Think they've took the "Ultras" thing to a new level .......
I can also imagine Kaliningrad being a major flash point in the near future, especially if issues with Belarus and Russia arise.Pretty informative one this.
"It has been mentioned that the offensive near Bakhmut is going slow, and that it is likely to not be the real one.
So for those wondering why, and is it the real offensive? Some answers, and a bit of a background.
Background
The Grand Total of the Russian Army is currently believed to be in total 600 000 men across all of the shebang of Russia.
There's also roughly 100 000 each that belong to the navy and the air force, but let us not count those here.
With "army" I mean every type of land fighting force, including air defence, train force, logistics and supply, etcetera etcetera.
Just the train force was 70 000 men strong at the beginning of the war, these are engineering soldiers tasked with maintaining and defending the expansive train network throughout Russia, and during war also expanding it into newly occupied territories.
This number also does not discern between PMCs like Wagner, regular army, Occupied Ukrainian Republic Militias, and so on and so forth...
In Bakhmut I have been lazy and said that Ukraine is fighting 1/3rd of the Russian army.
It is true, but it is a figure that must be explained better.
First we need to take into account that only half of the 600 000 are combat units used in a frontline setting (or as reserves for combat duty).
So. 300 000 troops. This is an extreme number, a typical western army has 1:4 ratio and not a 1:2 ratio.
This is indicative of the supply and maintenance issues that Russia has.
It is only possible to have a 1:2 ratio, and that is that you do not have large reserve forces, and this is now the case, almost all of the combat units in Russia is on the front lines.
So, 300 000 men in combat units, but 100 000 of those are in the Far East and along the western borders (spread extremely thin towards the West, like Russia does not really see NATO as a threat...)
So, even though the total Russian army contingent in Ukraine is 400 000 men strong there are only 200 000 dedicated to fighting and equipped to do so.
Out of those 100 000 is in the Bakhmut part of the frontline.
Another 50 000 is in the rest of Donbas, all the way from the Belgorod border down to Vuhledar, and from Vuhledar the entire way to the Kinburn Spit you have the last 50 000.
Behind them are logistics and air defence etcetera, but not combat units.
So, in fact half of Russias army in Ukraine is tied down in Bakhmut.
Russia has spent the last 10 months digging line after line of defensive lines, some has been dug behind unmoving frontlines, and some as the Russian offensive has pushed the front forwards.
There are now 5 complete defensive lines, an insane number by any stretch of the imagination since we are talking about trenches.
In the first world war there was only two complete, and never more than 3 in depth.
But to make things even worse, there are also incomplete lines, especially in Bakhmut proper, and then they have built fortifications and strongpoints (mid-thing between a trench and a fort).
So, now let me rephrase the western pundit narrative that Ukraine is not doing a serious offensive in Bakhmut and that things is incredibly slow...
Here goes:
Ukraine has in the first 5 days of their offensive taken more than 20 square kilometres of the most well defended and fortified piece of land to have ever existed in human history, and Ukraine has broken two complete defence lines in two different sites and cleared them over large distances.
With that sentence the discussion about it being real and why it is taking time should be dead, but I want to talk about another reason it takes time.
Deathometer
This is a direct translation of the Swedish term for it.
The Russian phrase is "sanitation number", the US uses acronyms as per usual in the form of KIA.
Prigozhin is basically using the sanitation numbers as a way to brag about how hard they are fighting, my jaw dropped over how pleased he was over having 20 percent dead per month... let that sink in. He was pleased about a disastrous number.
The Russian army is not much better, but they do not openly talk about it.
Let us just state this: Russia does not give a single **** about how many soldiers die in this war.
10 000 dead is a good deal as long as the generals get to move their desks 1 meter towards Berlin.
Russia just rushes head on into the Ukrainian trenches and fortifications with little or no armoured vehicles in Bakhmut.
Quite like lemmings running over a cliff abyss.
Ukraine is a democratic state, and democratic run armies tend to try to save lives of their soldiers.
Ukraines much lower Deathometer numbers in the war is often said to be due to mainly having defended themselves, and the 5:1 ratio of dead when defending.
Problem is obviously that this is hogwash.
Ukraine has performed 3 very counter offensives already, namely the Kyiv push, the Kharkiv to Kreminna push, and the liberation of Northern Kherson.
In fact, Ukraine has performed much larger offensives than Russia in the last year.
So, how come that Ukraine has a ratio that is 1:5 against Russia (it is better) while doing massive offensives?
This is an extremely complex question, I will limit the answer otherwise I will write a book.
