Russian invasion of Ukraine

[Salt n Vinegar]

If and when an enormous tackety boot comes into repeated and forceful contact with Putin's haw maws, I hope there's video coverage. It would stroll to the number 1 ratings slot on any internet channel, terrestrial TV or cinema group.

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, dirty dingus said:

Russia actively backed the Serbs in Kosovo less than a month ago. There is always tension in Mitrovica so a few rabble rousing mercenaries woujd probably be welcomed there with open arms. MOSCOW, May 31 (Reuters) - Russia supports Kosovo's Serbian population and believes their legal rights and interests must be protected, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on Wednesday.31  

That was USA's stance too, hence they publicly rebuked the Kosovan government and suspended Kosovan forces from local NATO training exercises. Russia's interest is in Belgrade not Pristina. 

[beefybake]

2 hours ago, FreedomFarter said:

That was USA's stance too, hence they publicly rebuked the Kosovan government and suspended Kosovan forces from local NATO training exercises. Russia's interest is in Belgrade not Pristina. 

Serbia is basically an unreconstructed rather nasty country, where underlying attitudes are little changed from when they were committing genocide at Srebenica in the 1990's.  The ongoing support in Serbia for all of that, and it's associated war criminal leaders is very much the reason why people like Mladic were so long in being handed over for appearance at The Hague.

The lesson here , now, is that in Russia there is broad support for the assault on Ukraine. There is no liberal minded opposition as we know it.

Which is why Russia must be defeated, and seen to be defeated over Ukraine.

Edited June 28, 2023 by beefybake

[ClydeTon]

The Russians still miss f**king Stalin. They've got an incredibly insular mentality (which is perfectly justified, based on their history) and they only think about what's best for "The Motherland".

The Government will take aggressive action, whereas the people either support that posturing over the world, or support isolationism. There seems to be no alternative. Although, in politics, one extreme always seems to turn to the other.

Ukraine can't and won't defeat Russia, simply because once Russia runs out of untrained conscripts & mercenaries to throw in and take out as many Ukrainians as possible, they'll send in the properly trained boys to finish the job. Quite similar to how the Soviets dealt with Germany. Brutal, should be f**king illegal, but remarkably effective.

[ICTChris]

25 minutes ago, ClydeTon said:

 

Ukraine can't and won't defeat Russia, simply because once Russia runs out of untrained conscripts & mercenaries to throw in and take out as many Ukrainians as possible, they'll send in the properly trained boys to finish the job. Quite similar to how the Soviets dealt with Germany. Brutal, should be f**king illegal, but remarkably effective.

This just isn’t the case. There is no crack Russian army hiding behind the Urals waiting to be unleashed. Russia currently have over 95% of their combat power engaged in the war in Ukraine. The pro-Ukrainian Russian volunteers took over several border cities because there aren’t any trained troops to man the border. Wagner drove hundreds of miles to Moscow because no-one was there to stop them.

[ICTChris]

Surovkin when he’s called to a meeting for his next appointment 

[TxRover]

11 hours ago, ICTChris said:

It now seems that an Iskender missile was used in the attack rather than an s-300 which was previously blamed.  This is significant as Iskenders are very accurate, implying that targeting a high profile restaurant was the plan..

Circular Error Probable of an Iskander is listed at 30m max, so it does certainly seem likely. Yet another war crime.

[TxRover]

19 minutes ago, ICTChris said:

This just isn’t the case. There is no crack Russian army hiding behind the Urals waiting to be unleashed. Russia currently have over 95% of their combat power engaged in the war in Ukraine. The pro-Ukrainian Russian volunteers took over several border cities because there aren’t any trained troops to man the border. Wagner drove hundreds of miles to Moscow because no-one was there to stop them.

Correct, when the Russians stopped the Germans at Moscow it wasn’t the will of the people, Soviet soldiers backs stiffening or any of that crap. It was 12-14 divisions of crack Soviet troops from the Far East, equipped for winter warfare, and able to be recalled to fight the Germans because they had determined the Japanese were too occupied in China to engage with Russia.

[Guest]

28 minutes ago, beefybake said:

Serbia is basically an unreconstructed rather nasty country, where underlying attitudes are little changed from when they were committing genocide at Srebenica in the 1990's.  The ongoing support in Serbia for all of that, and it's associated war criminal leaders is very much the reason why people like Mladic were so long in being handed over for appearance at The Hague.

