Herainestold wrote: ↑Sat Feb 04, 2023 12:36 am
jimbob wrote: ↑Fri Feb 03, 2023 7:30 pm
Herainestold wrote: ↑Fri Feb 03, 2023 5:06 pm
I am wondering if Russia has some new weapons system, maybe from Iran or North Korea, that they are going to use in the coming offensive. Something is giving them confidence that they can defeat Ukraine armed with NATO weapons.
Let's assume that Iran has somethings beyond the drones and missiles it's already sent. Why would they give them to a military that's demonstrated incompetence for use in a war where their capabilities and weaknesses will be highlighted and the devices themselves would probably be captured and subsequently examined by the US (amongst other nations)?
Also, the DPRK weapons are their own developments of Soviet weapon systems that weren't the most modern when they were supplied (or Chinese copies).
The Russians go for quantity over quality, look at their assault on Bakhmut. Large quantities of Iranian or DPRK munitions could make the difference
They have, to date, just barely entered the city. They started assaulting it in July.
To use large quantities of munitions, they need to get them to their guns - that means they need transport. They don't have enough trucks, so they rely on rail, but the rail situation in southern Ukraine is precarious for them. They tried to improve their rail connectivity with an assault on Vuhledar to free up a route from the Donbas to southern Zaporizhzhia oblast, but so far they have utterly failed to dislodge the veteran Ukrainian defenders and loss much in the way of personnel and materiel. Then they need to store the ammo, and we all know what happened to all their depots within ~80km of the frontline once HIMARS joined the fray. GL-SDB would push that out to 150km, which means they wouldn't be able to place large depots in any part of occupied Ukraine save for southern and eastern Crimea. They also need barrels to fire them from, and those are wearing out, or getting blown up, frequently due to a single shot from an M982 "Excalibur" guided shell.
Meanwhile western aid is stepping up. Ammunition production is up. Production of CAESAR SPGs is up. There's a willingness to donate now there wasn't previously, talk of potentially three figure supplies of Leopard 1s to go with the 100+ current gen MBTs going. It's easier to destroy everything in your path with artillery when you can safely store the huge quantities of ammo you need wherever you want and the only guns with the range to really hit back are a few ageing 203mm Pions - not that it was fast even then - but with CAESARs, PzH2000s, M109A6s and soon Archers, along with counter battery radars and M270 and HIMARS GMLRS, it's a much tougher proposition.
Don't get me wrong, Russia
can advance a bit, but not by throwing in special new munitions or huge quantities of new munitions, but by throwing in their own citizens as "meat", and to do so is borrowing against their own future military capability at a crippling interest rate. Getting their own men killed through frontal attack after frontal attack in the summer left their lines so sparse the Ukrainians punched right through them in September.
And meat alone will not win. The machine gun has not become any less deadly in the last hundred and five years - as anyone who follows what is going on closely would sadly know.