Posts Tagged ‘video’

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Scenes From A Russian Rout

Monday, September 12th, 2022

Things in Ukraine are moving so fast that the only thing I can be sure of is that what I post here will probably be obsolete before I press the Publish button.

What was a very successful Ukrainian counter offensive in Kharkiv Oblast is now a massive rout of Russian forces throughout the extent of their northeast line. All of Kharkiv (save a tiny bit east of the Oskil River) has been liberated.

“Ukraine controls all the land west of the Oskil River.”

The Russians left massive amounts of equipment behind, too much for any sort of orderly withdrawal, and they don’t appear to have torched any of it, either. They just turned tail and fled. “This is an armored brigade worth of vehicles. Looking at this, I think Russia has given more military aid to Ukraine than the United States.” Also, Russian civilians are fleeing the captured territories, only to be refused entry at the border.

“Fuck, every one of us can get a tank.”

Rus, Rus, Rus of the Ukraine
Fleeing as fast as he can flee
Rus, Rus, Rus of the Ukraine
Watch out for that tree!

Got to disagree with the first video: it’s damn hard to see if you’re peering out the forward driver’s port, and it’s quite possible the tank driver was unaware troops were falling off.

It looks like logistical problems and those long-documented Russian morale problems have finally intersected to destroy the ability of numerous Russian units to function as effective fighting forces. Here’s a recorded Russian phone soldier’s phone call from back in August illustrating low morale and how much Russian soldiers hate the war:

Russian soldiers don’t seem to be eager to die for a mistake. The extent to which Russian forces in Kharkiv Oblast have been routed and broken makes it an open question whether any can be reconstituted as effective fighting forces and redeployed to Donbas. That may explain why Russia seems to be trying to carry out a stealth conscription mobilization:

On their way out, the Russian army has given Ukraine a parting gift: destruction of Kharkiv’s civilian infrastructure. “Kharkiv and Donetsk regions were cut off. In Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Sumy there are partial problems with power supply.”

Total dick move, but not necessarily a war crime; power generating facilities are usually considered legitimate military targets. Russia obviously held off attacking them because they expected to control the territory.

Now that Ukraine has that territory back, a lot more Russian logistic routes (especially those out of Belgorod) are under threat of disruption from Ukrainian artillery. Indeed, Belgorod now loses a lot of value as a logistics hub, since it’s farther away from the frontlines, on worse roads. Russia may shift to routing everything through Kamensk-Shakhtinsky or Rostov-On-Don.

Ukraine continues to grind out more modest gains in the Kherson counteroffensive. As for the next phase of the war, it’s an open question whether to attempt to push Russian troops out of Luhansk next, or to apply more pressure toward the center of the Russian line and retake Lysychansk and Severodonetsk. But it’s clear that right now Ukraine enjoys the strategic initiative.

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 19 Comments »

Putin Finds Out About The Kharkiv Counteroffensive

Sunday, September 11th, 2022

Downfall parodies! The lazy blogger’s friend!

Got to admit I laughed at this one. And of course, Putin is more like Hitler than the average target…

My one main criticism is that they didn’t work the shout of “Stalin!” into the script. I mean with Putin, how hard would that have been?

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Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 4 Comments »

Breaking: Ukraine Retakes Izyum

Saturday, September 10th, 2022

As Ukraine’s Kharkiv counteroffensive developed earlier this week, it was apparent that the occupied city of Izyum, the linchpin of Russia’s northeast line, was in danger of being encircled. I anticipated a few weeks of hard fighting while Ukraine slowly tightened the noose while pounding the besieged city with artillery.

That’s not what happened.

Instead, Russia just buggered out of Iyzum entirely.

Russian forces have withdrawn from key eastern towns, as a rapid Ukrainian counter-attack makes further gains.

Ukrainian officials said troops entered Kupiansk, a vital eastern supply hub for Russian forces, on Saturday.

Russia’s defence ministry then said its troops have retreated from nearby Izyum to allow them “to regroup”.

