Blyatskrieg

[EACLucifer]

Things like this won't be helping Russian artillery - that crackling sound is ammunition going off in the depot after a hit from something long ranged.

[Woodchopper]

Ukraine, short of joining NATO, will never have air superiority let alone supremacy, even with gifted F-16s. That means they are going to have to do the hard graft of attritting mainly with artillery and the odd long range cruise missile. Manoeuvre warfare isn’t happening until the Russian logistics chain is seriously disrupted and their artillery is put out of action. The Ukrainians don’t necessarily need to do that across the whole front though.

One thing that threads like the above seem to miss, though, is the extent to which that is happening. The rate of Russian artillery losses documented by Oryx is currently very high. Russian counter-battery radars are also taking a beating. Popov's angry rant included stuff about getting hammered by counter-battery fire without a response. Partly that's due to Ukraine's better C3I. Partly it's long ranged gun-howitzers like the CAESAR, PzH2000 and Krab. Partly its the use of GMLRS in the counterbattery role it was originally envisaged for.

The upshot is Russian losses are high, and between that and their loss of ammunition due to long range strikes, they can't sustain the high rates of shelling they wanted. That's leading them to pull up air defences nearer the frontline, but then they are getting hit - an S-400 system recently lost several components to GMLRS strikes.

My back's too bad to sensibly explain the issues relating to timing and climate right now, but I will when I get the chance.

As we’ve discussed before, a combination of drones and precision artillery provides a lot of the capability that previously came from air power. Ukraine can identify targets from the air and rapidly hit them. So we’re seeing the attrition you describe.

[bjn]

Perun’s latest goes into the artillery situation as well as cluster munitions. Recently the visually verified destruction of artillery has a 4:1 ratio of Russian equipment destroyed vs Ukrainian.

[Woodchopper]

Optimism: Russia has deployed its forces forward. They are being attritted and in time Ukraine will be able to break through and rapidly take back territory with armour.

Pessimism: Minefields and trenches can be prepared in hours. They can be protected with anti-tank missiles. Russia isn’t going to run out. It’ll be like this and very slow progress all the way to the sea.

[bjn]

Somewhere in the middle probably. Forward deploying some of your best troops and assets to have them attrited wont leave you much besides conscripts of dubious motivation to man your entrenchments.

[jimbob]

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/a ... -the-front

Mines are a problem as are booby traps

[EACLucifer]

There's stuff I want to talk about timing, culmination, shaping, climate etc, but really not up to it right now.

However, there is one thing I will point out: Ukraine is still achieving a very favourable attrition ratio as verified by Oryx and similar. They are doing that while advancing. Slowly, perhaps, but still advancing, and advancing in fact enough to have liberated more terrain in the last couple of months than Russia took all winter.

Other point I'd make is some of that advance is round Bakhmut, on the flanks. That's not by commitment of reserves, either. It's not good ground to break out, so why there? It ought to be obvious - it's somewhere Russia put so much propaganda effort into they cannot afford to easily be pushed back from, so it's to pin reserves.

I think we're still mostly looking at shaping. There were attempts at an early breakthrough in a couple of places on the Zaporizhzhia frontline, but prepared defences and the commitment of Russian reserves stalled that, so they've gone to plan B. That's sensible, Plan A's really for when things go better than expected.

[TopBadger]

However, there is one thing I will point out: Ukraine is still achieving a very favourable attrition ratio as verified by Oryx and similar.

And as also evidenced by Russia's reported plans to change of conscription rules to allow them to mobilise men up to the age of 70

Advancing in fact enough to have liberated more terrain in the last couple of months than Russia took all winter.
...
I think we're still mostly looking at shaping.

Goods points well made.

[EACLucifer]

Another ammo dump down, looks like a big one. Crimea, specifically Oktyabr'skoye, which has both an airstrip and is on the Sevastopol-Dzhankoi railway line. That rumbling sound is the sound of Russian ammunition exploding in the depot rather than on Ukrainian houses or soldiers defending their country from invasion.