Spoiler

It was Bosnian Serbs who committed the genocide of Bosniak men at Srebrenica, Omarska and the other concentration camps in Bosnia-Herzegovina, not Serbian Serbs. There was likely full elite support of Mladic's crimes in Belgrade. Although knowledge was denied by Milosevic, it'd be extremely naive to believe him on that.. For your average Serb in Serbia at the time, they were living in an autocracy being blasted with propaganda. They were also recently immiserated by Milosevic's IMF-backed neoliberal shock therapy that'd begun in the late 1980s. That caused extreme social turbulence - not dissimilar to Ukraine and Russia in the same period - with no democratic way out of it. They wouldn't have known much about what was happening in Bosnia and they'd have been preoccupied with their own collapsing living standards at the time

As for contemporary Serbian attitudes to what their coethnics did in 1990s Bosnia, sure. There's definitely little if any introspection that's been done there and that's to their great shame. We can make comparisons here, though. No statues of Mladic are standing in Serbia yet western Ukraine has multiple Bandera statues. Bandera oversaw the slaughter of a high estimate of 60 000 Poles at Volhynia, mostly women and children, then that high estimate is at 130 000 dead Poles for Bandera's "career total". Does this make Ukraine "nasty"? No, of course not. It makes it a society where political power has been concentrated in the hands of a small economic elite since the 1990s and that elite has done all it can to keep the vast majority of Ukrainians living in precarity.. Education, like all social services, has gone without anywhere near adequate funding during that period and history has been taught with a heavily slanted right wing nationalist framing. Indoctrinating a people with that self-conception of nationhood makes them far less likely to challenge the economic hierarchy. Well, Serbia is little different in this.

If you want real bad guys for this then try somewhere like Turkey, which does have a higher standard of living yet still teaches its school children that not only did the Armenian Genocide not happen but any Armenian deaths were actually the Armenians' own doing.

Anyway, this all has nothing to do with my reply above to dirty dingus. I was only pointing out there that Russia can't touch Kosovo because it's NATO and therefore US territory. Serbs in Mitrovica boycott the political process intermittently out of exasperation with their poor material conditions. Albanians throughout Kosovo do likewise and polling consistently shows a high majority of them actually want Kosovo to unify with Albania, so fed up are they with Kosovo's bleak economic prospects. It's the poorest country in Europe and folk aren't happy with that. Serbia does not have designs on Kosovo. It's fine with the current strategic ambiguity situation of Kosovo, perhaps vaguely similar to Taiwan. Half the world doesn't recognise Kosovo and not just the usual cadre of Russia plus some diddies like Nicaragua. Spain, Slovakia, Romania and Greece also don't. Then the Kosovan government are happy that plenty countries do recognise them as an independent nation state. Also, we're into the 8th week of anti-government protests in Belgrade now so the last thing on Serbian president Vucic's mind is Mitrovica.

 

1 hour ago, beefybake said:

The lesson here , now, is that in Russia there is broad support for the assault on Ukraine. There is no liberal minded opposition as we know it.

Which is why Russia must be defeated, and seen to be defeated over Ukraine.

My primary concern is the welfare of Ukrainians. I'd give them the means to create their own Iron Dome if I could (USA have tried this but Israel keeps blocking it). Providing them the best available weapons gives them the best chance of repelling the invasion. Massacres like yesterday in Kramatorsk would only increase if Russia was able to advance farther into Ukrainian territory. Already Kyiv is regularly hit and people are killed there with the front line where it is, relatively far away. The Ukrainian resistance holding firm is crucial and obviously pushing back if that becomes possible would be ideal.

So the military defeat of Russia is entirely necessary for Ukrainian well-being. If that then led to a positive change in Russian society that'd be an added bonus, sure.

[MazzyStar]

1 hour ago, beefybake said:

Serbia is basically an unreconstructed rather nasty country

I can think of a much nastier country just next door to Serbia. 

[Stellaboz]

5 hours ago, MazzyStar said:

I can think of a much nastier country just next door to Serbia. 

Slovenia? Hungary? Romania? 

[LongTimeLurker]

8 hours ago, ClydeTon said:

...Ukraine can't and won't defeat Russia, simply because once Russia runs out of untrained conscripts & mercenaries to throw in and take out as many Ukrainians as possible, they'll send in the properly trained boys to finish the job...

Important to remember that a significant portion of the properly trained boys got sent in over a year ago when they were expecting to take Kyiv in three days and did not return.

Edited June 29, 2023 by LongTimeLurker

[TheScarf]

Russia are just really shite at war these days.

[LongTimeLurker]

8 hours ago, MazzyStar said:

I can think of a much nastier country just next door to Serbia. 

Croatia step on down if you know your Balkans history, but to be fair it's actually very much split down the middle where the legacy of NDH is concerned.