1. Better leadership on both a strategic and tactical level picking their fights more wisely.
2. Better supply and maintenance chain.
3. Better artillery preparation of the battlefield.
4. Usage of better and more abundant equipment.
This means that in Bakhmut the leadership has preidentified weaknesses, then they take out the Russian supply chains through masterful artillery preparation, and then they storm using large amounts of breaching charges and other specialised equipment.
And, they do it only when they are as sure as possible that they will succeed, and then do it in overwhelming numbers to limit contact time.
All of this takes a lot of time to do.
In all of the above is the answer to the question about why it is so slow.
To that I counter how steady the progress has been, and how deliberate it has been.
I bet that Ukraine has achieved every single daily goal, and that is quite something in a battle of this magnitude.
Is it working, well Ukraine so far in this offensive against the most well defended and fortified area has a sub 1:1 deathometer rating.
A final interesting tidbit.
For every sanitised russian there is 1 injured and 2 captured.
Remember that they shoot everyone leaving the lines backwards, and that includes their own injured...
This is why Russia has so low injured numbers.
So, for every day Russias army in Bakhmut become 2 percent smaller...
The Real Offensive?
There are two parts to this.
The first one is an emphatic "This is the real offensive!".
It is the part that will take the longest time to win, and it is the currently most politically important.
Because Ukraine must crush the psyche of the Russian population and leadership and hammer in that they are pathetic losers.
So, opening up the Offensive Season with breaking 1/3rd of the entire Russian army in Bakhmut will give them at least a TKO over Russia.
Offensive Season is an apt expression.
I have the entire time stated that Ukraine can, and will, perform up to 3 major offensives at the same time, and a couple of smaller offensives to just rattle the Russian army.
So why is Ukraine not doing those 3 now?
Kherson is ongoing, and that is the other major offensive, it is just that Ukraine is not going full gungho here to save lives of their soldiers. Instead they are developing and slowly expanding their 3 beach heads here, and they are also waiting for something huge to arrive.
Over in Vuhledar artillery preparation is ongoing with sniper precission, and small areas are taken on an almost daily basis.
Here the offensive clearly is at a shaping stage.
Here Ukraine is also waiting for a huge arrival.
The Huge Arrival
To save lives Ukraine must be able to win the artillery war at depth.
For every kilometre of depth that Ukraine can deny Russian logistics and force that back towards Russia is saving thousands of Ukrainian lives.
Problem is that Ukraine previously had barrel artillery up to 50km, and GMLRS up to 80km.
Now they have Storm Shadows, HRIM-2s and Gungnirs, but these are very rare birds, just a few hundred spread out over a year.
Heck not even the US has enough of cruise missiles to hurt Russia as bad as is needed.
But, the Storm Shadows et Al., are just a stop gap measure, that was originally intended to drop the Kersh Bridge and sink ships of the Russian navy.
Ukraine can't waste those valuable resources on forcing the bulk of Russian supply lines backwards, so instead they do a highly important strategic target or two per day.
What Ukraine is waiting for is the mass arrival of huge amounts of PrSM and GLSDBs.
The GLSDBs was delayed somewhat for technical reasons in regards of the old reused rockets that needed to be individually X-rayed, on top of that enough launchers needed to be built to make a difference.
It speaks volumes about the insane combined production power of Boeing/SAAB that they will be able to churn out 10 000 of the buggers for the offensive, albeit a tad delayed.
Currently this mass weapon with a range of 150km and a precission of sub 1 meter is rolling towards Ukraine on massive trains that are so heavy that they are damaging the tracks of the Öresund Bridge between Sweden and Denmark.
Fun fact, the trains running are so heavy that SAAB had to borrow specially adapted I-ORE ore trains from LKAB to even getting them to move, the I-ORE is the worlds strongest electric locomotive.
Making the trains lighter is not an option, there are just to many trains running towards Ukraine now, there are no more track-slots available and the bulk of SAABs slots are for the 2 million shells they are producing for Ukraine this year.
Anyway, I am waffling...
This means that in about 2 weeks Ukraine has enough of the GLSDBs stockpiled to start cutting Russian supply lines 150km deep.
Now PrSM (PRISM) are those weird looking Himars cassettes with 2 missiles in them.
Those have already been photographed in Ukraine. They have a range of 499km.
Raytheon went to Boeing, BAE Systems and SAAB to get enough production capacity to produce them far faster than the original contract to the US Army stipulated.
500 has been delivered, and a further 1 500 are inbound.
So far Ukraine has used them very sparingly, but they have already been photographed several times being used by Ukraine against Russian targets.
The PrSM and the GLSDBs had been promised to be delivered in late April, but not even the worlds largest companies could ramp up production fast enough.