[EACLucifer]

Another ammo dump down, looks like a big one. Crimea, specifically Oktyabr'skoye, which has both an airstrip and is on the Sevastopol-Dzhankoi railway line. That rumbling sound is the sound of Russian ammunition exploding in the depot rather than on Ukrainian houses or soldiers defending their country from invasion.

Claimed as an oil depot and warehouses, and local reports suggest it was a drone wot did it. The secondary explosions tells us the warehouses were storing ammunition, and the quantity/intensity of the secondaries seems comparable with events where it was estimated over a thousand tonnes of the stuff was destroyed, so a damn significant hit and not far from Sevastopol and Simferopol, either, so Russians must be wondering what air defence doing.

[Martin_B]

Another ammo dump down, looks like a big one. Crimea, specifically Oktyabr'skoye, which has both an airstrip and is on the Sevastopol-Dzhankoi railway line. That rumbling sound is the sound of Russian ammunition exploding in the depot rather than on Ukrainian houses or soldiers defending their country from invasion.

Claimed as an oil depot and warehouses, and local reports suggest it was a drone wot did it. The secondary explosions tells us the warehouses were storing ammunition, and the quantity/intensity of the secondaries seems comparable with events where it was estimated over a thousand tonnes of the stuff was destroyed, so a damn significant hit and not far from Sevastopol and Simferopol, either, so Russians must be wondering what air defence doing.

And apparently led to the Kersch bridge being closed again. The bridge is ~175 km east of the depot!

[Woodchopper]

according to Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff […]

“The various war games that were done ahead of time have predicted certain levels of advance and that has slowed down,” he said. “Why? Because that’s the difference between war on paper and real war. These are real people in real machines that are out there really clearing real minefields and they’re really dying.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... -missiles/

[Woodchopper]

visits showed the Ukrainian military facing a litany of new and enduring challenges that have contributed to its slow progress.

Ukraine has done well to adapt a defensive war — wiring Starlink satellite internet, public software and off-the-shelf drones to keep constant tabs on Russian forces from command points. But offensive operations are different: Ukraine has made marginal progress in its ability to coordinate directly between its troops closest to Russian forces on the so-called zero line and those assaulting forward.

Ukrainian infantry are focusing more and more on trench assaults, but after suffering tens of thousands of casualties since the war’s start, these ranks are often filled with lesser-trained and older troops. And when Russian forces are driven from a position, they have become more adept at targeting that position with their artillery, ensuring Ukrainian troops cannot stay there long.

Ammunition is in short supply, and there is a mixture of munitions sent from different countries. That has forced Ukrainian artillery units to use more ammunition to hit their targets, Ukrainian soldiers said, because accuracy varies widely between the various shells. In addition, some of the older shells and rockets sent from abroad are damaging their equipment and injuring soldiers. “It’s a very big problem now,” said Alex, a Ukrainian battalion commander.
Finally, in the summer months, camouflage and greenery remain crucial factors in whether a battlefield operation will be successful. Defending forces almost always have the advantage, whether because of unseen trenches or hidden electronic warfare units that use deceit and concealment to throw off attacking forces.

[…]

Ukrainian troops use less sophisticated, but easier-to-use, programs like smartphone messaging apps, private internet chat rooms and small Chinese-made drones to watch the goings on along the front line.

[…]

The downside of this system is that it is almost entirely tethered to Starlink satellite internet. That means when Ukrainian units are assaulting — absent a Wi-Fi router — it takes longer to communicate important information like artillery targets because attacking troops have to reach someone with an internet connection to call for support.

[…]

Ukrainian troops are also contending with Russian forces jamming the radios that soldiers are using to try to reach their comrades with internet.

[…]

other Ukrainian formations elsewhere on the front have had trouble filling their ranks with the caliber of soldiers capable of carrying out successful trench attacks, given that months of fighting have exhausted their ranks. New replacements are sometimes older recruits who were mobilized.

