Ukraine Revolt/Civil War News, Reports, Data, etc.

Miragedriver

Brigadier
potd-sisters-ukrai_3211194k.jpg

Teenage twins Anya and Katya are among a group of pro-Russian rebels seen here resting at a base on the southern front near the town of Mariupol in Ukraine. The sisters, both 19 years old, have been with the Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) army since October last year, fighting Ukrainian government forces.
Picture: ANDREY BORODULIN/AFP/Getty Images



Back to bottling my Grenache
 

Dannhill

Junior Member
Cassad has this to say about the insincerity of Kiev in honouring the truce and just buying time to regroup and rearm for a Spring offensive.

"- Ukraine pulls military forces and go on the offensive in late March - early April. While we were at the concert, Ukrainian punishers of heavy guns fired Gorlovka. - In addition, the Minsk Agreement there is no item on the introduction of peacekeeping forces. Ukraine is behaving strangely after the signing of the Minsk Agreement. We see that the statements Yatsenyuk, then Poroshenko. Minsk Ukraine is not interested in.

- Over the past day recorded 30 attacks on the territory of the DNI by Ukrainian punitive. They are all methods of trying to derail the Minsk Agreement, none of the Ukrainian politicians did not say, we ceased fire, and recovered military equipment. We are, in fact, bends, and they pull, then from Kharkov, then from Zaporozhye.

- I have the impression that this is a provocation that will break the Minsk Agreement. If there are violations of the Ukrainian side, if Kiev will continue to bombard the city and the DNI position, all this technology that we took today, will go back.
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- zinc PS. Actually Zaharchenko reiterated the obvious, the junta truce need maximum as a respite to clean up the battered during the winter campaign of parts, an increase in forces in the Donbas (due to mobilization, reopen and reduced equipment, as well as due to the possible arms deliveries due abroad). Ongoing attacks and provocations (like an explosion in Kharkov), refusal withdrawal of heavy weapons (with a mocking phrase "because attacks" that the junta itself and carries) - serve to maintain low-intensity combat operations that have to break even the basic understanding and lead to renewed hostilities action as achieving readiness Ukrainian troops and conducive to active offensive operations weather. It is obvious that the military-political leadership of the DNI does not feed on this account no illusions as knows how to actually comply with the junta "truce" and is preparing for the spring campaign. If present trends continue, somewhere in the second half of March - early April, the fighting is likely to recur."

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Good basic breakdown of the Russian full spectrum campaign (the author calls it "hybrid war", whatever).

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Hybrid war: The real reason fighting stopped in Ukraine – for now
By Fiona Hill February 26, 2015

President Vladimir Putin understands how insurgencies work better than any other Russian leader. We are watching this play out right now in Ukraine.

Before Putin took power, Moscow had long struggled to suppress rebel movements. In the 1980s, for example, the Soviet Union grappled with the Muslim mujahedeen in Afghanistan. Moscow propped up the beleaguered Kabul government with an invasion and occupation — to little avail. After 10 years of grueling conflict, Moscow withdrew, just as the Soviet Union fell apart. A few years later, rebels inflicted another serious blow against the Russian military, in the Russian province of Chechnya. Chechen militants launched attacks deep into Russia. The Kremlin again withdrew its forces and essentially sued for peace.

Until Putin took the helm.

Putin succeeded where others had failed because he was skilled at fighting dirty. As a former KGB operative, he fused together intelligence and military measures. In Chechnya he relentlessly pursued the rebels, often using undercover operations that adopted terrorist tactics, until one Chechen leader switched sides and helped him defeat the rebels.

A Russian flag flutters on top of a separatist self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic army armoured personnel carrier as it drives through the town of Vuhlehirsk
A Russian flag flutters on a separatist self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic army armored personnel carrier in the town of Vuhlehirsk, February 25, 2015. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

Now in Ukraine, Putin has turned the tables. He is with the insurgents, not the government. Putin is to Kiev what the mujahedeen and the Chechens were to Kabul and Moscow, respectively. Given Russia’s own simmering national minority troubles and territorial disputes, the Russian president is taking a huge risk in backing an armed rebellion in a neighboring country.

But the risk is well calculated because the stakes are high. Putin has a great deal riding on this.

