Curious, what are these speculations? From what I heard they only have 30k around Bakhmut but they seem to have drawn a disproportionate amount of Ukrainians.
The War in the Ukraine
- Thread starter SampanViking
- Start date
Elements of 20 brigades rotated into and out of Bakhmut over the last few month from what I've heard. Russians are using some sort of strategy devised by Syrian Tiger Forces to inflict maximum casualty. It works like this:
1. With coordinated artillery support, assault team advance forward and drive away the foremost group of enemy on the contact line.
2. Once the enemy position is secured, immediately go about burying landmines and mark out positions with good cover and transmit them to artillery
3. Once the enemy counterattack comes, pull out straight away and have artillery drop shells on per-marked positions
4. Go back to step 1.
As long as the side doing this has fire superiority it's hard to counter this. You could just not counterattack and not run into Russian's planned kill zones but giving up ground is politically unacceptable to Kiev, so inevitably the Ukrainian counterattack will come and get rained on by Russian shells.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
I think the fact that these sort of strategies also cost Wagner blood is a reason Ukraine high command just couldn’t help but continue to pour fresh meat into the grinder. It’s this extra political element and interference which has made Bakhmut so costly for the AFU.
Ukrainian high command seem to have it in their minds that the Russians are desperately short of manpower (on top of cruise missiles, computer chips and toilets just to name a few), so as soon as their high command see footage of Russian dead, they are happy and will order local
Commanders to continue no matter how many times more lives they trade, because Ukraine high command has consistently demonstrated that they couldn’t care less about the lives of Ukrainian soldiers or civilians. As long as their political objectives are met, no cost in lives is too high.
Bakhmut has been a real grinder and the costs on both sides are high, it’s just massively disproportionately unfavourable to the Ukrainians.
It will be interesting to see if the Russians manage to weaponise this Ukrainian high command obsessive interference to get them to overrule the better judgement of their generals and local commanders to needless waste Ukrainian blood in areas overwhelmingly favourable to the Russians.
Ukraine operated over 150 fast jets before the war, that means quite a few pilots. Add in all the former air force pilots who have no doubt been drafted back into the air force and they will have no shortage any time soon.
It was reported early in the war that Ukrainian pilots were training on F-15s. Probably an exchange program of some sort, but if it produces F-15 qualified pilots, the end result is the same.
I hasten to disappoint you - since 2011 about 900 F-35s have been produced, that is about 75 a year. This rate is called "a teaspoon per hour", no one will give bloody F-16s at the moment of escalation of the Rashist military threat, and some will even fix and paint the old Phantoms.
I think everyone is really overreacting to the idea of F-16s being given to the Ukraine. First of all, the deal hasn't been completed yet, and it wouldn't surprise me if it never is. There is a reason Poland and the US were so sketchy when it came to sending MiG-29s last year. There is only so many times you can poke the bear before it takes a swipe at you. Up till now Russia has actually show remarkable restraint when NATO sent mercs, AA systems, artillery, but sooner or later even Russia is bound to reach it's limit and will escalate.
Second, just how much use will these F-16s be. This is a weapon system. It needs a place to take off and land. It needs to be supplied with parts, engines, fuel, bombs, missiles. How about a competent ground crew who know what they're doing? Perhaps you can take a Su-27 pilot and train him at Nellis for a month or two to operate the plane, but what about the ground component for maintaining an unfamiliar weapons system? When a couple of screws come loose or a pipe comes off somewhere deep in the plane making the machine unable to fly, will it just be written off? Will they push the plane couple hundred kms to check it in Poland?
Third, is the question of what F-16s will be sent. They won't be the newest planes (block 50/52 and up). They'll be F-16 MLUs, planes which already have been ridden hard for decades. The youngest of those planes will be what? 30-35 years old? And if NATO decides to send anything more advanced, it will be depriving itself of usefull assets. Will Poland send theirs and basically deprive itself of a combat air force? Will Greece weaken itself vis-a-vis Turkey, when Turkey is inching closer and closer to leaving NATO? Or will the Americans stretch themselves even thinner?
What's curious to me is that the Americans seem to be OK with F-16s being sent do the Ukraine, while at the same time being so opposed to sending long range weapons which might be used to strike against Russian soil. Who wants to bet how many F-16s will get shot down while trying to bomb the Kremlin? I can already see the western media OOOh-ing and AAAh-ing when Zelensky proudly anounces that the first-ever F-16 has flown over Russian airspace (completely ignoring the fact that it cost the pilot's life).
Given how many resources these F-16s would require (on top of 4 types of tanks to be sent and God knows how many artillery systems already being sent) I wouldn't be surprised if the next logical step for Russia was to start concentrating their missile attacks on railway lines coming through western Ukraine.
Second, just how much use will these F-16s be. This is a weapon system. It needs a place to take off and land. It needs to be supplied with parts, engines, fuel, bombs, missiles. How about a competent ground crew who know what they're doing? Perhaps you can take a Su-27 pilot and train him at Nellis for a month or two to operate the plane, but what about the ground component for maintaining an unfamiliar weapons system? When a couple of screws come loose or a pipe comes off somewhere deep in the plane making the machine unable to fly, will it just be written off? Will they push the plane couple hundred kms to check it in Poland?
Third, is the question of what F-16s will be sent. They won't be the newest planes (block 50/52 and up). They'll be F-16 MLUs, planes which already have been ridden hard for decades. The youngest of those planes will be what? 30-35 years old? And if NATO decides to send anything more advanced, it will be depriving itself of usefull assets. Will Poland send theirs and basically deprive itself of a combat air force? Will Greece weaken itself vis-a-vis Turkey, when Turkey is inching closer and closer to leaving NATO? Or will the Americans stretch themselves even thinner?
What's curious to me is that the Americans seem to be OK with F-16s being sent do the Ukraine, while at the same time being so opposed to sending long range weapons which might be used to strike against Russian soil. Who wants to bet how many F-16s will get shot down while trying to bomb the Kremlin? I can already see the western media OOOh-ing and AAAh-ing when Zelensky proudly anounces that the first-ever F-16 has flown over Russian airspace (completely ignoring the fact that it cost the pilot's life).
Given how many resources these F-16s would require (on top of 4 types of tanks to be sent and God knows how many artillery systems already being sent) I wouldn't be surprised if the next logical step for Russia was to start concentrating their missile attacks on railway lines coming through western Ukraine.
The upcoming Russian offensive will be on all fronts according to the former head of the Russian Air Defence Forces
I think he means all along the existing front in Donbass and Zaphorizhiya, which is indeed ~1000 km long, and not in unrelated fronts like Kiev. If the assessment is true, and recent gains on the Zaphorizhiya side are representative of the true situation, then it is not unimaginable for there to be a speedup in Russian territorial advancement speeds.
Do they have enough manpower though? Its one thing to defend 1000km and its another thing to make an offensive while keeping enough troops to defend as well
Zaphorizhiya was a probing attack isn't it? Only involving 19th Motor Rifle Division and no other formation on Russian side. Nearby 42nd Guards Motor Rifle Division and 336th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade didn't take part and just held their ground.
Seems to me like Russians were probing Ukrainian strength in Zaphorizhiya. Initially it was way weaker than what they expected so they advanced a lot, to the degree that artillery wasn't ready to keep up for that sort of advance. Then AFU reinforcement came down from Dnipro and 19th pulled back since their goal was more recognizance in force and not to fight AFU reserve.