The ministry also confirmed the withdrawal of troops from a third key town, Balaklyia, in order to “bolster efforts” on the Donetsk front.

The Ukrainian advances – if held – would be the most significant since Russia withdrew from areas around Kyiv in April.

In his nightly video address on Saturday, President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that Ukraine had now liberated 2,000 sq km (700 sq miles) from Russia since beginning a renewed counter-offensive earlier this month.

His claim would suggest that half of that area has been recaptured in the last 48 hours alone – as it istwice the area of territory Mr Zelensky said had been liberated when he spoke on Thursday evening.

The announcement by Russia that its troops had withdrawn from Izyum is also significant, as it was a major military hub for Moscow.

“A three-day operation was carried out on the drawdown and organised transfer of the Izyum-Balakliya group of troops to the territory of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” the Russian statement said.

Taking Kupiansk is also huge. It’s a major crossroads and an important crossing over the north end of the Oskil River.

Livemap confirms it:

See that little blue rifle down in the southeast corner of the map? That indicates that Ukrainian troops are just outside Lysychansk, the Ukrainian city Russia spent so much time and effort taking back in July. Suchomimus says Ukrainian troops are even on the edge of Severodonetsk.

Supposedly Russia left a lot of gear behind as well.

This is looking less like a full-blown Russian strategic withdrawal than an absolute rout.

Developing…

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Posted in Economics, Media Watch, Military, unions, video | 2 Comments »

Holy Crap, Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory is Huge

Saturday, September 10th, 2022

This may fall into the “old news is so exciting” category for many of you. I knew that Tesla was building it’s Gigafactory east of Austin, and that it was large, but since I almost never travel to that part of town, until this video popped up in my YouTube feed, I had no idea how large.

Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, lists the footprint as 10 million square feet, making it the second largest building in the world, next to only Boeing’s aircraft assembly plant.

Also astonishing is just how quickly it was put up. Musk threatened to move Tesla to Texas back on May 9, 2020, officially announced it July of 2020, and the construction crew raised the first pillar in December of 2020. If they had tried to do this in California, I bet they’d still be wrangling over environmental impact statements and paperwork.

Earlier this year they held a “Cyber Rodeo” to celebrate starting manufacturing in the building, even though parts of it are still under construction. (Much like the Detroit Arsenal Tank Factory started production during World War II before the building was finished.) And Tesla plans to hire 20,000 people for the site.

They’re not stopping there. They’re already building another 500,000 square foot building on the site.

In California, even an industry as near and dear to the hearts of environmentalists as electric cars finds the tax and regulatory too hostile to expand their business.

Low taxes and low regulation are the way to keep your state prosperous. But that path doesn’t offer Democrats enough rent-seeking and graft…

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Posted in Austin, Regulation, Texas, video | 2 Comments »

Then: Commercial Investors Are Sucking Up All American Housing! Now: They’re Losing Their Shirts!

Thursday, September 8th, 2022

If you can remember all the way back to pre-Flu Manchu 2020, housing prices were soaring and there were a raft of articles decrying how commercial investors were snapping up housing as fast as they possibly could, pricing ordinary Americans out of the market.

Now, some two years later, it’s evident that a lot of those commercial investors kept buying right up through the peak of the market, and are now proceeding to lose their shirts on those deals thanks to the Biden Recession.

Take, for example, OpenDoor, the company that sends out those endless “We want to buy your home” letters. They promised investors they were going to use the Internet to revolutionize home-buying by flipping homes at scale and cut out the middle man. How well did they succeed?

Now that they’ve had a while to run their system, the answer is: Not so well.

