11:50
Wow, Zelensky’s speech was a PR ten-pointer in every category.
Both for the fighting soldiers and the own population but also for the world’s support and belief in a Ukrainian win.
It is very clear that Ukraine will reclaim all its territory.
11:52
Ok thanks, so Gerasimov is alive at least but he is not leading from the front in Izyum which is probably a bit lucky for him given how things are developing down there.
12:42
Between February 24 – April 19, Ukraine had retaken 40%-50% of the frontline (we did not count Belarus here because Lukas was the friend who betrayed).
On April 19, Russia started its spring offensive which was supposed to take – Kharkov, Donetsk Oblast, Luhansk Oblast and the entire southern border to the sea towards Odessa.
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Three weeks after the start of the spring offensive, Ukraine has retaken the area around Kharkov and threatens supply routes and has managed to blow away the entire offensive at Izyum which was the Russian concentration point. There is a lot of fog of war so we don’t know exactly what is happening but large Russian losses are likely, very large.
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Izyum is not a natural primary target for an offensive and the place they chose is strange, but it has gone well. I would have thought they would cut off the units and let them kill themselves in their traffic jam, they charged straight in instead.
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This leads me to believe that it was either a pure – seize the opportunity in flight thing – or a diversion for the real offensive which is the southern front. Liberating Mariupol and retaking Crimea before they have made the peninsula a fortress with all the BTGs left would be quite smart. It’s in the cards.
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Then you have a push from the west from the Kharkov – Izyum line that will go eastward with flank protection northward. After that, only Donbass remains and Ukraine can strike supply lines quite effectively.
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How fast, we don’t know but if there are long troop convoys on the way, Ukraine would do best to act in the vacuum after the spring offensive dies out and they get reinforcements for defense.
15:02
Balakliya is under attack according to FIRMS so the 93rd Mechanized has started moving eastward.
Those who cut the side at Izyum I guess were the 25th Airborne.
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If you look at a 7-day FIRMS map, the entire forest area west, northwest, and southwest of Izyum has burned like a torch and the area east of Izyum as well. Then you have a little string of fires north from Izyum which one can guess is freshly grilled armor.
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The Izyum offensive with its 22 BTGs as marked on the unit maps is thus located in this area. Now not all 22 BTGs were down at Izyum but most presumably with some flank protection and some up near Kupiansk.
Then there were reports of 20 new BTGs that moved down from rest status south of Belgorod a few weeks ago but exactly where they went is unclear, the report was for the Izyum offensive but they may also have split it and sent some east of the Oskil river.
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We have reports of some VDV, Guards armor, and the 64th motorized, in total about 5-6 BTGs are completely wiped out/permanently out of combat condition and one can guess that the remaining 16 BTGs are not freshly painted either since they have all been in the same area and fought the same battle?
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I’m not saying all have been knocked out by this pre-battle and offensive curveball but they fought down there 1.5 weeks before April 19 and fast forward until now and 22 BTGs + a couple more have been in combat 4.5 weeks and then subjected to enormous pre-battle and rolled over by a Ukrainian elite brigade as a finishing touch so the guess that most BTGs are out of combat condition down there I think is quite reasonable.
15:13
You really want to wake up to a similar red carpet down at Kherson but if you run a 7-day there it’s very clear that they are pre-battling rear, artillery, supply, and staffs on a large scale and that Snihurivka may be about to be taken but they haven’t run an Izyum against the dug-in BTGs around Kherson yet.
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There is a little string of red dots up from Melitopol to Tokmak and you get no prize for guessing that the free war is raging down there. It probably takes a couple of days to move howitzers and haubits from Izyum to southwest and southeast Zaporizhzhia.
15:20
Hey, at 32:38 in the link below the speaker voice says “blablabla Alexandr Gerasimov” and then there is a picture of a veteran in a face mask. So that is not Gerasimov in that picture so Gerasimov does not exist 🙂
Is there anyone here who has seen the whole thing and can confirm that he appears in any other picture than the old 90-year-old with a face mask?
https://youtu.be/IG3LAUonvCc
15:22
Take a break and think, the Russians average 1.5 BTGs lost per day and now they have been pushing for +4 weeks, that is at least 42 BTGs lost in total. Not totally unreasonable with +20 BTGs lost in Izyum which has been the hottest combat zone.
