manner. Dymtro’s daughter believes both were shot because they had earlier helped the Ukrainian army as volunteers.
Mykola said they wanted to bury his brother, but his wife feared the soldiers would shoot them. “The next day they went house by house, confiscating phones and laptops,” he said. At this point, 3 March, there was no electricity. “Those who came into our house behaved OK. But they told us that it’s good you have a cellar, collect some water, because you’re going to be bombed for six days.”
On Monday, United Nations secretary general António Guterres warned that, “Raising the alert level of Russian nuclear forces is a bone-chilling development. The prospect of nuclear conflict, once unthinkable, is now back within the realm of possibility.”
As hyperbolic as that claim may seem, the circumstances that would spur the Russians to use a tactical nuclear weapon are starting to fall into place. As laid out yesterday, the war is going badly for the Russians. Advances are moving slowly, when they’re moving at all, and casualties are mounting. The Russian economy is collapsing. Something’s going to break; it’s just a question of what breaks first.
This newsletter has repeatedly discussed the official Russian military doctrine, “escalate to deescalate” — that is, “If Russia were subjected to a major non-nuclear assault that exceeded its capacity for conventional defense, it would ‘de-escalate’ the conflict by launching a limited — or tactical — nuclear strike.” In other words, Russia’s official strategy when losing a war is to escalate it by using tactical battlefield nukes in order to “deescalate” it on terms favorable to Russia.
It isn’t likely that Russia will launch or detonate a tactical nuclear weapon yet. But it also isn’t unimaginable anymore. Apparently, Putin and the Russian military have been thinking about this option for a long time. In 2014, Ukrainian defense minister Valeriy Heletey said that, “The Russian side has threatened on several occasions across unofficial channels that, in the case of continued resistance they are ready to use a tactical nuclear weapon against us.”
This assumes, of course, his nukes still work. The United States is going to spend some $634 billion this decade maintaining its nuclear deterrent. Put it another way, the U.S. spends more money maintaining nuclear weapons in a given year than Russia spends annually on its entire military. Thermonuclear weapons (not fission-only tactical nuclear weapons) require regular Tritium refresh. Fission weapons still require battery and explosive refresh, and I’m not clear on the schedule.
A rapid Russian advance into the strategic southern town of 35,000 people, a gateway to a Ukrainian nuclear power station and pathway to attack Odessa from the back, would have showcased the Russian military’s abilities and severed Ukraine’s key communications lines.
Instead, the two-day battle of Voznesensk, details of which are only now emerging, turned decisively against the Russians. Judging from the destroyed and abandoned armor, Ukrainian forces, which comprised local volunteers and the professional military, eliminated most of a Russian battalion tactical group on March 2 and 3.
The Ukrainian defenders’ performance against a much-better-armed enemy in an overwhelmingly Russian-speaking region was successful in part because of widespread popular support for the Ukrainian cause—one reason the Russian invasion across the country has failed to achieve its principal goals so far. Ukraine on Wednesday said it was launching a counteroffensive on several fronts.
“A fourth Russian general has been killed in fighting in Ukraine, according to reports on Tuesday. Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Anton Gerashchenko announced the death of Major General Oleg Mityaev.”
A look inside an abandoned Russian field kitchen truck. Hope you like onions:
#Ukraine: Russian forces abandoned a PAK-200 field kitchen truck.
Another sign of how poorly things are going for Russia: “Kremlin arrests FSB chiefs in fallout from Ukraine chaos. The defenestration of several senior spies is a sign of Putin’s growing fury towards the intelligence services.” Traditionally the position of dictators who went to war with their own security service has been…precarious.
If you’ve read this previously linked article, you know that Russia is having real problems with air operations in their invasion of Ukraine. Here’s a short video that covers some of the highlights:
Key takeaways:
Ukraine has successfully moved its air assets around to keep them from being destroyed on the ground.
Russian equipment sucks. Pictures include Russian pilots using commercial GPS for guidance and strike coordinates written down on pieces of paper, which does rather limit tactical flexibility and pilot innovation. (Remember those crappy truck tires? How much better, if any, have Russian aircraft been maintained?)