Takeaways:

  • One thing I was unaware of: Commercial investors in residential real estate fund their purchases through variable interest rate debt.
  • OpenDoor’s outstanding debt balance “has ballooned from $271 million to $6.1 billion.”
  • Every point rise in interest rates costs OpenDoor $40 million more in interest rate payments.
  • “OpenDoor is truly a modern day house of cards. The company’s revenue grew from $1.8 billion in 2018 to over $8 billion in 2021. To grow they scaled, going from 18 markets to 44 markets in the U.S. In those four years, the company went from flipping 7,000 homes a year back in 2018 to now flipping 21, 000 homes most recently in 2021.”
  • “Despite OpenDoor’s top-line growth, the company has incurred loss after loss after loss, each bigger than the last, even in a strong rebound year in 2021. Where the company sold a record number of homes, OpenDoor incurred a record loss of over $600 million.”
  • Some math snipped. “OpenDoor would need to sell roughly sixty thousand homes a year just to break even with how much it costs the company to exist in its current burn rate. Every time the interest rate goes up a single point, OpenDoor needs to sell an additional 2,000 homes in order to offset that additional $40 million.”

    • The end of the video touches on how Zillow lost $881 million by trusting an algorithm that had them paying above-marker prices. We covered that briefly here some nine months ago. Here’s a video with more details:

    But it’s not just OpenDoor and Zillow. Here’s a video that explains why all the large-scale commercial buyers of residential real estate (including those buying to rent it out rather than flip) are screwed by rising interest rates:

    Takeaways:

  • The Fed “is now committing to not only continue increasing interest rates, they’re committing to keeping interest rates elevated for the foreseeable future.”
  • “These real estate investors are going to be losing money in the housing market on their investments, and that they are going to have to fire sale their portfolio as a result.”
  • “Over the last year, the investor profit or the cap rate in America is about 4.5%, which was pretty good in 2021, when interest rates were zero, but now that interest rates are projected to go to 3.8%, we can see that investors who buy real estate in America are basically getting very little premium over buying a short-term government bond.”
  • “As this investor demand continues to go down, home prices are also going to continue to go down in America, because in many markets investors were quarter of the demand, a third of the demand for homes over the last of couple years, and in some neighborhoods investors were 50—60% of the demand.”
  • “A lot of people think [commercial buyers pay] cash, but folks, it’s never cash, it’s always a bank in the background giving these hedge funds and private equity funds money to buy single-family homes.”
  • “They’ll give these hedge funds maybe 70—75% percent of the money to go do it, like a normal loan. The thing is, the loans that these Wall Street investors use to buy homes are often adjustable rate loans, where every time the fed hikes interest rates, the Wall Street investor has to pay more in debt service and interest on their existing portfolio.”
  • “We’re gonna get to a point soon over the next six months where these Wall Street investors are having to pay more to their bank and their warehouse lender than they’re going to receive in income and rent from their tenant. Like, literally, these Wall Street investors not only are going to see the value of their property going to go down, they’re going to begin losing money in terms of cash flow.”
  • So not only will investors have to sell, but frequently they won’t have any choice.

    Because their lender, their bank, is going to do something called a margin call. At a certain point, they’re gonna say “Hey Wall Street buyer who I’m giving money to, the value of the homes has gone down and now you can barely afford to pay interest. You’re gonna have to now just pay us off, or pay us down,” and when the bank does that margin call, these investors are then going to be forced to sell off their portfolio, because they’re going to need the cash, causing a massive, widespread dump of inventory onto the U.S. housing market.

  • He doesn’t mention Austin by name in this video, but he does in another pegging it as the #5 market most likely to see price drops. “This is a market in absolute freefall.” “In the span of just five months, the number of homes for sale in Austin has increased from 1460 and February to nearly 8 000 in July.” He thinks home prices could go down by 40%. Naturally, as an Austin-area home-owner, I think that’s way too much, but I do expect significant retreats from the highs reached early this year.
  • He also thinks inflation is going to get worse (which is probably a good bet).

    • (In another video covering some of the same ground, he mentions BlackRock, one of the biggest boogeymen in public perceptions of buying residential real estate. Guess what? “BlackRock is not a big player in terms of owning, managing and buying real estate in the U.S.”)