I also have the feeling that we haven’t seen the numbers for that grilling yet.
15:32
Was it T34-85?
15:44
Remove LW so I don’t have to be embarrassed all day (more crying emojis)
15:47
Many small streams, I don’t have exact knowledge of how it looks but it has been over one BTG/day for quite a while now and per day you don’t raise an eyebrow but if you multiply by the number of days they have taken those losses and compare to the 93 BTGs they mobilized for the spring offensive it is enormous losses.
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Ukraine is not rushing to the Urals because they do as they always have done, well-calculated attacks with the least possible losses except where they have to.
16:22
MRF and THE SNIPER, yes we are going through a period now where the miracle at Kharkov was a lucky break and that nothing has really happened at Izyum because we don’t have the information yet. The interesting thing is to try to piece together the information before ISW finally catches up, not just adjust after reading a summary.
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-LW usually writes that a Russian BTG has 10 tanks and 30 IFVs, sometimes lower sometimes higher.
-I am quite sure that the 90-95 BTGs mobilized for the spring offensive were not fully manned in part.
-Loss figures lag a few days, it’s not a computer game directly, and Izyum is recent.
-Losses were 1130 tanks and 2781 IFVs yesterday.
-April 11 I take as an approximate start date for Izyum – 725 tanks and 1923 IFVs grilled.
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– 30-40 BTGs of 90-95 BTGs 100% knocked out. Now it doesn’t work that 40 are knocked out and the rest have full combat value but you can have BTGs with a couple of tanks left that simply moved out of the combat area or just sit somewhere without a battalion commander and sulk with zero combat value. 4.5 weeks of constant fighting also wears on a Russian.
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My counter question to you is what you would consider intense fighting and high losses because 40% losses of all BTGs in 4.5 weeks I consider absolutely sky-high and now every single expert has declared that Ukraine could not go on the offensive but nevertheless they clear north of Kharkov and strike at Izyum.
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Then you calculate some kind of stalemate where the Russians can dig in and have full supply while you read that depots burn every day, convoys are taken out and the highly reasonable assumption that the 300 artillery tubes with smart ammunition that we know are largely assigned to units can take out stationary targets easier than moving targets. How exactly did you think the Russians would achieve a stalemate here?
Not to forget the 300 T72s with night fighting equipment they have received, the Russians probably don’t have many BTGs with night fighting capability.
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And finally, we know that VDV is reduced by 90%, the first guards armored army is no more and most recently a few days ago that three regiments, one guards, one VDV and 64 motorized moved north or were wiped out at Izyum.
Yes, these are reports that do not come from the Russians themselves on stamped paper but it correlates quite well with knocked out armor and the number of fires on FIRMS.
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Sure, I’m guessing like everyone else, sometimes more sometimes less but above are after all hard numbers that we have to relate to and it is anything but a stalemate if you ask me, especially since Ukraine has 250,000-300,000 men in maneuver brigades against the Russians now presumably 90-95 BTGs/2…
Ukraine loses at a lower rate and presses in reserve personnel over time is my stable bet.
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I believe firmly in FIRMS, Nathan’s satellites correlated well and also the IR satellite and that TESS ran a real field test and looked for Walpurgis Night fires in Sweden on Walpurgis Night and it did not light up like these red dots.
What more do you need to test run our very own spy satellite?
16:37
please LW remove my post, I really am ashamed 🙂
17:04
We know they pulled together 20,000 – 30,000 men for the spring offensive and then the reserves were more readily available than what they have to draw on now.
(If I may guess, about 10,000 soldiers from Moscow are on their way down this afternoon).
The experts say it will take the Russians 3-6 months to muster something comparable to what existed on February 24 and I bet money that they will be deployed as they come so no real buildup.
18:35
I can’t respond to your post MRF since you are at the bottom of the chain, so I have to answer my own,
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No one but the combat leadership knows the situation, Ukraine has suffered far higher losses than they have admitted, we have often discussed that and that we should not sully ourselves in their losses. We know they have 900,000 reserves of which a not insignificant part has combat experience after 8 years of war and that they have received 300 T72s (night combat equipment), drones, image intensifiers for infantry and artillery + guided ammunition in very large quantities. A qualified assumption from me is that Ukraine’s maneuver brigades are intact with the chain of command and expertise so when plugging the gaps the capability is retained.