Russian training sucks. Russian pilots get half as much training as NATO pilots, and practice less complex maneuvers. Thus:
Russia can’t coordinate large-scale air missions.
Thus the documented record of Ukrainian forces shooting down Russian airplanes:
#Ukraine: A Russian Su-25 jet managed to successfully land on an airfield after being hit with a Ukrainian MANPADS missile.
Guessing by the damage, the plane is likely to be decommissioned or at least will require serious repairing. pic.twitter.com/Ljv2gNkJ4m
— 🇺🇦 Ukraine Weapons Tracker (@UAWeapons) March 14, 2022
Russia has turned to China for military equipment and aid in the weeks since it began its invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject, did not describe what kind of weaponry had been requested, or whether they know how China responded.
The development comes as White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan plans to travel to Rome on Monday to meet with his Chinese counterpart, Yang Jiechi.
Sullivan told CNN that the administration was “communicating directly, privately to Beijing, that there will absolutely be consequences” for any Chinese efforts to assist Russia in evading sanctions.”
Do you see the problem? It’s right there in the first sentence.
Russia has turned to China for military equipment and aid in the weeks since it began its invasion of Ukraine, U.S. officials familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
“Officials familiar with the matter.”
Remember that phrase?
Remember that phrase (and similar ones) a lot from those endless “sources say” hit pieces on President Trump that turned out to be complete garbage made up out of whole cloth?
Because of that, we can never take anonymously sourced pieces that promotes the latest Democratic Media Complex line at face value ever again. How can we be sure you’re not making things up again?
We can’t.
We can never take any anonymously sourced piece in the Washington Post at face value. So we have no idea if Russia sought military aid from China or not.
That’s the problem with institutional trust. Once it’s gone, it can’t easily be replaced.
Any time you read “source says” in a piece in an MSM outlet, you should read that as “just trust me, bro!”
And we don’t.
And absent a clean sweep in management and a complete turnover of current staff, we never will again.
There are a lot of small countries, especially in the southern and eastern areas of Europe for whom [a Russian invasion] may not have been a plausible scenario two weeks ago, but it’s kind of looking like one now. And if you are a small country close to the borders of Russia, you’re in this difficult defensive position. None of these countries have a military that can, with a straight face, suggests that it could simply put up a toe-to-toe, stand their ground fight and defeat a military the size of the Russian army.
I’m going to point out that this is not necessarily true. Finland did it in The Winter War in 1939-1940. But he gets to that.
Yet you want you have to provide some sort of plausible threat to an invading occupier like Russia to avoid being invaded in the first place. The whole point is that the best possible success in repulsing an invasion is to not get invaded in the first place. So how can you convince a country like Russia that your very small little republic is not worth invading, that it is too difficult to invade? A lot of these countries are looking around, and going “Would NATO actually step up and help us directly, help defend us in case of an invasion? Any maybe NATO would, maybe NATO wouldn’t.”
One big solution is civilian military firearms ownership and preparedness. And here modern Finland comes up:
There is a specific division called SRA which is essentially reservists shooting society, and it is it’s actually technically in some cases for gun, rifle, pistol, shotgun and precision rifle. In competition it requires competitors to essentially carry a military loadout; they have to wear armor, they have to carry water, they have to carry a minimum amount of ammunition during the stages…It’s specifically to encourage military readiness .
“Having a large community of competent civilian marksmen is something that can contribute a very real deterrent to invasion.”
True. Every nation in Europe should make civilian firearms ownership more widely and legally available, for this and other reasons.
At this point, there seems to be no indication that Russian forces are measurably closer to their goal of controlling all of Ukraine.
Here’s a LiveMap snapshot.
From a pure strategic viewpoint, those Russian tendrils snaking toward Kiev from the northeast look like a bad idea, since there’s no way to protect their supply lines.
(Always remember that the map is not the territory, and that both sides are working hard to put out propaganda, though the Russians seem to be manifestly incompetent at it.)
Here’s a fascinating thread reportedly leaked from an active Russian FSB (successor to the KGB) analyst about how badly everything is screwed up.
