Posts Tagged ‘Anders Puck Nielsen’

Russia Running Out Of Soldiers And Shells?

Sunday, April 9th, 2023

As Russia enters the 14th month of its 72 hour campaign to take Kiev, there are signs that its meat-grinder approach to combat is depleting the exact resources it needs to win.

First up: Anders Puck Nielsen on Russia’s likely manpower shortage:

  • He looks at various how and low counts for determining Russian casualty rates, then builds his arguments around one in the middle.

  • There is a rule of thumb that is often mentioned, that for every dead soldier there are three wounded. So if we take some round numbers, and remember it’s not actually important if they are a little bit off. It doesn’t change the point that I am getting to if you think real the number is a little lower. But say that on average about 500 Russian soldiers have been killed every day since the mobilization in September, when Russia also really started to have very big attrition numbers. And if we then make a conservative estimate and say that for every dead soldier, there have been two wounded, then we get that the Russian fighting force has been decreased by about 1500 soldiers every day. Then we can divide 300,000 by 1500, and we get that they have soldiers for about 200 days, until the Russian army will have consumed all those mobilized soldiers. This is not exact science. It’s just a rough estimate to illustrate Russia’s manpower problem. Putin announced the mobilization on 21 September, and incidentally 200 days after that is about now. It’s on 9 April 2023.

  • “Putin probably should have announced the second wave of mobilization months ago, but he didn’t. So that is why military analysts are talking about a Russian manpower shortage.”
  • “Those 300,000 soldiers that Russia mobilized in the fall are probably not there anymore.”

    • Second up is a report that both sides are rationing artillery shells in advance of Ukraine’s anticipated counteroffensive.

    Artillery units on both sides of the line, despite the continued duels, are reportedly dialing back fire missions to save up ammunition for the long-awaited Ukrainian counteroffensive.

    Russian milblogger Alexander Khodakovsky claims that those Russian units not involved in ongoing offensives have had ammunition supplies seriously curtailed. Khodakovsky attributed the rationing to concerns about the potential offensive.

    At the same time, a frontline account from the Washington Post highlighted Ukrainian artillery crews similarly conserving shells. While embedded with an artillery platoon in Ukraine’s 56th Motorized Brigade, Isabelle Khurshudyan and Kamila Hrabchuk reported the unit’s 152mm howitzers used to fire more than 20-30 shells a day. That number has dwindled to fewer than three.

    The nearby units equipped with NATO 155mm caliber guns are reportedly facing less of a shortage than the Warsaw Pact-era guns. Citing an anonymous Ukrainian military official, the report claimed Ukraine is still firing 7,700 shells a day. Russian shelling reportedly dwarfs even that figure. Ukraine’s incredible artillery consumption remains a concern for NATO as Western production lines struggle to keep supplies moving.

    Russia’s grinding style of combat requires a fresh supply of bodies and artillery shells to function, and those are the things (along with money, high tech munitions and global sympathy) that Russia seems to be running short on…

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Military, video | 16 Comments »

    Turkey Bitchslaps Russia

    Saturday, November 5th, 2022

    Commenter Greg The Class Traitor asked about this on another thread, so I thought I would throw this Anders Puck Nielsen video up with a bit of context.

    Basically Ukraine managed to hit (but not sink) some Russian warships in Sevastopol harbor with some waterborne drones, and Putin threw a hissy fit, declaring the Ukrainian grain export deal was off. Turkey promptly went “No it isn’t” and said exports would continue with Turkish flags on the grain ships in question, causing Russia to back down and rejoin the deal pretty much immediately.

    Historically, there’s no love lost between Turkey and Russia. (Honestly, you could swap out any other of either of those two country’s neighbors in that sentence, and it would still be true.) The fact that there were ten different Russo-Turkish wars (plus the Crimean War and World War I) should give you an inkling of how deep and bitter that enmity extends. That’s one of the factors that made NATO such a useful ally against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Even today, Russia and Turkey are fighting a quasi-proxy war between Russian-backed Armenia and Turkish-backed Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh, and Russia is on the losing end there as well.

    Let’s look at Russia’s backdown over the grain deal.

    Takeaways:

  • “It looks like a diplomatic defeat in a stand-off with Turkey, and it shows that Russia is essentially unable to control the maritime domain in the Black Sea.”
  • “Russia was clearly very upset about the attack. It was a big deal in the Russian media, and they put a lot of effort into portraying it as a terrorist attack. And just to be clear, when there is a war going on, it is not terrorism to attack the opponent’s military.” This is clearly a “Duh!” point, but one worth spelling out given the vast swarms of pro-Russian bots who argue otherwise.
  • “The deal was made such that it had a duration of 120 days, so it was up for renewal in November…For quite a while is has seemed that Russia has been unhappy about the grain deal. I don’t think they had expected that it would be such a big success.”
  • “As I am recording this we are up to 477 shipments and more than 10 million tons of cargo. That’s a lot. I don’t think the Russians had expected Ukraine to be able to make a safe corridor that quickly.”
  • “If we remember how the war was going back in July, then Russia was still on the offensive. People were still talking about Russia closing the land corridor to Transnistria and maybe taking Odessa. So from a Russian perspective the idea might well have been that the deal would never work. Because it was going to take months for Ukraine to make a safe corridor, and before that time, Ukraine would have lost the access to the ports.”
  • “But what happened was that the grain deal did become a success. Ukraine has made a lot of money from exporting its agricultural products, and it has reduced the prices of food on the global markets.”
  • “What this grain does is that it reduces the prices on the global market, so that people in the third world can also afford to buy food. And then it helps the economy because it reduces inflation. But for Russia right now it is a point to have a big economic crisis in the West, and the Ukrainian economy is supposed to be terrible.”
  • “Turkey was not going to accept that the deal would fall on the ground. So they made it clear that the grain shipments were going to continue, and that they were going to provide the ships to do it, if necessary. And that gave Russia the challenge that if they withdrew from the deal, but it didn’t have any consequences, then it would be embarrassing. Because it would demonstrate that Russia is unable to control the events.”
  • “The Russian navy can’t actually operate with surface warships close to the Ukrainian coastline, because Ukraine has land based anti-ship missiles, so it would be really hard to interdict the grain traffic. And using long-distance air strikes or submarine attacks on UN cargo ships that are transporting grain to the world to avoid a food crisis…it would turn everybody against Russia. It’s just impossible to explain.”
  • “Maybe it could even lead to a military confrontation with Turkish warships that were protecting the shipments. So in other words, Erdogan called Putin’s bluff.”
  • “What this shows is basically two things. It shows that the relationship between Turkey and Russia, it now that Turkey that has the stronger position. It is now Erdogan that tells Putin how things will be. And then it shows that the Russian Black Sea Fleet can’t enforce a blockade on Ukrainian harbors. And if they can’t do that, then I will say that it is getting more and more difficult to see what the role of the Russian navy actually is in this war.”