“How can you expect a 40-year-old to be a good infantry soldier or machine-gunner?” asked the Ukrainian commander whose platoon had taken dozens of casualties. Youth not only means better physical prowess, but younger soldiers are less likely to question orders.

[…]

Russian forces have rushed more artillery units to the area so that even if they lose a trench to a Ukrainian assault, they can quickly shower their lost fortifications with shells, forcing Kyiv’s troops to retreat from newly recaptured ground.

[…]

Ukrainian artillery crews are navigating an assortment of munitions delivered from countries like Pakistan, Poland, Bulgaria and Iran, forcing gun crews to adjust their aim based on which country the ammunition comes from and sometimes how old it is, even though it is all the same caliber.

[…]

Electronic warfare is a hidden hand behind much of the war, with Russian abilities outmatching those of the Ukrainians. Russian forces can detect cellphone signals and jam GPS and radio frequencies, and they are often looking for Starlink Wi-Fi routers to target with their artillery.

“It’s a very big problem for us,” said Marabu, referring to the Russian forces’ ability to switch the frequency output of their drones. That makes it harder for the NOTA to tell where the drones are on the front line.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/23/worl ... enges.html


And regarding previous discussions on journalism, the lead author is a former soldier and analysis “is based on a dozen visits to the front line and interviews in June and July with Ukrainian soldiers and commanders in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, where many of the battles are being fought.”

[Woodchopper]

Worth noting that secure military communications systems are complex. The UK army’s current Bowman system took almost 20 years to implement and was massively over budget.
That kind of system is not something that can be supplied piecemeal by lots of different countries.

But lack of such a communication system will make the combined arms operations mentioned earlier much more difficult.

[EACLucifer]

“It’s a very big problem for us,” said Marabu, referring to the Russian forces’ ability to switch the frequency output of their drones. That makes it harder for the NOTA to tell where the drones are on the front line.

Funnily enough, well-connected Russian mil-writers have the exact same complaint about facing Ukrainian drones - they say the Ukrainians are better at switching frequencies, etc. It's pretty common for that kind of perception to develop on both sides during a conflict, I'd add.

And regarding previous discussions on journalism, the lead author is a former soldier and analysis “is based on a dozen visits to the front line and interviews in June and July with Ukrainian soldiers and commanders in the Donetsk and Kharkiv regions, where many of the battles are being fought.”

The problem isn't they don't sometimes employ good journalists, the problem is that they also employ bad ones - one of my main previous criticisms of this was someone who thought the Kharkiv offensive in the east of Kharkiv Oblast was aimed at the city of Kharkiv when it took places a hundred kilometres away - city/oblast confusion the hallmark of many an absolute amateur in this conflict - and ones who rely too much on leaked info from the American defence/foreign policy establishment and who don't have the knowledge needed to situate it in context, as such leaks are not usually representative of what the whole establishment's view is, and often come from disgruntled individuals seeking to shape the narrative because their views are losing out.

Then there's the times they employ downright vatniks like Ivan Nechepurenko, employed by the NYT for nearly a decade.

[dyqik]

Worth noting that secure military communications systems are complex. The UK army’s current Bowman system took almost 20 years to implement and was massively over budget.
That kind of system is not something that can be supplied piecemeal by lots of different countries.

But lack of such a communication system will make the combined arms operations mentioned earlier much more difficult.

And this has just come out, suggesting that some of these expensive and hard to deploy systems are not secure.

https://www.wired.com/story/tetra-radio ... -backdoor/

[Woodchopper]

aving serially outperformed expectations, Ukraine finds itself in the unenviable position of having gone from scrappy underdog to victim of its own mythologized success. Six and a half weeks into a much-anticipated counteroffensive and there are no dramatic battlefield developments. A handful of settlements have been reclaimed in the southern regions of Zaporizhzhia and Donetsk, and that’s it. An absence of climax has begun to lead to impending anti-climax and the sort of doomcasting that characterized the preliminaries of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The counteroffensive into which Kyiv and its NATO partners have invested so much kit, manpower and money is already a busted flush, we are told. “Ukraine’s counter-offensive is failing, with no easy fixes,” ran one comment piece in The Daily Telegraph. This was preceded four days earlier by an even less sunny prognosis in the same newspaper, “Ukraine and the West are facing a devastating defeat.”

