The War in the Ukraine

Pmichael said:

Two planes were shoot down. The Serbian assets didn’t deny a single bombing run, though it caused a large share of the forces being bound for SEAD.

And then the experiences caused the development of an improved HARM with alternatively flies to the GPS coordinates of the radar system - making the tactics of turning off the radar obsolete.


And that’s pretty much the difference to Russia which didn’t learn anything. They can’t fly high because they would be easily targeted by anti air assets and are forced to do desperate low level runs which turn them into easy targets for manpads.

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There is also the fact that Russians are using mostly unguided weapons so they can't hit anything from higher altitude, and another problem is subpar communication between air force and ground forces what prevents them from operating in unison, but biggest is that they don't have skills to do the job properly.

Pmichael said:

And then the experiences caused the development of an improved HARM with alternatively flies to the GPS coordinates of the radar system - making the tactics of turning off the radar obsolete.

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That must be why we have HARMs crashing in the middle of parks without hitting anything in Ukraine, or that the battery that damaged a an F-117, also downed another and was never destroyed. It is true it didn't stop NATO from bombing civilians and the chinese embassy "by accident".

Pmichael said:

They can’t fly high because they would be easily targeted by anti air assets and are forced to do desperate low level runs which turn them into easy targets for manpads.

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But there are plenty of videos of them flying high in the hunt for what's left of the UAF, and the success of the Ukranians with manpads can be questioned given the amount of them received relative to how much equipment downed and how often the Russians keep doing low level CAS with impunity.

sheogorath said:

That must be why we have HARMs crashing in the middle of parks without hitting anything in Ukraine, or that the battery that damaged a an F-117, also downed another and was never destroyed. It is true it didn't stop NATO from bombing civilians and the chinese embassy "by accident".


But there are plenty of videos of them flying high in the hunt for what's left of the UAF, and the success of the Ukranians with manpads can be questioned given the amount of them received relative to how much equipment downed and how often the Russians keep doing low level CAS with impunity.

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If everything is okay and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Russian equipment/tactics/training then I guess the NATO is just too good for Russia to have any hope to stand against the NATO backed Ukraine.
But for real we are just doing the old ‘the enemy is strong but weak at the same time’ dance.

For now the Ukrainians are undoubtedly winning the war (not just winning some battles as some people claim).
Whether the course of the war changes or not depends entirely on whether the top leadership (Putin) has the will and the mental capacity to correct his mistakes as soon as possible (ie: he needs to stop being stubborn) because the current major setbacks that the Russians are suffering from cannot be blamed on just the western theater command or Shoigu or Gerasimov, after all Putin is not just some random guy, he is the commander in chief and ultimately he is the one who decides what strategy to chose.

Even a regular civilian like me realized several months ago that the war has reached a stalemate and more troops were needed. Yet it took Putin like more than 6 months to order a mobilization? The way Putin is acting right now with the late mobilization while the Russian military is facing setbacks left right and center is like.. when a student is gonna do the annual exams and he has one week to prepare for it but he wastes his time forcing him to wake up early on the day of the exam to try to study everything in the four hours he has before the exam starts. This mobilization should have been done 1 month after the start of the war.

sndef888 said:

What are your predictions on the situation?

I think Putin's goal is now just full control over donbass, and maintaining current borders in kherson and zaporizhzhia. Overthrowing kiev government now out of the question.

The partial mobilisation I think will be able to give them that, though at quite high cost.

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There is no such thing as partial occupation or limited war. you can't just go in, occupy some one's land and tell him "ok now let's all stop fighting and live in peace", the Ukrainians are not idiots or cowards, they will continue to fight for their land. You either occupy all their country or you give them back every part of their land down to the last inch, there is no way in between.

I think Zelensky is playing all-in right now.

By the summer, all Western financial aid, as well as finances raised from various foundations and organisations, as well as state revenues, were spent on emergency purchases of equipment, heavy weapons, armoured vehicles, pickup trucks with machine guns, training, etc. Literally everything in Ukraine is being spent on weapons, and now everything has been thrown into an emergency offensive. And the Ukrainian people are already starting to go into mass poverty because of the ruined economy, high inflation and corruption.

Zelensky's all-in strategy might work if Ukraine's armed forces can at least repeat the success of Kharkiv and manage to take Kherson, which could lead to a bad situation in the Russian Federation itself and start a "fall of power" in the Kremlin.

If the war drags on, everything bought and collected for months for the current Ukrainian offensives will be lost and destroyed and Zelensk's all-in strategy will fail.

According to rybar.

"The guys from the field report massively that the enemy's equipment was marked with our tactical insignia, i.e. "Z" and "V", which caused confusion in the first hours of the battle, when the front collapsed. If that's the case, then the enemy has an American network-centric battle control system, with all units on the battlefield tied in a grid and marked on computers, even at the company level, not to mention the battalion regiment. So, even a company sergeant in Humvee, BMP or T-64 sees on the screen, where their own and where others and he does not care what marks on the armor. If so, it is very bad, because is a qualitatively new level of control of troops. And our retreat is a consequence of the loss of the equation."

So the Ukrainians use an American grid system and uses star link satellite communications.

Do Russians have satellite communications or a grid system to tell friend from foe? Or a real time system to look at the location of the artillery? And order counter battery fire? If not then this is a large discrepancy to bridge and would be hard for the Russians to stem the losses.

Russians have begun losing their ancient T-62MV tanks. Kherson is being defended by Russias VDV units and regular forces and they running away.

Five months back I wrote that I feared this war was the beginning of the end of Russia as a great power. Yet I was thinking of processes that may unfold over the next five, ten, twenty years -- not the next six months! Of course the future is yet to be written, but at this point it seems I may not have been quite pessimistic enough.

Broccoli said:

Russians have begun losing their ancient T-62MV tanks. Kherson is being defended by Russias VDV units and regular forces and they running away.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1577189346587082752

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1577189784057163778

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Something is off with the barrel of the first one, it is too short. Fractured barrel resulting in tank being abandoned? Second T-62 has burn marks on the rear of the turret by the engine compartment.

Lethe said:

Five months back I wrote that I feared this war was the beginning of the end of Russia as a great power. Yet I was thinking of processes that may unfold over the next five, ten, twenty years -- not the next six months! Of course the future is yet to be written, but at this point it seems I may not have been quite pessimistic enough.

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The recurring theme of this war is that people overstated massively Russian capabilities regarding equiptment, doctrines and tactics - including Russia themselves. And the denial will stop Russia from having their Prussia moment and do the necessnary stepts to modernize and innovate their armored forces.