    Like the fear of Japan buying everything in the late 1980s, fear that institutional investors will make owning a home impossible for ordinary Americans turned out to suffer from the same recency bias, assuming that what is going on right this minute will continue for the foreseeable future.

    Like assuming that the giant ants are unstoppable, or that Hispanics will always vote for Democrats, assuming that housing prices will always go up and that credit will always be cheap are categorical mistakes that the market will eventually punish you for making, and the companies that made it are now bleeding red ink.

    People who sold during the bubble made out like bandits, and people who bought during it got screwed, but what can’t go up forever won’t. Bubbles pop. Absent government distortions of the market*, supply and demand have a way of adjusting.

    Anyway, if you need to buy a house, nine months from now is probably going to be a great buyer’s market…

    *And yes, lots of cities and states try their damnedest to prevent new housing from being built. I’m looking at you, California.

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    Posted in Austin, Economics, Texas, video | 11 Comments »

    Ukrainian Counteroffensive In Kharkiv?

    Wednesday, September 7th, 2022

    There are indications that Ukraine, in addition to the Kherson counteroffensive, is conducting a counteroffensive in Kharkiv Oblast, and has apparently captured Volokhiv Yar, Balakliya and Yakovenkove, towns between Kharkiv and Russian-occupied Izyum.

    It’s unclear whether this is a feint, a spoiling attack or a full-blown counteroffensive, but the scale of the initial success suggests it’s too large to be a mere probing attack.

    Says ISW:

    Ukrainian forces conducted a counterattack in Kharkiv Oblast near Balakliya that likely drove Russian forces back to the left bank (north side) of the Severskyi Donets and Serednya Balakliika rivers on September 6. Ukrainian forces likely captured Verbivka (less than 3 km northwest of Balakliya) on September 6. Geolocated footage posted on September 6 shows Ukrainian infantry in eastern Verbivka (less than 3 km from Balakliya). Multiple Russian sources acknowledged Ukrainian gains in Verbivka and reported that Russian forces demolished unspecified bridges in Balakliya‘s eastern environs to prevent further Ukrainian advances. Images posted on September 6 also show a destroyed Russian bridge over the Serednya Balakliika River—a geographic feature behind which the Russian front line in this sector likely lies. Social media users reported that Russian forces withdrew from checkpoints six kilometers west of Balaklia on September 6.

    Russian forces likely no longer maintain their previous positions in Bairak and Nova Husarivka (just south of Balakliya on the right bank of the Seversky Donets River). Russian forces likely abandoned Bayrak and Nova Husarivka in late August. Images posted on August 30 show that Russian forces blew the bridge over the Seversky Donetsk River near Bayrak on an unspecified date. Bridge demolition activity indicates a planned Russian withdrawal. Ukraine’s General Staff reported on September 6 that Russian forces conducted air strikes against Bayrak, indicating that Ukrainian forces may have advanced in the area.

    Russia’s deployment of forces from Kharkiv and eastern Ukraine to Ukraine’s south is likely enabling Ukrainian counterattacks of opportunity. The September 6 Ukrainian counterattack in Kharkiv was likely an opportunistic effort enabled by the redeployment of Russian forces away from the area to reinforce Russian positions against the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kherson Oblast. Obituary data on Russian servicemen indicates that Russia deployed elements of the 147th Artillery Regiment of the 2nd Motorized Rifle Division of the 1st Guards Tank Army to Kherson Oblast no earlier than late August. This is the first time ISW has observed elements of Russia’s elite 1st Guards Tank Army operating in southern Ukraine. Elements of the 147th previously fought in Bucha in Kyiv in March and elements of the 1st Guards Tank Army were active primarily along the Kharkiv Axis after the Russian withdrawal from Kyiv.

    Reporting from Ukraine (a pro-Ukrainian source) breaks down the counteroffensive.

    Suchomimus analyzes the news as of yesterday. There are “reports that Russia is blowing up bridges, a sign that they are in a bit of a panic and expect Ukraine to advance.”