He firmly believes, as he has laid out in many statements, that the battle for the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine is a proxy war with the West. The United States and Europe seek to weaken Russia, Putin’s argument goes, by pulling a key Russian ally, Ukraine, into their sphere of influence. Putin’s goal is to deny Kiev the chance of associating with the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

In Putin’s view, the West stoked regime change in Kiev in February 2014 for the same reasons that the United States supported the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s — to undermine Moscow’s authority throughout the region. Putin also asserts that the West aided and abetted the Chechens throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s to destabilize the Russian Federation. So according to Putin’s logic, Afghanistan was the West’s proxy war with the Soviet Union. Ukraine is the West’s proxy war with Russia.

This being a proxy war, Putin is intent on helping the side that best serves Russia’s interests. In this case, that side is the “armed formations,” as the February Minsk agreement describes them, of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Lugansk regions.

Russian President Vladimir Putin looks on during a meeting with Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow
President Vladimir Putin during a meeting with Cyprus President Nicos Anastasiades at the Novo-Ogaryovo state residence outside Moscow, February 25, 2015. REUTERS/Yuri Kadobnov/Pool

Putin, of course, denies that Russians are fighting with the Donbass rebels. Kremlin officials insist this is a civil war between Ukraine and people who reject the new Kiev government. Putin does admit, though, that many Russian volunteers have joined the rebels, including “vacationing” soldiers. Yet Putin has also claimed that Kiev is being supported by “NATO’s foreign legion” and U.S. arms.
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To be continued in next post due to 10K character limit
 
Continued from previous post due to 10K character limit
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The Minsk agreement refers to the presence of “foreign armed formations, military technology, and likewise mercenaries” in Ukraine, without specifying their origin. The denials and the voluntary nature of the external involvement are all hallmarks of a civil war centered on an insurgency.

Having fought off an insurgency himself, Putin knows a thing or two about insurgents’ methods. Putin and the Russian military have incorporated these tactics into a larger strategy of 21st-century hybrid war. Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, rolled this out in a January 2013 speech. He announced the Russian military would engage in a “new kind of war” fought with “nonmilitary methods to achieve political and strategic goals.”

These methods, Gerasimov explained, would involve fomenting popular protests, using covert military measures and deploying special operations forces, often under the guise of peacekeeping or crisis management. Such tactics, Gerasimov insisted, had been used by the United States for decades. Now Russia would fight back in the same way.

Because of what Putin perceives as an asymmetry of military capabilities and economic strength between Russia and the United States and its Western allies, he feels Russia has to be more aggressive and smarter than its opponents in fighting this new kind of war. This asymmetric, hybrid war, Gerasimov noted, requires “the close coordination of military, intelligence and information operations.”

Russia’s military intelligence, the GRU, and the Federal Security Service have been at the forefront of operations in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, as many observers have noted. Russian diplomats and media have helped to maintain a coordinated information-support campaign to persuade domestic and foreign audiences of “the futility of [exerting] any forms of pressure on the Russian Federation and its allies.” Gerasimov, in another speech in February 2014, explained that this was also a goal of hybrid warfare.

A man waits for a convoy of mobile artillery cannons of the separatist self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic army to start pulling back from Donetsk
A man waits for a convoy of mobile artillery cannons of the separatist self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic army to start pulling back from Donetsk, February 26, 2015. REUTERS/Baz Ratner

Putin and the Russian military hierarchy have been remarkably open in describing how the Kremlin is using the war in Ukraine as a giant training exercise for conducting a hybrid war. While the rebels have directly engaged the Ukrainian army in the Donbass, the Russian military has been engaged in training exercises just inside Russian territory. These exercises include the use of space, missile and nuclear forces, special forces and conventional military units, and psychological operations teams and political operatives.

They have pulled in all branches of Russia military and security services, as well as the civilian leadership. The exercises have been covered widely in the Russian media and on Moscow’s official websites. In a May 2014 announcement, for example, the Kremlin stated, somewhat cryptically, that Putin was overseeing these giant war games “in operational mode.”

So where are we now in this giant war game? On Feb. 24, we appeared to enter what Moscow might term a “political-diplomatic phase.” This was the first full day without casualties since the Feb. 12 Minsk agreement. As Gerasimov asserted in his speeches, the goal of an asymmetric hybrid war is to achieve objectives without launching a full-blown conventional military war. Hybrid war has many weapons and many ways of fighting.