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This while the Russians are not receiving reinforcements and materiel in equivalent amounts and are exhausting their maneuver units. Provided the Russians have not succeeded well with mobilization which we do not know of course but no OSINT has demonstrated it yet as far as I have read except the troop trains LW mentioned today. With the staffs knocked out entire chains of command go up in smoke and you know as well as I do that Russia’s Chief of Defense was not at the May 9 parade.
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Regarding knocked out BTGs it is a somewhat more advanced assumption than you think 🙂 It is probably damn hard to advance a Russian BTG completely without shrapnel protection or armor marching in single file across a field against a dug-in defender. A Russian BTG contains around 200 fighting soldiers as I understand.
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I don’t know your view on combat value but after three months of very hard fighting it probably approaches zero and you don’t recover a unit in a few weeks. This number of non-combat capable is not reflected in reporting so there are more BTGs than knocked out that they cannot get back into combat. They assembled BTGs from various battered units before the spring offensive and it probably does not work well together with the Russians’ training. I guess that BTGs that are not elite units start to have low combat value at 30% losses after prolonged combat contact and many BTGs have taken greater losses than that.
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When the word Ergo is used I always flinch a bit but you point out that I exaggerate that poor maintenance affects the Russians’ capability and this after a recent example with the fuel shortage north of Kiev? They have the same maintenance problems at Izyum, how do you think they will get supplies down from burned-out depots in Belgorod with SOF, drones and mines in the way as well as 2000 knocked out trucks?
You are also aware that they ran an accelerated timetable for the spring offensive so they did not have time to build up supplies for longer fighting than a few weeks?
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Regarding the thankless role you have taken on you can be very sure that what I write has no impact whatsoever on the outcome of the war, so you are not saving Ukraine’s army from destruction here through your self-appointed role and discussion with me 🙂
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Zelensky and the Ukrainian soldiers themselves are quite confident of a win so why shouldn’t we be equally positive, what I write is not the least bit spectacular because that is what Ukraine has stated they are striving for and so far Ukraine has exploited every opening like the worst Napoleon and the greatest opportunity in this war is when the spring offensive now dies out. Why do you think the Russians are starting to fortify Crimea, because it is a stalemate? After all, Crimea is at a safe distance from the front, right?
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Russia was to take all of Ukraine, then it was Kharkov, Donetsk Oblast, Luhansk Oblast and Odessa and you have access to the same maps as everyone else. The Russians have not achieved any of their strategic goals at all in this war and that alone is quite incredible. That Ukraine then went on the counteroffensive on May 5 is a minor sensation, they beat my guess by 5 days and apparently according to you/all of you I am too positive..
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Now to my highly personal reflection, if anyone thinks the Russians still have the capacity to stop Ukraine from retaking Crimea and Donbass they need to calibrate what information they read or revise the picture they have of the Russian army but this is subjective and we won’t reach a conclusion with such a discussion before Ukraine has retaken Donbass and Crimea so we might as well park it 🙂
18:55
MRF – we have no access to up-to-date satellite images with or without IR and FIRMS has proven to be interesting. Nathan Ruser has historically proven to be very accurate and he has access to something we do not.
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Now I did a little test and checked Sweden April 30 with 24h setting and sure there are quite a few red dots, then on to May 2 and some red dots left. There you have a good calibration of what FIRMS can detect, right?
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Now your take on this is that it is burning bushes and trees?
An exploding artillery shell doesn’t set much on fire unless it hits ammunition or fuel that causes fire. If artillery ignited everything it hit, wouldn’t all of Ukraine be burning or Mariupol and Kharkov, with how much the Russians shelled?
If you watch any film of an MLRS salvo hitting it only causes fire when it hits vehicles or flammable material, otherwise a big poof.
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If you look at Nathan Ruser’s satellite images it’s local fires, something has ignited and is burning out. If it were a forest fire it would have ignited the whole forest since one would assume everything is equally dry, right?
A quick look at the weather shows it still looks a bit too wet.
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I stand quite firm that with Nathan Ruser’s satellite images FIRMS has proven to be a good measure of where Russian rear areas are being hit. If you have the energy I think you should look around Kherson as it is increasing down there in various places.
