Pretty brutal thread on the cost to UKR holding and then withdrawing from Vuhledar
Brave people. Truly heroic. Vuhledar is a somewhat hollow victory for Russia as it cost them 70,000 lives and I believe in the order of 3,000 items of heavy armour.
Well, I said my mate was back to his usual ebullient self. He never shirks admitting when he's wrong, but he ain't shy with "I told you so" either. And neither is he one to downplay his part in things.
Regular readers will know his thing for numbers, maths and spreadsheets.
Today's missive is mostly about that .... and good news. With a bit of Tank Girl action thrown in at the end. Oh, and on a side note, I don't know if I mentyioned, Buddha-nov decided that the battlefield wasn't really for him. So he is back up to mischief. ... but with help.
Anyway, here you go.
"
Did you hear it happen? A powerful movement occurred in the force and millions of voices screamed out in pain and terror.
This week November happened, albeit 4 to 8 weeks early. Much patting on the head happened today, and I must admit that I patted my own back so hard that I sprained both shoulders.
War is won by the party that have resources left 15 minutes longer than the other side, this is axiomatic. It was what got me started on what in the end became the largest mathematical statistic project during a war, and that at least in part shaped how the war was, and is, fought.
Ukraine could never win an outright classic war against Russia; it just simply did not have the combat power to achieve big enough battlefield victories against a post-superpower state with vast stockpiles of arms.
Nor did Russia for that matter have the resources to force a rapid victory. Yes, they did have the hardware, but they would never have the consumables to win rapidly, especially since their doctrine is incredibly wasteful in regards of both equipment, consumables and manpower.
Therefore, it became a race of attrition between Ukraine and Russia, and with Ukraine husbanding all resources to the point of slowly giving up territory, they could attrit (grind) Russia more effectively.
Also, neither side had enough consumables, even though Russia for the first two years had a clear advantage due to their much larger stockpiles. But, in the end it was a foregone conclusion that the West would be able to ramp up production enough to overcome Russia.
The difference in scale of economy was just simply to great. And a lot of political and diplomatic work was put in to make certain that Russia couldn’t dip into the large production powerhouses of China and India.
India was simple, all we had to do was to put in orders so large that not a single shell could go the wrong way. China took some arm twisting, but they did not in the end want to lose their Western markets and end up in an all-out trade war.
The work
In the beginning I had a quite simplistic view on things and concentrated on military stuff. How much shells, tanks, artillery etcetera had Russia visavi their rate of loss and visavi their production capacity.
Then I went into demographics of Russia, births, deaths, invalids, demographic maps, Russian refugees, etcetera. This gave an ever-improving image of how many soldiers Russia could potentially lose.
The Soviet Union was a funny place, they built enough weapons systems, stockpiles, etcetera, to fit their population. In other words, why have more tanks than you have soldiers to man said tanks?
As the Soviet Union an equal amount of arms remained in the Soviet Union compared to the number of Russians living in what became Russia, the other arms were already in those new countries that sprouted forth as the Soviet Union fell.
Ukraine ended up with a rather hefty chunk of it to begin with, and even though it lost their nukes and strategic bombers, the conventional arms stayed in situ.
After that it was just to keep track of the stockpiles and arms depots, and most crucially the amount “boofed” by Ukraine. To that I just needed to add realistic production numbers. From then on, I just finetuned it a bit.
What nobody seems to have realised is that Ukraine constantly produced the real numbers for publication. Punderati and media constantly believed that those numbers was fictional, but those numbers are the same as was fed into the equations.
And quite early on the numbers said that sometime in, or around, November 2024 would be the date when Russian stockpiles and arms production could no longer sustain Russia’s combat power.
From that point Russia would slowly have less combat power in regards of tanks, artillery, armour, soldiers, airplanes, air defence, etcetera. It was never the date when victory would be achieved.
Russia will have enough combat power to hold on to its current holdings, or even attempt new offensives for all of 2024 up to summer 2025, after that they will start to be pushed backwards at an increasing rate until autumn 2026 when all of Ukraine will be liberated militarily.
It after all takes an outrageous amount of time to destroy that much equipment. But as I have written I do not think that Russia will remain the current Russia for that long.
And that brings us to the human side of the equation, and the point where I had to turn over the work to people that could sift through data much more effectively than I ever could, both from a computational standpoint, and the standpoint of staffing.
Almost a year ago EU took over that job, using more computer power than entire countries have, sifting through Russian statistics, economic news, remaining power-stations, operational heating plants, fertilizer trains, seed import… in the end more than 1 000 key figures was tracked, economic and in regards of human comfort items.
Some of those factors was found to roughly correspond with the November prognosis for military stuff, and an idea was formed. Can we tweak sanctions and other economic means to achieve a simultaneous combined effect?
