Russia/Ukraine Crisis 2022-3

[psyanojim]

Of course the Russian officers are going to blame everything on Putin and his advisors, and Putin and his advisors are going to blame everything on the fighting soldiers and eevil NATO Polish African-American mercenaries.  And in 50 years historians will be writing very serious books about how the Russian army can not have been as incompetent as people at the time said.

Actually, some of the most interesting anecdotes I've seen about Soviet-style decision making are from the Ukrainian side, since they are the ones currently in the process of adapting from Soviet-style to NATO-style command structures.

I saw one very interesting interview with a grizzled old graybeard Ukrainian tanker (I'll see if I can find it) talking about exactly this issue.

How the move to the NATO structure of highly trained NCOs in the frontline tanks, with the junior officers further back coordinating from drone footage etc was initially dismissed by the veteran Soviet-era soldiers as officers being too 'cowardly', but now even the 'old-timers' are total converts.

Edit: Its not just about 'incompetent' leadership either. It sounds like Russian officers are drowning in bureaucracy and can't break wind without permission from their superiors. Even pro-Russia Telegram channels have similar complaints to 'free leaders from bureaucrats'

[dubsartur]

Its hard because everyone sees different things on social media and much of it is someone's propaganda (which does not mean its false, but the Ukranians are not sharing intercepted phone calls where someone says "we massacred a Ukrainian attack today, some of their shells hit a school before counterbattery took them out, we have plenty of ammo").  But there have been a lot of clips of Russian and proxy forces moving in combat like a gang of strangers at their first LARP battle, and they keep making decisions like sending all those troops and equipment at Kyiv then withdrawing them or attacking fixed positions in the Donbas from the front again and again.

Edit: back in March many people believed that many Russian tanks lacked a full crew, which might be one reason why they did not react very fast or had trouble communicating, moving, and shooting at the same time.  And shortages of troops lead to things like that second lieutenant killed while commanding a battalion, or the sailors captured at the front lines.

That Perun vlogger pointed out that since September Ukrainian press releases focus on the best equipped, best-trained troops leading the attack and not territorial defense with Kalashnikovs and antitank weapons riding a pickup truck along the Belarusian border.

There also seem to be tensions between the Russian military and the Donbas militias who have even worse kit and even less of a choice to be fighting.

People close to NATO armies usually complain about bureaucracy and a culture of ass-covering.  Some of that would probably go away if they were ever in a conventional war against anyone with an air force which lasted more than a few weeks.

[dubsartur]

There are rumours that Russia is sending columns of equipment from Melitopol on the south front west towards the Dniepr.  The only crossing of the Dniepr in Russian hands which will support vehicles is supposed to be a damaged dam at Nova Kakhova, so sending even more equipment across the river does not seem like it would help. 

Maybe the question "command and control breakdown vs. lack of reserves and impossible commands from Moscow?" is academic, since there is always some way to move people and equipment around to cause the other guy trouble.

[psyanojim]

The irony is that, unlike east of Kharkiv, the Russians in Kherson appear to be withdrawing in relatively good order (probably because Russia sent many of its best troops here).

However, unlike east of Kharkiv, the Russians in Kherson are rapidly running out of areas they can withdraw to, because of the severed Dnipro crossings.

Up until now, Ukraine has only been able to hit those crossings with expensive long-range munitions eg HIMARS rockets. If those crossings come within easy howitzer range, Ukraine can basically keep them under bombardment 24/7.

Rapidly approaching winter is a very, very bad time to have your supply lines cut. And yet withdrawing across the river means many of Russias best units which were deployed to Kherson could end up losing most of their equipment. Decisions, decisions...

Maybe the question "command and control breakdown vs. lack of reserves and impossible commands from Moscow?" is academic, since there is always some way to move people and equipment around to cause the other guy trouble.

I'd be more inclined to consider it an academic question because it is not mutually exclusive. 'All of the above' is the answer I would tick for the overall Russian campaign.

[dubsartur]

At least the fighting in Kherson Oblast is mostly in open countryside so it does not smash up as much as fighting in urban areas.

Mobile warfare will be harder on the mobiks than just sitting in a trench with a machine gun or an antitank weapon or unloading trucks in the same warehouse every day.

Now we see if Ukraine has another division-sized reserve to throw at Zaporozhia Oblast or Donetsk.

[Jubal]

Well, the Vasco da Gama bridge across the mouth of Portugal's Tagus River may have just regained its status as Europe's longest bridge, on account of a large hole suddenly appearing in the one across the Kerch straits that connect the Crimea with Russia.

[dubsartur]

If I understand correctly, the Kerch Strait bridge is the only rail connection from Russia to the southern front.  The railway parallel to the front is in mortar range of Ukrainian troops near Donetsk city, so no trains can pass that point.  So as soon as the railway part of the bridge finishes collapsing (and burning out a train of fuel tankers on it will have done damage) the whole Southern Front has no more fuel, no more shells, and no more spare parts in the middle of winter.

A better military than the Russians would have found a way to get a second railroad working, but fortunately they did not.  Edit: a state of 150 million people, fighting a war to transform the global order, given six months and a start in its prewar territory should be able to build a 50 mile stretch of railroad!

One of the problems with the Afghanistan War is that Afghanistan has no railways, so all NATO supplies had to be trucked in from Pakistan or flown in from even further.  That is expensive (and meant that NATO could never punish Pakistan for letting its intelligence services support the Taliban and Al-Quaida).