18:58
KLASA, was that directed to me about the start date so offensive operations began +1 week earlier in the Izyum area, April 17 is probably more correct than April 19 but since the question concerned Izyum I backed up a week. This because it was quiet on other front sectors.
19:40
Nathan’s map shows the southern front quite porous, i.e. the Russians do not have full control over large areas south of the front line.
https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1523693759774740482
20:05
I think some piece of information got lost but I thought I posted this?
Propotopivka is Ukrainian and Zavody disputed, they are located right on the edge of the forest belt that burned around Izyum.
So it’s not just pre-combat in Izyum but they have advanced on the ground and are retaking communities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Russo-Ukrainian_War_detailed_map
20:27
Right now the Russians must try to protect their supply line down to Izyum and also have a defense of the city Belgorod. Even if Ukraine has no intention of crossing the border, they will troll the Russians as much as they can and taking the chance to leave Belgorod undefended after all the explosions and state of emergency and 25-30km from Ukraine’s border probably not even the Russians would do.
Belgorod has probably been a staging area for Izyum and the offensive east of Oskil and if it ties up reserves, those are reserves you can’t send down there.
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Kharkov was also part of the spring offensive and even if it was not seriously intended now, the Russians probably did not expect that front section to be cleared on Victory Day.
20:51
Yes, I suspect it is a diversionary maneuver ahead of the southern front offensive but we’ll have to see.
Also strange that they strike from the south/from below.
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Something I have wondered about those 22 BTGs that have fought there for 4.5 weeks is how intact they are, what was really left down there before the artillery opened up?
According to the blogger, three regiments have retreated north or been wiped out and I counted it as 5-6 BTGs
21:15
Erik14 I wonder if you have more on the 19 BTGs near Belgorod that you wrote about above.
According to the map we got summarizing BTGs there are 5 near Kharkov and the unit map had 3.
Ukraine seems to be messing around with two mech brigades up there together with a couple of national guard brigades and some national battalions.
Is it 5 or 3, it seems reasonable to have such significant successes but 19 BTGs would be a formidable opponent.
Are they positioned further away near Belgorod or have they participated in the fighting?
21:41
It has stopped exploding at Kherson airport, 19 times I think and the intervals were about as long as it took to rebuild their supplies again one could guess. Have the Russians learned from this and moved rear, staffs and artillery east of the Dnipro do you think?
Or maybe it’s just a lot of forest fires increasing in intensity daily down there.
21:58
Around Kherson it is open farmland so advantage to the Russians in defense and their 7 BTGs they haven’t worn out the same way as on other fronts, they are probably dug in and it requires tube artillery with guided ammunition to smoke them out.
It is VDV, marines and guards + spetsnaz and reconnaissance I think so they can probably put up a pretty good fight so far.
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Then I thought about these new drones, switchblade for example. If Ukraine can fly in hobby drones and WW1 bomb targets then these should be a serious capability upgrade and they have many of them. They have been in photos in pro-Russian blogs so they are unit-assigned.
22:39
Maybe already posted but two phone calls with the usual – stolen weapons, low morale and knife fights in the trenches.
The last sentence was interesting because if the Russians manage to find alcohol and get drunk today, tonight would be a perfect opportunity to do something fun.
https://youtu.be/VLrxlUR73QU
23:18
This statement from the Russians might explain the +13 ships that someone posted above, probably means more terror bombings, seemed to be corvettes.
”The Russian Defense Ministry announces the deployment of battleships carrying Kalibr missiles in the Black Sea”
11:25
Sorry, I’m late into the parade here and trying to read up but understand that Gerasimov was not present?
He is the Chief of the General Staff and should have been there if he was alive/able to walk without holding his backside.
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Was it Shoigu in the car?
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That Syrian general who was supposed to take over, was he present? He has an extremely good reputation and would have been a given?
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I understand there were no armbands with Z?
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If I interpret the parade correctly, the dissonance is almost total compared to what is happening in Ukraine and they have a big party where they march nicely and that the whole army is burning and bleeding in Ukraine is of lesser importance, it’s fun to have a celebration.
They are signaling strength here and anyone who sees the parade feels wow, this is a real army.
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There was no revolution, no Ukrainian flags, no threat of nuclear weapons, no sugarcoating with a withdrawal and no declaration of war with general mobilization – the century’s nothing burger but polished boots and everyone marched in step really nicely, kind of?