Ironically, such assessments stand in marked contrast to what Russians in the field are saying about the capability of their adversary.

[…]

Some of these Ukrainian officials told us they were a bit queasy at the expectations being set for them in Western capitals, namely that Kyiv needed a swift return on investment lest it risk losing diplomatic and military support because electorates in donor countries would grow impatient.
“All or nothing, fast or failure” was exactly the kind of pressure the Ukrainian General Staff was afraid of.

Proof of their wariness came right away when the campaign got off to an especially rough start.

[…]

This ambush seemed to set the tone for much of the disillusioned or dire press coverage since.

[…]

Ukraine’s core interest is protecting Ukrainian lives, according to Kaimo Kuusk, Estonia’s outgoing ambassador to Kyiv. Kuusk told one of the authors that Western armored vehicles had done their job of keeping their occupants alive after being hit with explosives.

[…]

Still another factor for the slow pace of Ukraine’s progress is that it changed tactics following the 47th’s fiasco, moving away from using heavy armor to try to punch through Russian lines and toward a slower, more incremental rate of advance. Here minefields remain the most daunting obstacles.
The Russian military has scattered millions of anti-tank and anti-personnel landmines in heavy concentrations to both attrite advancing Ukrainian forces and slow their movements, allowing them to be more easily targeted by artillery and anti-tank guided missiles. Kyiv has been using a variety of methods to neutralize these lethal devices: mine-clearing line charges (long cables filed with plastic explosives fired across the battlefield to detonate the mines); individual Ukrainian sappers crawling on their bellies to collect and defuse mines by hand; and mine rollers attached to the front of tanks, which blow up the mines in front of rather than underneath the armor. Fields the Ukrainians have cleared are in some cases even re-mined within hours by Russian artillery or drones, which disburse new explosives from a distance, making progress grimly Sisyphean and sluggish.

As such, Kyiv has resorted to using long-range fires to degrade Russian logistics and artillery, a tried-and-true method of what retired Australian Gen. Mick Ryan calls “corrosion of the Russian physical, moral and intellectual capacity to fight,” principally by annihilating all the concomitants of warfare. Kyiv has spent the past several weeks directly targeting individual artillery pieces with accurate counter-battery fire and blowing up Russian ammunition depots with long-range cruise missiles and drones,

[…]

According to “Karl,” a pseudonymous Estonian military analyst New Lines previously interviewed, Ukraine continues to “demolish on average about 25 artillery pieces a day. This is beginning to have some effect.” The Russian military has always been heavily dependent on massed artillery to conduct both offensive and defensive operations, meaning that destroying these crucial assets has an outsize effect on all aspects of Russian battlefield performance. Don’t take Karl’s word for it.

Senior Russian military officials on the front line are experiencing the impact of Ukrainian corrosion with a ferocity understandably inaccessible to pessimistic Western pundits. Consider the high-profile sacking of Gen. Ivan Popov, who until recently was the commanding officer of the 58th Combined Arms Army. The 58th has been engaged in heavy fighting in Zaporizhzhia. Popov recorded a voice memo for private dissemination among his soldiers, but Russian parliamentarian Andrey Gurulev posted it on Telegram. The general criticized “the lack of counter-battery combat, the absence of artillery reconnaissance stations” and what he described as “the mass deaths and injuries of our brothers from enemy artillery.”

Popov, it bears mentioning, may be the highest-ranking member of the Russian army to grouse about the efficacy of Ukrainian artillery, but he is not the only one. A host of pro-Russian sources on social media have attested to the damage Ukraine is doing with its Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (GMLRS) as instruments for counter-battery fire.