Diplomacy can be one of them. In late January, the United States government debated whether to send arms to the Ukrainian military. The intent was clearly to push Putin from covert to overt support of the rebels — and into a conventional war. Instead, however, Putin was able to push the U.S. debate into the background by plunging into diplomatic negotiations with the Ukrainian president, the German chancellor and the French president — which ultimately resulted in the second Minsk agreement.

The agreement, in spite of its references to foreign fighters, maintains Russia’s position that the war in Ukraine is between Kiev and the Donbass “armed formations.” The arrangement also provided enough diplomatic cover for the rebels to rout the Ukrainian army from the town of Debaltseve, a railway hub that connects Donetsk and Luhansk.

The timing and wording of the agreement’s provisions that Putin directly hammered out provided sufficient strategic ambiguity for the rebels to press their advantage. As Gerasimov noted a year ago, “political-diplomatic and foreign economic measures … are … closely interconnected with military, information, and other measures.”

Now that the rebels have consolidated their area of control, one operational phase of the game seems to have concluded. Putin bought time for the rebels to take Debaltseve. With the rebels having secured a position of strength on the ground, the ceasefire can now be enforced.

In the next phase, Putin and the rebels will likely regroup. They will pocket whatever concessions they can take from Kiev. They will then likely reassess what they need to do militarily, politically and economically in the next phases of the proxy hybrid war to maintain pressure on Ukraine and the West.

This sort of tactical maneuvering is something Putin learned in the KGB. As circumstances change, you step back and see how everyone else reacts. You have to be willing to adapt and have a range of backup plans to keep one step ahead of your adversaries.

If the military part of an operation runs into a problem, for example, try another approach. If diplomatic efforts don’t bear the fruit you want, look elsewhere. You just have to be willing to use all methods available — and be ruthless to achieve your goals.
 

Equation

Lieutenant General
Is the west prepared to wage a nuclear war to keep the territorial unity of Ukraine despite the Minsk 2 accord which speaks of negotiations for the federalisation of the provinces in rebellion and not their independence?

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No there won't be a nuclear war but rather more economic sanctions against Russia. It's all depends on how far south the Rebel forces are willing to risk towards taking the port of Mariupol. If there is any possible military involvement it would only be NATO air strikes at rebel positions (of course Russia could do the same) if further peace talks fail. That's just my opinion and prediction on the current scenario.
 

tphuang

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Staff member
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Is the west prepared to wage a nuclear war to keep the territorial unity of Ukraine despite the Minsk 2 accord which speaks of negotiations for the federalisation of the provinces in rebellion and not their independence?

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Can you stop posting such insane ideas? Nobody in the West is going to wage a nuclear war over a Non-Nato country.
 

Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
Is the west prepared to wage a nuclear war to keep the territorial unity of Ukraine despite the Minsk 2 accord which speaks of negotiations for the federalisation of the provinces in rebellion and not their independence?.

Why are you asking such a question Danhill?

This forum has strict rules against starting conversations regarding nuclear war between nations.

Almost invariably such comments are flame bait and then lead to severe nationalism, arguments, and ultimately to warnings, suspensions, and banning.

It is part of our Forum Rules of Behavior and you have been here long enough to know this
 
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Dannhill

Junior Member
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Emergency announcement of the Head of the DPR in regard to the withdrawal of heavy armaments

Head of the DPR Aleksandr Zakharchenko made an emergency announcement in Donetsk on February 26 in regard to the withdrawal of heavy armaments from the line of contact.

He recited to the journalists the text of the document submitted to the Head of the OSCE mission in the DPR. “In pursuance of the Declaration of 12.02.2015 and the “Package of measures concerning implementation of the Minsk Agreement” the Donetsk People’s Republic has withdrawn heavy armament to the agreed upon and registered by the given document distance”, the document claims.

Aleksandr Zakharchenko remarked that the DPR has withdrawn 90% of artillery, mortar-guns and heavy equipment.
“The Ukrainian side evades the commitments formalized by part 2 of the “Package of measures concerning implementation of the Minsk Agreement” and has not started the withdrawal of heavy armaments agreed upon by the sides.