    • Plus, if Russia had actually attacked Turkish ships, that would probably lead directly to a military conflict with NATO. And while I’m sure that before Russo-Ukrainian War, there were many Russian ultranationalists who loudly declared that Russia could win a war against NATO, Russian military performance has been so lousy that only the most hopelessly self-deluded could believe that now.

    (By the way, my Internet was restored Friday. It turns out three people on my block were affected, so it was a narrowspread outage, evidently because the “traps” were too old to handle a recent network upgrade. I’ll try to do the LinkSwarm on Sunday, if I have time.)

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    Posted in Economics, Foreign Policy, Military, video | 7 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 »

    Ukraine’s Attrition Strategy

    Wednesday, August 24th, 2022

    A lot of questions have popped up about the much-talked about Ukrainian counteroffensive for Kherson, among the biggest of which is “Where is it?”

    Anders Puck Nielsen, a military analyst at the Royal Danish Defence College, has some answers. What Ukraine is doing right now is not a traditional counteroffensive, but a prolonged attrition strategy to degrade Russian logistics and forces.

    Some takeaways:

  • Usually you want some level of operational secrecy, but Ukrainian officials have been talking up the “Kherson Offensive” since at least June.
  • “I think it was meant as a kind of trap. It was not enough for Ukraine to liberate Kherson, but they also wanted to take out a lot of Russian soldiers in the process.”
  • “This area west of Dnipro is probably the one area in the whole operational theater where Ukraine has all the advantages, and Russia has all the disadvantages. So it is better for Ukraine to fight as many Russians as possible in this area than it is to fight them later on somewhere else.”
  • Putin was faced with withdrawing or reinforcing. “And of course Putin was not going to give up Kherson without a fight, so Russia started pouring reinforcements into the area.”
  • The phrase that describes Ukraine’s strategy is “accelerated attritional warfare.”
  • Ukraine’s strategy: “To cause the Russians to have as many casualties as possible rather than defending specific pieces of terrain. And then what we see around Kherson is that Ukraine has figured out a way to accelerate that attrition among the Russians by luring them into a trap where they send reinforcements into an essentially undefendable area.”
  • So the frontline isn’t moving, but “the Ukrainians expect them to run out of supplies eventually, and then it will be easy.”
  • “I talked about the bridges, and how Ukraine can target the Russian logistics by destroying the bridges. And I also talked about how this war seems to have entered into what can be called the third phase of the war.”
  • Phase 1: Russia invades, tries to take Kiev, and fails, because their logistics suck. Advantage Ukraine.
  • Phase 2: Russia grinds out gains in Dobas, with logistics adequate to the task. Advantage Russia.
  • Phase 3 (current): Ukraine starts degrading vulnerable Russian forces in the south. “So they are going very hard after the Russian logistics systems. And that is what the attacks in Crimea and other places long behind the frontlines are about.”
  • “But the point of the attacks is exactly to make the Russian logistics as complicated as possible. To make the supply lines as long as they can possibly be. Because Russia now has to pull the ammunition depots even further away from the frontline, and they have to use trucks instead of railroads and stuff like that.”
  • “And the supply lines in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts are actually beginning to look very much like they did in northern Ukraine in phase one of the war.”

  • “That accelerated attrition [and] the sustained attacks on the Russian supply lines will mean that Ukraine can be in a pretty good position after the battle of Kherson. They will have all the territory west of the Dnipro. And it will be very easy to defend afterwards, because Russia is not going to come back across the river once they have lost that foothold. And then Ukraine will have freed up all those forces from the Kherson area that they can redeploy for a new counteroffensive somewhere else. So that could for example be an attack from the north down toward the Melitopol area. And Russia would be in a really tough position for such a fight. Because they don’t have more forces they can move from the Donbas area, because they already did that for the battle for Kherson. And they don’t have good logistics because Ukraine will have been hitting the infrastructure for months.

    • Conclusion: There’s no guarantee of Ukrainian success, but it’s hard to see what Russia can do to counter this strategy. “After that Ukraine will redeploy and make a new counteroffensive somewhere else. Perhaps a Christmas offensive or something like that.”

    Winter offenses are always a hard sledding in this part of Europe, but the rest of his analysis accords pretty closely with what we’ve been seeing.

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    Posted in Military, unions, video | 21 Comments »