    And here he shows a video of Ukrainian forces entering Yakovenkove further east, from which he surmises that they must have already taken Balakliya.

    Bonus: Ukrainian aircraft shoots down a Russian Su-25:

    Map snapshot, which is already slightly out of date:

    Izyum is the linchpin of Russia’s north-central front. Losing it would not only spell an end to any further Russian advances in Kharkiv for the immediate future, but also put Russia’s hard-won conquest of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in jeopardy.

    With Russia reportedly buying artillery from North Korea (Caveat: This comes from Biden’s Pentagon, so grains of salt are in order) and two separate counteroffensives chewing up units, it’s possibly that Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine have already peaked.

    Edited to add: Reporting from Ukraine has a video up detailing how different thrusts of the counteroffensive developed:

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    Posted in Military, video | 2 Comments »

    When Storage Wars Meets Gun Hoarders

    Tuesday, September 6th, 2022

    Back when I’d visit my parents a decade or so ago, one of my father’s guilty pleasures was watching Storage Wars.

    If you’re unfamiliar with this cable staple, it features competing teams of people bidding on abandoned storage units, then going through the ones they won trying to figure out what things were worth. Storage Wars was infamous for every episode having one or more “surprise items” that the buyer just happened to know an expert who could identify the item and its value. It was a little cheesy, and like all realty TV, was fake and scripted, but was a higher, more nourishing brand of cable junk food, than, say Ice Road Truckers or Deadliest Catch (which is evidently still on).

    Anyway, people still bid on abandoned storage units, and a guy who has a YouTube channel bid a princely $5,786 for a unit because he saw some gun cases in there.

    Did it pay off?

    Boy did it!

    There were a few cheap handguns, but also a lot of expensive hunting rifles, including:

  • A Marlin 1895CB chambered in 45/70 Government.
  • Two Remington Model 700s chambered in .270.
  • A Winchester Model 1894 chambered in 450 Marlin.
  • Etc.

    • But also thousands of rounds of ammo, a whole lot in loaded magazines.

    This video is almost 100% pure gun pr0n:

    Let this be a reminder: If you have a large firearms collection, you want to make sure you have an itemized and notarized will, so your designated heirs end up getting fair value for your collection.

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    Posted in Guns, video | 19 Comments »

    Ukraine: Don’t Assume Russia Will Win

    Monday, September 5th, 2022

    Defense analyst Anders Puck Nielsen says there’s a tendency for many to believe that, although Ukraine has put up a good fight, a Russian victory in the Russo-Ukrainian War is inevitable. (I assume he’s seeing these on the various MSM channels I stopped watching a long time ago, as the only place I see such assumptions these days is among comment trolls and the occasional ZeroHedge headline.)

    Some takeaways:

  • “When Russia launched the invasion of Ukraine back in February, many people assumed that it was going to be an easy win. It was not only Vladimir Putin who believed that they could finish this war within days or weeks. Many people thought so. And even after it became clear that there would not be a quick victory, many people still carried over this assumption that Russia is going to win eventually because that is the only possible outcome.” (I too thought a Russian victory was the most likely (though not certain) outcome in the first few days, before it become apparent just how badly bungled the invasion planning was, how fragile Russian supply lines were, how poor the communication was between different branches of the Russian military, and how neglected even basic maintenance was for Russian equipment.)
  • “They think of Russia as a giant. And then they think about Ukraine as a small country. But that is not really a good comparison.”
  • Unmentioned by Nielsen is that one reason they thought so is just how much old Soviet military equipment Russia still had lying around. That assumption was somewhat overstated, and, again, a whole lot of that equipment was poorly maintained.
  • Russia’s massive display of incompetence didn’t change the minds of many who still saw Russian victory as inevitable. “The assumption was that this just means it’s going to take longer, and then Russia is going to figure it out, and they are going to win.”
  • “We still have analysts who say that Ukraine could never push Russia back from the occupied territories, and that there has to be a negotiated solution where Ukraine gives something to Putin to end the war. And then these analyst also often seem to take it at face value when Putin or Lavrov or somebody else comes with threats about escalation.” (True, but I don’t think anyone pays serious attention to such people any more, if they ever did.)
  • Nielsen says there are a number of reasons why Russia can’t just carry out a mass mobilization, or start tossing nukes around.
  • Putin launched the war due an entire chain of bad assumptions, including those about the inevitability of Russian greatness.
  • “Ukraine is winning the war of attrition, and they will start pushing Russia backwards.”
  • “That’s why I think this idea that a Russian victory is inevitable is so dangerous. On the Western side, it leads to the belief that it is dangerous to provide Ukraine with heavy weapons. And this can mean that Ukraine won’t be able to finish the war as quickly as they otherwise could. And on the Russian side it means that they won’t be motivated for peace talks, even if the situation on the battlefield is awful.” (Not sure I agree here; The U.S., UK, Germany, and Poland have all transferred significant heavy weapons to Ukraine.)
  • “It will be extremely hard for the Russian leaders to embrace the idea that a defeat is possible. Like, not even that it is going to happen, but just that it could be a possibility. Because that would require them to question everything they believe to be true about Russia and being a great power. So they will be able to live in denial for a very long time.”
  • “If we want the war to end, we need Putin to understand that a defeat is a real possibility. And the best way to do that is to equip Ukraine with the weapons they need to win.”

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Media Watch, Military, video | 2 Comments »

    The Ukraine War Map Problem

    Saturday, September 3rd, 2022

    When the Russo-Ukrainian war kicked off back in February, I relied on https://liveuamap.com/ to track military action in the war, just as I had used their similar map when tracking the war against the Islamic State. However, after the initial phase of the war, LiveUAMap seemed to update less and less frequently, and it’s been practically useless for tracking progress in the Kherson counteroffensive.

    Today, most video commentators on the war seem to rely on https://deepstatemap.live. Here’s today’s snapshot from Kherson:

    Better than nothing, but not as good as LiveUAMap used to be.

    Here YouTuber Suchomimus compares different maps of the Kherson offensive, and how the differ on territory captured.

    He mentions the War_Mapper Twitter account, which I haven’t been following due to my ongoing Twitter timeout.

    He also mentions the official Russian-sourced map, which I’m not particularly interested in trusting.

    The Institute for the Study of War includes a map with their daily assessment updates, but they’re not interactive or particularly detailed.

    There are also a few YouTubers who do daily map updates. There’s Denys Davydov (“Hello, my friends…”). He’s Ukrainian and upfront about his bias, and covers the various clashes across the entire front (which makes his videos a bit long, and I tend to skip around for the bits I’m interested in). He suffers from “The map is the territory” syndrome, and isn’t a deep tactical thinker or versed in the intricacies of combined arms operations, but he’s useful if you understand his limitations.

    One of the maps he relies on (in addition to DeepState) is the MilitaryLand map, which looks really useful.

    Ukraine News TV relies on the DeepState map, and goes into considerable detail recount the day’s events.

    War in Ukraine isn’t great in terms of voiceover, but seem to have a lot of unit-specific information on his maps.

    For the sake of completeness, I note WeebUnion, who says he’s objective but seems pro-Russian (and his commenters even more so). He’s not a dynamic voiceover talent, and he begins this video with “Hello, comrades,” so…yeah, I don’t follow him.

    This is the map he’s using.

    This is a quick rundown of the map resources I’ve run across. If you know of other useful source, feel free to share them in the comments below.

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    Posted in Global Warming, Obama Scandals, video | 3 Comments »

    Peter Zeihan on The Kherson Counteroffensive

    Thursday, September 1st, 2022

    For those who think I rely too much on Ukraine updates and Peter Zeihan videos, enjoy this Peter Zeihan video update on Ukraine!