Kadyrov's squad was absolutely demolished before they even had a chance to fight and they got blown to pieces. I do not have any info that it was an FSB leak to Ukraine, so I’d give it a 1-2% chance – but can’t exclude this possibility completely.
I assume that’s Ramzan Kadyrov, corrupt head of the Chechen Republic, former resistance fighter against Russia who defected in 1999 and was appointed by Putin in 2007. Bit of a jihadist scumbag to boot, and just a generally nasty piece of work. I assume by “Kadyrov’s squad” they mean the Kadyrovtsy, the militia forces under his direct control.
Our Blitzkrieg has totally collapsed. It is impossible to complete the task: If Zelensky and his deputies were captured in the first 3 days, all key buildings also captured, and they were forced to read an address of their surrender to the country,
Some tweets about who could they even get post-Zelensky to sign a treaty (Medvechuk? Tsaryova? Yanukovich?) snipped.
2) Our logistics are already over-extended today. We can send a much large contingent into Ukraine, and what would we get? Ukraine – a territorially enormous country, and their hate towards us is astronomical.
With regards to Russian military losses: I don’t know the reality – no one does. There was some information the first 2 days, but now no one knows what is happening in Ukraine. We’ve lost contact with major divisions. (!!)
Because all of this was planned at the top (in Russia), because we were told that such a scenario will not happen (Ukraine invasion) except only if we were to be attacked first.
Now, civilian losses in Ukraine will follow a geometric pattern progression, and resistance against us will only get stronger. Infantries already tried to enter cities – out of 20 paratrooper groups, only one had “provisional” success.
And so, with the Ukrainian question we lunged as if going for a 100m sprint, but turned out we’d signed up for a marathon. And this is a rather brief overview of the current events.
Cheap Chinese tires have been blamed for a Russian convoy of armoured vehicles being unable to reach Kyiv.
Yesterday, the Ministry of Defence issued an update revealing that a convoy of Russian tanks advancing on the capital of Ukraine remained 30km from the centre of the city having made little progress over the previous three days because of “Ukranian resistance, mechanical breakdown and congestion.”
Karl Muth, an academic based at the University of Chicago and a self-described tire expert, took to Twitter to set out a theory blaming cheap Chinese tires for the slow advance of Russian vehicles.
“Those aren’t Soviet-era heavy truck radials,” Muth said, commenting on a photo of a Russian army vehicle with ripped tires.
Instead Muth believes the trucks use “Chinese military tires, and I believe specifically the Yellow Sea YS20.”
“This is a tire I first encountered in Somalia and Sudan. it’s a bad Chinese copy of the excellent Michelin XZL military tire design,” he continued.
Former pentagon staff member Trent Telenko also got stuck into the debate and said “poor Russian army truck maintenance practices” has created a risk of equipment failure.
“When you leave military truck tires in one place for months on end. The side walls get rotted/brittle such that using low tire pressure setting for any appreciable distance will cause the tires to fail catastrophically via rips,” Telenko said.
Morgan Stanley analyst says that Russia is heading toward debt default as soon as April 15. Those are dollar-denominated bonds, which means they can’t be paid with devalued rubles.
There are reportedly more than 400,000 “volunteer hackers” helping Ukraine fight its cyberwar against Russia.
Victor Zhora, deputy chief of Ukraine’s information protection service, told Bloomberg last week that Ukraine was putting up a “cyber resistance” against its invasion that would work to try and weaken Russia.
Zhora said: “Our friends, Ukrainians all over globe, [are] united to defend our country in cyberspace. [Ukraine is working to do] everything possible to protect our land in cyberspace, our networks, and to make the aggressor feel uncomfortable with their actions.”
He also said that volunteers were helping Ukraine obtain intelligence in order to fight back at Russian military systems.
They are also trying to get the message out to Russian citizens, who have been Fed a starkly different narrative from their government than the rest of the world has seen play out. Volunteers are working to “address Russian people directly by phone calls, by emails, by messages” and “by putting texts on their services and showing real pictures of war.”
There aren’t 400,000 real hackers around the world. But 10,000 hackers and 390,000 script kiddies can sill do a lot of damage…
More than a week into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian Air Force has yet to commence large-scale operations. Inactivity in the first few days could be ascribed to various factors, but the continued absence of major air operations now raises serious capability questions.