[…]

In spite of Ukraine’s highly publicized shortfalls in ammunition, it certainly seems to have enough to make life unpleasant for the invaders.

“Enemy artillery crews do not change position for hours, shelling our front line with impunity,” moaned Alexander Khodakovsky, the commander of the Vostok Battalion of the “Donetsk People’s Republic,” the Russian puppet regime in eastern Ukraine. “Our gun artillery does not meet modern requirements for a number of reasons, primarily in terms of range.”

[…]

Ukraine has been using the Storm Shadow to hit Russian logistics bases it would have previously hit with GMLRS but for the fact that Russia adapted to that tactic by relocating its materiel outside the 56-mile range of the artillery rockets.

[…]

“I remember the summer when Ukrainians received HIMARS, and the warehouse began to burn like matches,” one Russian military blogger, “ALIVE Z,” lamented in response to a successful Storm Shadow strike on Novooleksiivka, on the border with Crimea in Kherson oblast, on July 11. “The appearance of the Storm Shadow missiles forces us to move the warehouses even farther [away from the front line] or to look for another solution. … In general we will have to be very scrupulous about the protection and placement of ammunition.”

British cruise missiles have also felicitously freed up more GMLRS for counter-battery purposes.

[…]

The Hollywood-tailored excitement of the Battles of Kyiv and Kharkiv may have unduly raised the bar for what Ukraine can accomplish in short order. Yet the Battle of Kherson, begun in August 2022, was a long, hard slog, the bulk of which garnered comparatively little contemporaneous front-page coverage — until all of a sudden it did. That operation culminated four months later with an announced Russian withdrawal.

This was before the Ukrainians had U.S. or European main battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, cruise missiles and cluster bombs. This was also before Putin’s regime began to cannibalize itself by downing its own helicopters, seizing military districts and exiling the vanguard of its expeditionary force to tent encampments in Belarus.

[…]

Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning former war correspondent Thomas Ricks once said something to the effect of: “Covering combat can be dangerous but is relatively easy. You just need to write down what you hear and see. But covering a war accurately is far more difficult, because it requires some understanding of strategy, logistics, morale and other things that often can’t be observed.” We find ourselves at a bizarre turning point in a crisis which has seen no shortage of them where the only ones who think Ukraine’s counter-offensive isn’t quite the let-down or failure it’s been widely portrayed as are the Russians desperate to prove otherwise.

https://newlinesmag.com/argument/russia ... hers-dont/

[Woodchopper]

The main thrust of Ukraine’s nearly two-month-old counteroffensive is now underway in the country’s southeast, two Pentagon officials said on Wednesday, with thousands of reinforcements pouring into the grinding battle, many of them trained and equipped by the West and, until now, held in reserve.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the campaign. Their comments dovetailed with reports from the battlefield on Wednesday, where artillery battles flared along the southern front line in the Zaporizhzhia region.

[…]

Ukrainian officials have told U.S. officials that the enlarged Ukrainian force would try to advance south through Russia’s minefields and other fortifications toward the city of Tokmak, and, if successful, on to Melitopol, near the coast.

Their goal is to sever the so-called land bridge between Russian-occupied Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula, or at least advance far enough to put the strategically important peninsula within range of Ukrainian artillery. Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and uses it as the base for its Black Sea fleet as well as to supply its forces in the south.

The new operation, if successful, could take one to three weeks, Ukrainian officials have told officials in Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/07/26 ... raine-news

[EACLucifer]

The main thrust of Ukraine’s nearly two-month-old counteroffensive is now underway in the country’s southeast, two Pentagon officials said on Wednesday, with thousands of reinforcements pouring into the grinding battle, many of them trained and equipped by the West and, until now, held in reserve.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details of the campaign. Their comments dovetailed with reports from the battlefield on Wednesday, where artillery battles flared along the southern front line in the Zaporizhzhia region.