[Jacksgranda]

16 hours ago, ICTChris said:

Russian channels reporting that Surovkin is being detained. Surovkin was the General out in charge of Russian forces after their decisive defeats in Kharkiv and Kherson. He stabilised the lines and managed to withdraw Russian occupation troops from Kherson city without losing too much equipment and men. He’s widely seen as the most competent Russian military commander but was sidelined in the New Year in favour of Gerasimov, who planned the Russian winter offensive, which took little territory and chewed up huge amounts of combat potential, losing equipment and men in large numbers.

Surovkin was seen as close to Wagner and, despite him being one of the few military brass who publicly backed Putin during the mutiny, he’s alleged to have had forewarning of events.

None of this is confirmed of course.

Who worries about confirmation on this thread?

[welshbairn]

12 hours ago, ClydeTon said:

Ukraine can't and won't defeat Russia, simply because once Russia runs out of untrained conscripts & mercenaries to throw in and take out as many Ukrainians as possible, they'll send in the properly trained boys to finish the job.

Quote

Typically, spetsnaz personnel are assigned the sorts of stealthy, high-risk missions — including an apparent order to capture Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky — for which they receive some of the Russian military’s most advanced training. But when Moscow launched its full-scale invasion last year, senior commanders eager to seize momentum and skeptical of their conventional fighters’ prowess deviated from the norm, ordering elite forces into direct combat, according to U.S. intelligence findings and independent analysts who have closely followed spetsnaz deployments.

The rapid depletion of Russia’s commando units, observers say, shifted the war’s dynamic from the outset, severely limiting Moscow’s ability to employ clandestine tactics in support of conventional combat operations. U.S. officials believe that the staggering casualties these units have sustained will render them less effective, not only in Ukraine but also in other parts of the world where Russian forces operate, according to the assessments, which range in date from late 2022 to earlier this year.

The hollowing of these units appears to be evident in satellite imagery featured among the leaked materials. Before-and-after photos — showing a base used by the 22nd Separate Spetsnaz Brigade in southern Russia, according to the document — reveal that “all but one of five Russian Separate Spetsnaz Brigades that returned from combat operations in Ukraine in late summer 2022 suffered significant losses.”

The slide includes two overhead images, one taken in November 2021, months before the invasion began, and another captured a year later. The former shows a bustling motor pool teeming with vehicles; the latter reveals what U.S. officials concluded is a state of extreme depletion months after the brigade’s return home with fewer than half of the Tigr tactical vehicles it had before the deployment. The 22nd and two other spetsnaz brigades suffered an estimated 90 to 95 percent attrition rate, the assessments say.

Compounding Russia’s problems is the loss of experience within its elite forces. Spetsnaz soldiers require at least four years of specialized training, the U.S. documents say, concluding that it could take as long as a decade for Moscow to reconstitute these units.

The documents do not say how many spetsnaz troops are estimated to have been killed or wounded in Ukraine, but the materials, citing intelligence intercepts, assess that one unit alone — the 346th — “lost nearly the entire brigade with only 125 personnel active out of 900 deployed.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/14/leaked-documents-russian-spetsnaz/

[ICTChris]

It's not just special operations forces who have been destroyed.  The initial invasion saw huge losses for Russian paratroopers (the VDV) both in terms of their personnel and equipment.  Naval infantry have also seen huge losses - this year Russian marines were used in the attacks on Vuledar where they lost significant volumes of equipment.

Marines and paratroopers are among the best trained and equipped units in the Russian armed forces and they've been smashed up.  As the article quoted above by @welshbairn says these guys have been used, along with special forces, as basic infantry.  Another example of the destruction of Russian capabilities was seen this week - the pilots killed by Wagner shoot downs at the weekend totalled 17,000 hours of flight time.  That level of combat experience is irreplacable for the Russian Air Force.

 

[Silvio Tattiescone]

17 hours ago, ICTChris said:

Russian channels reporting that Surovkin is being detained. Surovkin was the General out in charge of Russian forces after their decisive defeats in Kharkiv and Kherson. He stabilised the lines and managed to withdraw Russian occupation troops from Kherson city without losing too much equipment and men. He’s widely seen as the most competent Russian military commander but was sidelined in the New Year in favour of Gerasimov, who planned the Russian winter offensive, which took little territory and chewed up huge amounts of combat potential, losing equipment and men in large numbers.

Surovkin was seen as close to Wagner and, despite him being one of the few military brass who publicly backed Putin during the mutiny, he’s alleged to have had forewarning of events.

None of this is confirmed of course.

Here's why Surovkin's been collared

 

Quote

Trying to regain control over the command system, Shoigu issued an order saying that all “volunteer” formations must sign a contract with the Ministry of Defence. According to Deputy Defence Minister Pankov, the order should give “the necessary legal status to volunteer formations, create unified approaches to the organisation of comprehensive support and fulfilment of their tasks.”^[6] Prigozhin immediately rejected the possibility of signing such a contract, noting that Wagner does not obey nor answer to the Ministry of Defence.^[7] Prigozhin also noted that Wagner seeks approval for its actions from the Russian military command via Wagner-affiliated Army General Sergei Surovikin.

https://sceeus.se/en/publications/the-ghost-of-civil-war-in-russia/

 

Interesting site.