One of the greatest surprises from the initial phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been the inability of the Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) fighter and fighter-bomber fleets to establish air superiority, or to deploy significant combat power in support of the under-performing Russian ground forces. On the first day of the invasion, an anticipated series of large-scale Russian air operations in the aftermath of initial cruise- and ballistic-missile strikes did not materialise. An initial analysis of the possible reasons for this identified potential Russian difficulties with deconfliction between ground-based surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries, a lack of precision-guided munitions and limited numbers of pilots with the requisite expertise to conduct precise strikes in support of initial ground operations due to low average VKS flying hours. These factors all remain relevant, but are no longer sufficient in themselves to explain the anaemic VKS activity as the ground invasion continues into its second week. Russian fast jets have conducted only limited sorties in Ukrainian airspace, in singles or pairs, always at low altitudes and mostly at night to minimise losses from Ukrainian man-portable air defence systems (MANPADS) and ground fire.
Snip.
While the early VKS failure to establish air superiority could be explained by lack of early warning, coordination capacity and sufficient planning time, the continued pattern of activity suggests a more significant conclusion: that the VKS lacks the institutional capacity to plan, brief and fly complex air operations at scale. There is significant circumstantial evidence to support this, admittedly tentative, explanation.
First, while the VKS has gained significant combat experience in complex air environments over Syria since 2015, it has only operated aircraft in small formations during those operations. Single aircraft, pairs or occasionally four-ships have been the norm. When different types of aircraft have been seen operating together, they have generally only comprised two pairs at most. Aside from prestige events such as Victory Day parade flypasts, the VKS also conducts the vast majority of its training flights in singles or pairs. This means that its operational commanders have very little practical experience of how to plan, brief and coordinate complex air operations involving tens or hundreds of assets in a high-threat air environment. This is a factor that many Western airpower specialists and practitioners often overlook due to the ubiquity of complex air operations – run through combined air operations centres – to Western military operations over Iraq, the Balkans, Libya, Afghanistan and Syria over the past 20 years.
Second, most VKS pilots get around 100 hours’ (and in many cases less) flying time per year – around half of that flown by most NATO air forces. They also lack comparable modern simulator facilities to train and practise advanced tactics in complex environments. The live flying hours which Russian fighter pilots do get are also significantly less valuable in preparing pilots for complex air operations than those flown by NATO forces. In Western air forces such as the RAF and US Air Force, pilots are rigorously trained to fly complex sorties in appalling weather, at low level and against live and simulated ground and aerial threats. To pass advanced fast jet training they must be able to reliably do this and still hit targets within five to ten seconds of the planned time-on-target. This is a vital skill for frontline missions to allow multiple elements of a complex strike package to sequence their manoeuvres and attacks safely and effectively, even when under fire and in poor visibility. It also takes a long time to train for and regular live flying and simulator time to stay current at. By contrast, most VKS frontline training sorties involve comparatively sterile environments, and simple tasks such as navigation flights, unguided weapon deliveries at open ranges, and target simulation flying in cooperation with the ground-based air-defence system. Russia lacks access to a training and exercise architecture to rival that available to NATO air forces, which routinely train together at well-instrumented ranges in the Mediterranean, North Sea, Canada and the US. Russia also has no equivalent to the large-scale complex air exercises with realistic threat simulation which NATO members hold annually – the most famous of which is Red Flag. As such, it would be unsurprising if most Russian pilots lack the proficiency to operate effectively as part of large, mixed formations executing complex and dynamic missions under fire.
Third, if the VKS were capable of conducting complex air operations, it should have been comparatively simple for them to have achieved air superiority over Ukraine. The small number of remaining Ukrainian fighters, conducting heroic air-defence efforts over their own cities, are forced to operate at low altitudes due to long-range Russian SAM systems and consequently have comparatively limited situational awareness and endurance. They ought to be relatively easily to overwhelm for the far more numerous, better armed and more advanced VKS fighters arranged around the Ukrainian borders. Ukrainian mobile medium- and short-range SAM systems such as SA-11 and SA-15 have had successes against Russian helicopters and fast jets. However, large Russian strike aircraft packages flying at medium or high altitude with escorting fighters would be able to rapidly find and strike any Ukrainian SAMs which unmasked their position by firing at them. They would lose aircraft in the process, but would be able to attrit the remaining SAMs and rapidly establish air superiority.