[…]

Ukrainian officials have told U.S. officials that the enlarged Ukrainian force would try to advance south through Russia’s minefields and other fortifications toward the city of Tokmak, and, if successful, on to Melitopol, near the coast.

Their goal is to sever the so-called land bridge between Russian-occupied Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula, or at least advance far enough to put the strategically important peninsula within range of Ukrainian artillery. Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and uses it as the base for its Black Sea fleet as well as to supply its forces in the south.

The new operation, if successful, could take one to three weeks, Ukrainian officials have told officials in Washington.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2023/07/26 ... raine-news

Vital caveats to any article like that;

1) Ukraine has not been very open with their plans with the USA, and for good reason, as the USA does not keep other nations' classified info safe. Don't presume that any American knows actual Ukrainian plans

2) Other than a couple of early attempts to see if the lines could be carried by speed and surprise, we've seen shaping operations. Accelerated attrition of artillery, pushes around Bakhmut to force Russia's hand - and Russia's response seems to have been a push north of the Siversky Donets, though I don't think it's done much. Shaping operations also take place in the information space. Last August, the NYT ran an article claiming that Ukraine had considered a two front offensive, but ultimately settled on a single front offensive in Kherson. Within days, we started getting a lot of reports from a little town called Balakliya on a quiet sector of the front in Kharkiv oblast...

3) The officials that provide anonymous briefings to the media have their own agendas. This could be wishful thinking, or it could even be russophiles still in the establishment - there's plenty left over from Obama's shameful foreign policy days - setting Ukraine up for failure.

4) Even if it is the plan, plans can be changed. Ukraine's managed to achieve a favourable attrition ratio even when advancing. That may matter to them more than specific pieces of territory for the moment.

ETA: There are rumours of something happening around Robotyne, but our only sources are Russian and highly conflicting, and evidence of where shelling is taking place that suggests Ukrainian forces maybe advancing past the town to its east, but it's really hard to tell and all the evidence is very tenuous.

[EACLucifer]

Looks like Ukrainian forces may have reached the main defensive line between Robotyne and Verbove. Not conclusive what happens, but remember footage is released late, and tends to be partially released - for example the Russians will release the footage of the same event repeatedly if they have different angles or even sometimes if they don't. We also tend to see more Russian footage of frontline stuff than Ukrainian due to better opsec. It's also generally a few days old, so worth keeping an eye on the area between Robotyne and Verbove, but could be nothing significant.

[EACLucifer]

Apparent confirmation that Staromaiorske is liberated, something which has been rumoured for a few days. This is further east of the location I mentioned in my last post. At one point it looked like Ukrainian troops would carry the whole Mokri Yala front as far as Staromlynivka by surprise and shock earlier this summer, but the deployment of Russian reserves thwarted that. However, Ukrainian forces have still advanced, have liberated Staromaiorske and thus flanked Urozhaine on the other side of the river and are still closing in - albeit slowly - on Staromlynivka.

[Woodchopper]

Yes, looks like advances in two areas. Zelensky isn’t being subtle: https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/ ... 1zY-PW4R9w

[Grumble]

Yes, looks like advances in two areas. Zelensky isn’t being subtle: https://twitter.com/zelenskyyua/status/ ... 1zY-PW4R9w

Not much need to be subtle about things that have already happened, not like it’s a secret to the Russians

[EACLucifer]

Nothing conclusive, but things like massed fire from Uragan batteries suggests Ukraine's trying to push - they have very long range and can saturate large areas with fire, but they are extremely thirsty for ammunition and supplies are limited, so you tend to only see these massed salvoes when something time critical is happening.

[EACLucifer]

Explosions in Rostov, Taganrog and Azov, so quite a way into Russia. Could be drones, talk also of modified S-200s. Worth keeping an eye on. There's an airbase at Taganrog, Rostov's a key supply node - the key supply node really - and a lot of the positions Russia uses to sustain its war are within drone and/or modified S-200 range.