[dubsartur]

On the court front, one Ian Bremmer claims that the narcissist wannabe owner of birdsite claimed to have been given his peace proposal in a direct conversation with Vladimir Putin https://nitter.ca/joshtpm/status/1580000350626799616#m https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-knows-kremlins-red-lines-spoke-putin-ukraine-bremmer-1750950 

While Russia made Sauruman's choice and learned Saruman's lesson (you can subvert, or you can invade, but its hard to do both) Russian talking points still have a wide reach in right-wing and pseudo-leftist Anglo circles due to a kind of inertia.

[Jubal]

Has anyone seen much battleground stuff lately? I've mostly been seeing economic warfare reports/suggestions Putin is mostly going to try and hammer Ukraine's energy infrastructure all winter. There's a lot of talk of a further Ukrainian refugee wave into my part of Europe, and I hope governments are making the financial calculations necessary to bring them in.

The problem for Putin in this strategy presumably is that the winter will also be hammering the Russian Army, and probably more so than their better supplied Ukrainian counterparts.

[dubsartur]

Has anyone seen much battleground stuff lately? I've mostly been seeing economic warfare reports/suggestions Putin is mostly going to try and hammer Ukraine's energy infrastructure all winter. There's a lot of talk of a further Ukrainian refugee wave into my part of Europe, and I hope governments are making the financial calculations necessary to bring them in.

The problem for Putin in this strategy presumably is that the winter will also be hammering the Russian Army, and probably more so than their better supplied Ukrainian counterparts.

Nitter is down so I don't have access to birdsite.  Its the usual Wagner Group + mobik attack on Bakhmut and Ukrainian propaganda videos emphasizing that many mobiks lack gloves and tarps so are freezing to death in the cold and the wet, with the new intensive Russian air attacks on power and transmission sites.  I think its confirmed that the Ukrainians have landed special forces on a peninsula east of the Dniepr where they can spot for long-ranged attacks. Trench warfare during the Rasputitsa is not fun, videos are going around of Ukrainian fighting positions full of water.

I don't know when Russia will run out of cruise missiles but probably before spring.  Allegedly they have been caught adapting missiles from their Strategic Rocket Force to deliver conventional warheads.

I imagine that sometime in December the ground will have frozen hard enough, and enough heavy equipment will have repositioned from Kherson to east of the Dniepr, that Ukraine launches another big attack either in the north-east to outflank the defenses in the Donbas, or south to put the airbases and train stations in Crimea in HIMARS range.  Unless they break through, that will probably be like the Kherson offensive: not a lot of photos and videos which give an overall sense of what is happening just taking village after village and propaganda videos of drone strikes and destroyed vehicles.

[Jubal]

Oh, another thing I saw recently : there was a talk at the Future and Reality of Games (FROG) conference about the use of game images in Wagner Group etc propaganda on Russian media, which was given by a dissident scholar hiding in Montenegro. It was grimly interesting seeing some of the use of imagery - masks from Hotline Miami used to cover the identities of Wagner Group members (the game is apparently very popular in Russia, and the undertone of putting on the masks to do murder rampages is... disconcerting).

[dubsartur]

Oh, another thing I saw recently : there was a talk at the Future and Reality of Games (FROG) conference about the use of game images in Wagner Group etc propaganda on Russian media, which was given by a dissident scholar hiding in Montenegro. It was grimly interesting seeing some of the use of imagery - masks from Hotline Miami used to cover the identities of Wagner Group members (the game is apparently very popular in Russia, and the undertone of putting on the masks to do murder rampages is... disconcerting).

I think I linked on my blog to an article about an infantryman in the Donbas last winter who spent his free time playing Call of Duty (or similar).  As a medievalist, you can probably see how this is exactly like Conquistadors reading lots of romances.

[dubsartur]

LindyBeige has an interview with a Brit who returned from the International Legion piped  He survived the attack on the Legion base near the Polish border.  At around 45 minutes he describes how the smallarms for a company went missing.

One thing he says is that many veterans of NATO militaries had never learned basic 19th/20th century field skills like finding kindling and building a fire when its cold and wet.  And some of those veterans quit after a few days against someone with arty and an airforce.  Lt. Col. Nicholas Moran is pontificating about how a corps of Americans could sweep the Russians out of Ukraine in three weeks and while they probably could, a big part of it would be (1) get air superiority with that massive budget.  Creating a war of movement against someone with artillery and aircraft is hard.  (Moran served in the 2003 conquest of Iraq, but the Americans had so many more resources than the Iraqis that they could make it work; nobody today has a reliable way to spot and shoot down small drones even if lots of militaries are developing defenses)

[psyanojim]

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[dubsartur]

Did not know about the followup talk about kit!  It reminds me about my gripe about the reenactment event at Plataea in 2022: one organizer is hardcore for camping, but I was seeing zero research on all the things you need to sort out to live in a field for a week without getting heatstroke or bug bites or diarrhea.  At a reenactment the other guy is not trying to kill you like in a war, but the Sun and the dreaded GI are!  And most reenactors don't go on multi-week hikes and canoe trips in northern Ontario for fun.  My health was not up to attending so I don't know how it worked out.

Any direct US/NATO intervention in Ukraine would most likely involve US/NATO doing what it does best - annihilating conventional forces from afar with overwhelming firepower/accuracy against critical/high-value targets - while relying on the Ukrainian army to finish the job on the ground.

It seems like you are repeating my point that step 1 for Anglo forces in the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars was gaining total air superiority, and that created the conditions for the ground forces to do spectacular things?  If either side in the Russo-Ukrainian war had air superiority they would be doing some impressive things too, but its hard to do those things when whenever you get a few thousand guys together they are spotted and attacked from the air.  The US or UK armies could absolutely do even more in the same situation because they have so much more of everything and are better at using it, but even then small drones would make some things hard.

Didn't British forces in Iraq end up pinned in Basra airport and Basra Palace at the pleasure of Muqtada al-Sadr?