The economy was set to become problematic around now, but some tweaking was done to make certain that Russia would run dry now, among them hardened sanctions on banking, and shutting down other currencies from being tradeable, among them the Yuan.
At the same time EU took over as the largest black-market runner of components to Russia, but there was naturally a twist, a percentage of those was either malfunctioning, or programmed to stop functioning at a critical point in time, for some reason the date of functionality was just prior to November.
We also “constricted” Russia’s ability to get seeds and spare parts for their agro-industrial sector, and key ingredients needed to produce high-quality artificial fertilizer. They obviously had all the ammonium nitrate and phosphor ever needed, but you need trace amounts of other stuff, and those shipments went “poof”.
Combine that with diesel shortages and general price increases, combined with Russia forcing farmers to sell cheaply, and the harvests dropped considerably. And then nature did us a solid one, we got locusts, draughts, floodings, the works.
Normally Russia would obviously just have bought enough food to feed their population, but they are out of tradeable cash, and on top of that they can’t transfer money out to pay with. And all of their gold production is now used to pay for components for the war industry, their gold reserve did just run dry (oops).
This is why we just saw Russia buying sunflower seeds and tangerines, paying with potatoes and rye. It is never a good sign when you have to barter for food this early after the farming season. Another sign of how hard and fast this is becoming a problem, the amount of grain theft is now skyrocketing in Russia.
This week Russia admitted that they can’t guarantee electricity, fuel, heating and food during the winter. This sounds soft enough, “guarantee”, is after all not “no chance in hell”. But, when Russia states something like this things are about to get truly gnarly.
This means that the military combat power is now slowly dwindling, their economy is on the decline, and that human comforts and necessities can’t be guaranteed.
This is why Ukraine went so hard after hydrocarbon facilities, electricity infrastructure and thermal power plants. It was carefully calculated to also coincide with the rest.
Somehow my meta-war of mathematics became the prevailing tool to see the war over time, and it in real-time started to influence how the war itself was run to achieve the decided effects and affect the long-term planning of how to conduct the war.
The most important part is that it created the yearlong attrition phase and why offensive after offensive was cancelled. No offensive operation would have brought us faster to the desired result after all, and the Kursk offensive is meant to drag Russia into fighting inside Russia instead of in Ukraine.
Now
One might assume that this is a moment to celebrate. I would say emphatically no to this, now starts the long end game against a stubborn chess player hellbent on not giving up the game.
We still need to continue to grind Russia’s combat power downwards, remember that it is still higher than Ukraine’s. And we need to degrade it so much that Ukraine can go on a long and sustained offensive to drive what remain of Russia out of Ukraine, while at the same time fighting Russia inside Russia.
Currently the combat power ratio is 1:1.8 in favour of Russia, and we need it to go all the way to 2:1 in favour of Ukraine, a tall order, but doable with time. It is also good to remember that now we are increasing in production so fast that Ukraine is in absolute terms increasing in combat power and weight of fire on the battlefield, while at the same time Russia is in absolute terms losing in the same metrics.
After the victory in Vuhledar it is now clear that Russia is against the ropes, and no longer able to perform successful offensive actions.
They will obviously try to move forward from Vuhledar, but that is literally and figuratively uphill for them. Ukraine is holding the high ground, and Russia will be extending their logistics routes as they go.
At least that would have been the case previously, but now it instead seems like Russia will pull out their all of a sudden surplus units from the area and send them to Kursk instead.
Ukraine is also definitely winded by now, but still able to make minor offensive pushes in key areas.
Regardless, both sides are quietly happy about the soon to set in Rasputitsa. Russia might even have collapsed in the East if it didn’t happen, and Ukraine need time to reconstitute tired heavy units fighting in Kursk and other key areas.
And here comes the good sauce. Ukraine’s grinding warfare is eminently possible to do during Rasputitsa, whilst Russia’s meat-and-tank waves are impossible to do during Rasputitsa.
This means that as the winter campaign sets in Ukraine will be comparably stronger coming into the offensive winter season than Russia will be.
Future
Now I have been asked to help with calculating when a military victory will happen, and that requires somewhat different metrics. At the same time, we will attempt to figure out what will happen with Russia, and where and what will be the breaking point.
And here is the glaring difference between the 4 parties. Russia believe that they can still win by being donkey stubborn. The US believe that Ukraine can fight Russia into a standstill and then negotiate a settled peace agreement, but this is shifting a bit now towards going for battle victories forcing Russia to the table.
EU has a completely different and more technocratic viewpoint, a viewpoint that I share based on my knowledge and experience. Yes, Ukraine can win a total military victory in about two years, but at a truly staggering cost for Ukraine. A cost that I believe should not have to be paid.