And Ukraine knowing that they are weeks away at that stage chose to delay, and only start one Real Offensive, and doing prep work on the other Two.
By doing that they are saving thousands of lives, and as it turns out just the threat of losing in Bakhmut is creating giant arsed waves in Moscow on it's own.
I can understand Moscow.
If my strongest fortress was the first part of the expected Offensive then I would really get weak in my knees.
If half of your army in Ukraine is being pushed backwards in a steady manner, and you expect two more offensives... then you basically know you have lost.
The army knows this very well, problem is that the civilians are still to stupid to grasp it.
Over the next 5 months the Offensive Season will unfold and it will contain at least 2 more big offensives, some will be fast manouver warfare, and some will be extremely slow and look like nothing ever seen previously and being done at a speed that would impress even a threetoed sloth.
Third Space
As I went through Officer College I learned tactics and War School thought me strategy.
These are the two classic spaces (fields) of warfare.
Problem is just that this is not enough for Ukraine to win.
They can win both tactically and strategically and in the end push out all of the Russian army out of Ukraine without winning the war.
To get a decisive win in a war you need to decapitate the political hand of the opposing country, or get them to admit defeat and go home.
The latter option is not gonna happen, Russia is just to damn stupid and stubborn to admit defeat without being occupied.
And, occupying Russia is not an option for two main reasons.
The first is the blasted fact that Russia is way to large for Ukraine to successfully occupy.
The second one is that Russia would use nukes before Moscow fell to the army, so a partial win by decapitating the capital city of the enemy is not an option either.
So, how in the name of feck do you win then?
I call this the Third Space, and that is to by military means win politically over the opposing force.
Ukraine can only win by humiliating the political leadership of Russia through devastating political battlefield wins on their own soil (mostly).
And here the targets are different than what would be tactical or strategic wins.
Grinding up 5 defense lines on two sides of Bakhmut is a tactical victory, encircling it is a tactical win.
Cutting the landbridge is a big tactical win.
But, none of this is a Third Space win, especially not the latter landbridge cutting.
Inside of Ukraine there are 3 Third Space targets that would crush everything that the Russian leadership has stated as unmutable truths and objectives. Losing them would expose all of Russia as feeble meowling weaklings and turning all that propaganda into lies smeared like **** in the face of the Russian population.
These 3 Ukrainian targets are:
1. Bakhmut, thanks to the Russian sexual fetish and 10 months of unending Russian propaganda about how fabulous a win taking it would be.
2. Donbas City, ostensibly the entire war is there to safeguard the Russians in this City... and Russia has spent a lot of effort into this narrative.
3. Crimea, the liberation of Crimea would crush the lie that Crimea is a historic part of Russia to stay forever inside Russia.
Achieving all of them in one go would be massive, but if done one after each other the effect is grinding into the heads of Russians that their country is just **** that can't do anything to stop Ukraine and that it is all pointless and based on lies by their leaders.
If the Russian leadership is still alive at this stage Ukraine need to do the fourth target on the Third Space list, and that is to invade Russia itself and take Belgorod, Bryansk and Kursk.
Third Space can only be won by carefully spaced crushing defeats of these key targets, ordinary Russians must learn that whatever they do Ukraine will serve them new costly defeats at every stage, and that unless they have a leadership able to put a stop to it, that they the ordinary Russian is well and truly ****ed.
Hundreds of smoking accidents, assassinations, resistance cell attacks, and so on are all obviously helping to grind in this looming sense of doom and defeat.
Welcome to Third Space, my space.
This was the final reason why Bakhmut is indeed a serious part of the offensive, for now even more important than any cutting of landbridges... "
Also, he mentioned that last night that Belarus is establishing border controls at its border with Russia. Not seen this confirmed yet, but it would make sense after the last week.
Surely Ukraine will stop short of invading Russia ?
It's crossing a red line to using nuclear weapons or am I missing something.
Is Ukraine too close to Russia to use them for risk of fallout .
The loss of the naval base at Sevastopol would be a huge symbolic loss to Russian prestige, profoundly embarrassing.
I'd be interested to know what is happening in Moldova at the moment there was talk of the Russians being chucked out of there at one point?
That's why I hope Konigsberg is freed from RussiaI can also imagine Kaliningrad being a major flash point in the near future, especially if issues with Belarus and Russia arise.
I see the USA has now agreed to grant the F16 export licence to countries who want to supply Ukraine, which looks to be Holland and possibly the UK.
No.Do we have any F16 ? Never seen any in the skies over North Yorkshire like every other combat plane.
Do we have any F16 ? Never seen any in the skies over North Yorkshire like every other combat plane.