The Donetsk People’s Republic offers to Ukrainian side an opportunity to start the withdrawal of heavy armaments envisaged by the “Package of measures concerning implementation of the Minsk Agreement” before 6 PM Kiev time and 7 PM of DPR time on 27.02.2015.
In case of violation by the Ukrainian side of the Declaration of 12.02.2015 and the “Package of measures concerning implementation of the Minsk Agreement” the Donetsk People’s Republic is forced to reserve the right to return the heavy armaments to the places of previous dislocation as of 12.02.2015”, the document says. “ The Donetsk People’s Republic lays all the responsibility for the wrecking of the plan of peaceful settlement of the conflict envisaged the Declaration of 12.02.2015 and the “Package of measures concerning implementation of the Minsk Agreement” on the Ukrainian side”, says the document.

Aleksandr Zakharchenko also informed the audience about the incessant attacks of Ukrainian forces at the Donetsk airport, Kirovskiy district of Donetsk, Gorlovka, Dokuchayevsk and Yelenovka. “If shelling and attacks do not stop, we reserve the right to consider the Minsk Agreement wrecked by the Ukrainian side. Military equipment will be returned to their previous positions. All attempts to attack our settlements will be checked in the bud”, he stressed.

According to the Head of the DPR, the leadership of the LPR will make the similar announcement.
 

Dannhill

Junior Member
More info out on the Kiev loses in the 9 Days war of the Cauldron and other areas.


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2/26/2015
Debaltsevo: Junta’s Stalingrad
By Klim_Vo
Translated from Russian by J.Hawk


Junta’s losses over the last month stagger the imagination.

DPR Ministry of Defense published data concerning the losses of Ukrainian occupation forces which they suffered during battles with Novorossia’s defenders in the vicinity of Debaltsevo and on other sectors of the front between January 12 and February 20.

Occupier losses include 10,940 killed and wounded (including 4110 killed), and 1178 prisoners of war.

Equipment losses are also staggering. The invaders have lost the following quantities of equipment:

299 tanks (28 captured intact at Debaltsevo)

38 self-propelled howitzers (12 captured)

4 2S7 Pion 203mm self-propelled cannon (3 captured)

4 2S3 Akatsiya 152mm SP howitzers

3 2S1 Gvozdika 122mm SP howitzers

151 BMPs (33 captured)

115 BTRs (30 captured)

24 Grad 122mm MRLs (15 captured at Debaltsevo)

1 Smerch 300mm MRL

205 towed artillery pieces

36 120mm mortars

16 ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns (captured at Debaltsevo)

6 MT-LB tracked APCs and prime movers.

2 BRDMs

4 BMDs

290 motor vehicles (145 captured)


In addition, the junta lost 3 Su-25 attack aircraft, 1 helicopter, and 4 UAVs.


The Ukrainian military had abandoned a state-of-the-art counter-mortar radar supplied by the United States.


J.Hawk’s Comment: It’s difficult to say to what extent this data is accurate, especially when it comes to the estimates of killed and wounded, many of whom became casualties due to Novorossia artillery fire against targets behind the front lines. However, photographic evidence from several blogs suggests these figures are correct within an order of magnitude. Every major engagement saw the battlefield littered with destroyed and abandoned UAF vehicles. The Debaltsevo cauldron’s rate of losses was even higher, since the vast majority of equipment the UAF sent there had to be left behind.


Arguably this victory is even more important as, in addition to he obvious morale effect on both sides, it quite effectively deprived the UAF of the physical ability to conduct offensive military operations (not that they were all that impressive to begin with), and even to offer effective defense against a Novorossia offensive. This is why Ukrainian officials are scouring the world for weapons, and why the West is concerned about Novorossia’s designs on the rest of Ukraine. And, let's face it, the surest sign that Ukraine is on the brink of military collapse is when NATO begins to talk about the Russian Army allegedly operating in Eastern Ukraine.


However, it does not appear that Novorossia is going to press its military advantage. To start with, its government has major problems to deal with, due to the damage caused by Ukrainian artillery bombardments of civilian areas. In contrast to Ukraine, Novorossia's government plans to establish its legitimacy by actually governing and making the country a place fit for human habitation. Secondly, Ukraine’s economic crisis is deepening, which will either force a change of policy or, should that fail to materialize, a change of regime. At the moment, the latter scenario seems the more likely of the two.
 
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