And here comes the bureaucratic and technocratic brilliance in how EU sees the war in its totality. From the aloof ivory tower of Brussels, it has coldly looked at all of the costs incurred upon Russia, and out of that devised plans for crushing Russia, partially on the battlefield, but mainly economically and from a human comfort’s standpoint.
The plan is brutal to say the least. The plan is to starve and freeze millions of Russians until they revolt or the entire country collapses, at the same time as Ukraine produces what military pain it can on the battlefield and inside Russia.
It is not a nice way to win a war, but EU doesn’t give a single **** about Russia, that ship has sailed a long time ago. All EU is bothered with is to keep Europe and the applicant states safe, and to save lives in Ukraine.
And if that comes at the cost of millions of Russians, so be it, Russia chose the war, not Ukraine and Europe.
And there is no surprise that right now Ukraine is revealing new fearsome and very advanced cruise-drones like the Palyanytsia (Loaf), Ulamkyy (Debris) and the ballistic missile Nevodomyy (Unknown). The latter named after Russia blaming unknown causes when things explode.
Those and other upcoming fearsome and advanced weaponry are there to be able to take out Russia’s fuel, electricity and heating during the winter, while at the same time taking out air bases and other strategic military targets, and all of it is coming out of EU factories as parts kits, making them officially into Ukrainian weapons.
Whatever comes out of the winter season will be interesting to see.
Anyway, the goal is to crush Russia in a million ways to achieve a complete and utter victory outside of the battlefield, shortening the war considerably. It is now all up to the Russian population to draw the correct conclusions from their misfortunes and go out and revolt. Or for someone to coup to make it stop.
Why does not EU bat an eyelid at doing this to Russia? Because EU is democratic, and it is up to the population to take responsibility for the leaders that they have elected, and whatever people may want to accept. Putin was democratically elected 3 times in open democratic elections, it is after that he cheated his way to power, more for vanity reasons than he would actually have lost those elections.
Russians truly love Putin on average, and they truly do want a strong Stalin like leader. So yes, they are responsible for him. They formed him in their liking, more or less.
In a democracy you have the Obligation to protest if your leaders go entirely dingbats, end of story. If not, you will have to take the consequences.
One should also remember that Ursula von der Leyen sees all of her hundreds of millions of citizens as her own children, and like any mother she goes apeshit bonkers if a bully is threatening or beating her children and is prepared to go very far to protect her own. There’s a reason I call her Momsie, those who say she has “only” 7 children of her own are mistaken, she has jolly well adopted every single European.
Be nice and she is very nice, claw one of kids and woe be god.
End of story
Turns out I was right.
I now get to go around smiling my most infuriating smile while rubbing in my favourite phrase: “Told you so!”
And then Tank Girl happened
As I was about to post this, I got news from her. According to the latest forecast there’s two weeks to Rasputitsa.
She decided to create two weeks of living hell for the Russian units in Kursk, and press on even harder in the Seym Pocket and towards Kurchatov.
To be able to do this she has formed an entire division and put that into the fray. It consists of a mechanized brigade, a motorized infantry brigade, an artillery brigade, an air mobile brigade, and to round it off a logistics and support brigade, plus the ordinary battalions and other stuff.
The mechanized brigade is using Challenger tanks from the UK, and the Air Mobile Brigade is an entire drone brigade.
At the same time, she used special forces to break up defence positions between her and Kurchatov and used Debris missiles to take out an ammo depot inside Kurchatov Town.
This Division strength unit was formed by units that became redundant along the Southern Frontline, the mech Brigade is from Robotyne par example. It is telling about how much troops Russia has redirected when Ukraine can move such units out from an area without risking a Russian offensive down there.
Due to the inordinate numbers of drones that 3 complete Air Mobile Brigades can loft at the same time in Kursk, plus drones from within other less drone specialised units, is the explanation for the very high numbers of Russian casualties here, and they are now increasing by the day.
Other post news
Sweden is airlifting the equipment for an entire new Brigade of CV90s. All of it are newbuilds containing various types of CV90s, plus a bunch of Archer artillery platforms. The reason for the airlift is that the European and Swedish rail-networks are now saturated, and Ukraine need the stuff now so that the new Brigade can finalise training during Rasputitsa.
This Brigade has twice the weight of fire compared to previous Heavy Brigades, so it has gotten the moniker “Superheavy Brigade”. In the airlifts is also something hitherto not seen, but I will wait with saying what that is.
With winter coming Ukraine has started to bombard the most essential Russian commodity. This night no less than two vodka factories got blown up, and a general price hike in vodka prices is expected since demand now outstrips availability of this Russian lifegiver. "