Russia has every incentive to establish air superiority, and on paper should be more than capable of doing so if it commits to combat operations in large, mixed formations to suppress and hunt down Ukrainian fighters and SAM systems. Instead, the VKS continues to only operate in very small numbers and at low level to minimise the threat from the Ukrainian SAMs. Down low, their situational awareness and combat effectiveness is limited, and they are well within range of the MANPADS such as Igla and Stinger which Ukrainian forces already possess. The numbers of MANPADS are also increasing, as numerous Western countries send supplies to beleaguered Ukrainian forces. To avoid additional losses to MANPADS, sorties continue to be primarily flown at night, which further limits the effectiveness of their mostly unguided air-to-ground weapons.
How Russian propaganda has sold some of the Russian people on Project Z. But Russian troops are finding things quite a different story. Warning: Bodies, and at about 18 seconds in one, I think strewn body parts:
But once they realised that there will be resistance and the war looks like this, their enthusiasm started declining. Which means it will be much harder to find new volunteers to go fight to Ukraine. But you need them. What are you gonna do? pic.twitter.com/ItmwcYSwIe
“Sources have been telling me, sources that are well connected to the Russian Security Services, that the offensive is not going well, that some special forces, the Russian Spetsnaz, are furious because they have been sent into battle without proper support, and many of them have been killed. They say that the national guard forces and the regular army, the national guard forces include those Chechen units, that two of them are not coordinating on the field. And that the overall battle plan is somewhat disjointed in that it’s partly a plan for war and partly a plan for peacekeeping and so-called de-Nazification of this country. And it has led to a lack of cohesion,” Engel reported.
“A lot of this goes back to the man who’s behind it all, Vladimir Putin, who I’m told is now increasingly isolated, is just taking advice from his inner circle, that there are only about three people who matter right now,” Engel continued. “And that speech, you mentioned it a short while ago, that Putin gave yesterday — bizarre location, speaking at Aeroflot, to a group of flight attendants. He sounded incredibly angry. He sounded detached. He was talking about how the Ukrainians here are machine-gunning people, that they’re driving around in cars packed with explosives, jihadi-style. And he went very deep and repeatedly on this theme that they’re fighting against the Nazis. It was the angriest I’ve ever seen him.”
This is from a couple of days ago. Have Spetsnaz pissed off at you doesn’t seem like a good long-term survival strategy for a Russian leader. On the other hand, this report probably deserves some skepticism, since it fits too easily into what we would like to hear about the situation, so some salt is in order. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“Ukraine says it has RE-TAKEN Chuhuiv city and killed two high-ranking Russian commanders during the battle.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“A Complete Summary Of All Russia Sanctions And Developments.” Read on for exciting blow-by-blow summaries of foreign exchange surcharges and debt repayment details…
What rolls down stairs/alone and in pairs/and up-armors your Russian truck? Caveat: They call this improvised armor, but it could also be on-hand materials for traction in muddy areas.
Busy day, so enjoy another Ukraine video. This is a good summary of the fight up until now:
Some takeaways:
We know what Russian plans were, based on captured documents and a pre-written “analysis” of Russia’s glorious victory someone found on file on a web server.
They expected to be at the gates of Kiev in three days and have everything conquered in two weeks.
Well, we’re almost two weeks in, and they haven’t achieved any of their major objectives. All major cities remain in Ukrainian hands.
One reason they didn’t: NATO alerted them to impending Russian action slightly before it began, so many commanders and units were already dispersed from bases.
They didn’t have enough trucks to begin with and have already lost 200 more.
Also, not only is the Ukrainian mud all but impassable, but their truck tires really suck. (More on this in a day or so.)
We need to pay more attention to the south, where Russian troops attacking from Crimea have done better (but still not great).
Time is not on Russia’s side, as sanctions are crashing their economy hard.