 

Quote

the emergence of the so-called “Gerasimov doctrine.” In 2013, the head of the Russian General Staff made a presentation at the Academy of Military Sciences.^[8] Apparently expressing the opinion of Russia’s military and political leadership, he argued that in today’s world there is no clear line between a state of war and a state of peace. It follows from Gerasimov’s words that wars are not currently declared and are waged almost constantly

 

[ClydeTon]

11 hours ago, ICTChris said:

This just isn’t the case. There is no crack Russian army hiding behind the Urals waiting to be unleashed. Russia currently have over 95% of their combat power engaged in the war in Ukraine. 

If Russia had 95% of their men on that frontline this war would be in a history textbook.

Even Western outlets, such as the staunchly left-wing, anti-Russian CNN, will tell you that Russian losses have amounted to but a fraction of their overall strength. Their army still amounts to 800,000> and there is no chance all of that is deployed.

Russia's only full-scale application has been equipment. Tanks, Planes and Warships have been thrown into this war. Men, less so.

Special Forces and Commando units have been thrown in en masse. It's essentially what they do in the middle east and Africa, but at a larger scale with more regular army backing.

Russia's army (in peacetime) is double the size of Ukraine's today. (1,000,000+ to ~500,000) They wouldn't need Wagner or Conscripts if they didn't choose to throw cannon fodder in first.

3 hours ago, LongTimeLurker said:

Important to remember that a significant portion of the properly trained boys got sent in over a year ago when they were expecting to take Kyiv in three days and did not return.

I wouldn't say a significant portion. They were estimated to have between 15,000 and 30,000 at the Battle of Kyiv. Even if 25,000 of them were captured or killed, the Russian army is still massive. https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-may-30-2023 - the Institute for Study of War, an American non-profit, suggest they have ~300,000 in Ukraine, as of May 2023.

On the flipside, the CIA estimate Ukraine had ~700,000 in July 2022.

The Russian Army and all paramilitaries amount to almost 1.5 million. There are one hell of a lot of people not fighting this war.

Russia's main losses have been in their equipment. They've lost hundreds upon hundreds of tanks, planes - of course, missiles - and other, more conventional, equipment, like guns and armour.

They still have a large army.

12 hours ago, ICTChris said:

The pro-Ukrainian Russian volunteers took over several border cities because there aren’t any trained troops to man the border. Wagner drove hundreds of miles to Moscow because no-one was there to stop them.

Wagner drove halfway to Moscow because the army chose  to let them. That was quite well reported. Many armed units agreed with Wagner's sentiment but didn't want to join their march.

Why? Well quite simply, the Russian higher-ups are incompetent, probably the reason they're getting held back by Ukraine. Putin's getting rid of the one general who's had a fair bit of success and replacing him with a total dud. The Russian Army are pretty brutal and would love nothing more than a fight, but they won't, I would imagine, want to go to their graves because some twats in Moscow can't make a war plan. Same way most folk here wouldn't want to fight under Rishi Sunak's orders. If you don't have faith/trust in your leaders, you don't want to die for them.

To conclude, and possibly back-pedal a bit, I was dealing in absolutes a bit with my last post:

• I don't, personally, see Ukraine winning this outright.

• Russia aren't using any more than 1/3 of their manpower. They're using a hell of a lot of equipment.

• Wagner were allowed to march towards Moscow because the Russian Army generally dislike the MoD's decision making, the same view as Wagner.

• Russia are almost certainly throwing conscripts and mercenaries in, rather than losing their best men. They have/had an army only comparable to America and China, a very well-trained one at that. They started conscripting within months of the war starting.

My theory, and I doubt we'll ever know, is that they planned to use the trained men for a quick victory, but after the Battle for Kyiv, they realised that the Ukrainians were going to take them to the death. So, they decided to throw in conscripts from the civilian population to try and take out as many Ukrainians as possible, and attempt to weaken them. Has that been successful? Time will tell.

[MazzyStar]

5 hours ago, Stellaboz said:

Slovenia? Hungary? Romania? 

 

2 hours ago, LongTimeLurker said:

Croatia step on down if you know your Balkans history, but to be fair it's actually very much split down the middle where the legacy of NDH is concerned.

Aye, it was Croatia I was talking about. In terms of historical crimes and public attitudes towards them Croatia is about 100x worse than Serbia is, but since they’re in NATO and the EU and not an ally of Russia you’ll not hear much about it in western media and discourse.