    Takeaways:

  • “Everything that the Russians were bad at before (propaganda, logistics, precision, training, maintenance, equipment), everything they were bad at before, they’re worse at now.”
  • Ukraine has moved from trying to stop the Russian advance with shoulder-mounted weaponry to longer-range heavy artillery, allowing them to hit ammo dumps, logistical hubs and high-value officers.
  • “The degree to which the Ukrainians are able to put targeting information, either from their own human network or signal intelligence that is provided by the Americans, and put it to use has been very impressive, and it has snarled the entirety of the Russian advance in both the east and the south.”
  • “Russia may be running out of ammunition.”
  • Russian doctrine calls for slow advances prepared by massive artillery barrages.
  • “They faced a massive industrial collapse in the 1990s that they never really covered recovered from.”

  • They have fought three artillery intensive wars since the Soviet collapse: two in Chechnya and then one in Syria. So now the Russians are attempting to advance over a front that’s a thousand miles long with a burn rate for their artillery in excess of 40,000 shells a day. Going through a relatively small by Soviet standards arsenal that has been acquired since the Soviet collapse, when the industrial system collapses. Well, any equipment any shells that they’re going to use that are not from that stack are things that were built before 1989, meaning that they’re in excess of 30 years old. We’ve seen reports several a year in Russia going back 30 years that, every once in a while, one of these shells [just] cooks off and the entire ammo dump goes up. It’s entirely possible that some of the explosions were seeing in places like Belograd or Western Russia are not actually being caused by the Ukrainians, but by the Russians manhandling of their own equipment. But regardless, that burn rate 40,000 a day is not something that anyone could maintain at length.

  • Thus Russia has been shooting at big static targets like train stations and malls. “They have the feel of being a little bit more than the Russians shooting at things to demonstrate to the world that the Russians can still shoot at things. Tanks and infantry are not following up on any of these attacks.”
  • “Kherson was the only major city that Ukrainians ever lost to the Russians, the only regional capital.”
  • “All the normal things that plague offensives are appropriate to think about here. They trigger higher casualties among the attackers than the defenders. They require more troops, They require better logistics. They’re more vulnerable to disruption. All of that stands. Also, you have to consider that this isn’t simply Ukraine’s first significant offensive in the war, but this is Ukraine’s first significant offensive ever.”
  • “The Ukrainians have continually surprised to the upside, and the Russians have continually surprised at the downside. So what should have been a wildly unbalanced war that should have been over four months ago all of a sudden, if not a conflict among equals, is suddenly looking like a little bit more of a fair-ish fight.”
  • Summary of the Kherson situation so far, including damage to the bridges, covered here and here.
  • No guarantee that the Ukrainians will win in Kherson, but it obviously offers them the best chance.
  • “If it proves that the Ukrainians are successful [Russian] forces are going to have to evacuate on foot, they are going to have to leave all of their gear behind…this would be the single biggest military transfer to Ukraine of the post-war environment, and certainly of this war…all of a sudden, the Ukrainians might actually have what they need.” Sometimes Zeihan has a tendency to overstate things, and I think he does that here. Yes, they’ll probably capture some usable heavy equipment, but the estimates I hear are some 20,000 Russian troops in Kherson, and I’m not sure how many functional military vehicles will be left in usable condition after such heavy fighting. They might well pick up significant quantities of towed artillery.
  • He talks about the importance of taking Nova Kakhkovka, and controlling the irrigation gates for the canals that feed occupied Crimea.
  • If Ukraine retakes Kherson, they might theoretically be able to take out the Kerch Strait Bridge. (Note that this is only true if they actually have the ATACMS missiles for their HIMARS that the Biden Administration says we haven’t given them yet, as I calculate a distance of roughly 179 miles from Nova Kakhkovka to the bridge.) “Crimea goes from being an incredibly strategically valuable platform that the Russians can use to launch into Ukraine proper, into the most significant military vulnerability that post-war Russia has ever had.” Eh, I think I have to go with the Atomic Bomb between 1945 and August of 1949.
  • “If Ukraine is going to win this war, this is how it’s going to start.”

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 3 Comments »

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