11:18
Hello MICKEUPPSALA and thank you for your kind words yesterday, always nice to hear and nice that someone reads.
Now when you thought it couldn’t get worse for the Russians, they start drowning in battalion size 🙂
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Counting like crazy on this with combat value, motivation, hardware, and numbers, and it looks bleak if you are Russian. Two wildcards are if the Russians go towards full collapse or if they manage to push in reinforcements on a large scale, but it seems like they are starting to think about defending Belgorod and that ties up troops on Russian soil.
11:28
Yes, exactly when you started to get worried, a video drops where they are standing outside the bunker opening singing 🙂
Now it’s probably much about making sure the Russians can’t blow up all the bunker openings, they can’t get an indirect hit so they are probably now trying to place explosives and light them, but evidently they are still being denied that.
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This story really has everything and is evil-good in the best mammoth movie style and will go down in history, and especially new generations’ history class on Netflix, as one of the real great deeds. If they manage to make feature films about a few hundred Englishmen getting tangled up in a province in southern Africa, you can guess what this will become.
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Something you really hope for every day is that they get rescued, it’s getting hard to paint this tragedy in bright colors anymore. If they are to be rescued with Turkey’s help, you probably need more protection than Guterrez on site because apparently there was a bounty on him when he was in Kiev. It’s a perfect opportunity for the Russians to send in a Russian and try to bomb them away when they try to load onto the ships.
12:29
Now it is probably a bit in the nature of things that the narrower the Russians define their operational area, the higher density they get on their units, but that is weighed against the condition of said units. We have been writing for a while now that the Russians are heading towards zero in their attacks rather than what a Western counterpart would have done, and thus one can guess that it looks pretty grim east of the Oskil river down towards Severedonetsk, i.e., the units that have pushed down from the north towards the Slovyansk – Severedonetsk line.
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Offensive operations are ongoing between Donetsk – Siversk (roughly), which means they are using up their offensive capacity over a larger area than just around Severedonetsk, even though it is becoming quite clear that this is the last straw they are grasping at here. Why they are conducting pure WW1 style assaults right now I am quite curious about, what is driving this. My take on this was that after May 9 they would go on the defense where they were at least, but the Russian command obviously still thinks in terms of taking something, anything. Now this is actually the best thing that can happen because the worse condition the Russian units fight themselves into, the better for the next phase of the war (provided the Russians don’t get large amounts of reserves, but we have no information on that).
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If you think about the Russian soldier on the ground, they have passed (the latest…) the deadline when the war was supposed to be won on May 9 and are forced even by Russian standards into some kind of organized suicide. Even a Russian soldier can probably get fed up and feel that those restaurant bookings in Kiev they had to pay for were wasted money after all. How much longer will they accept going forward and how much longer will they accept holding captured terrain when it starts raining guided artillery shells?
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Now the area north of Izyum and up to the Russian border is a bit open, but if they continue their push towards Kupiansk they have excellent flank protection northwards, so really the area west of the Oskil river up to the west-east flowing rivers north of Kupiansk is a remaining cleanup operation that is ongoing and will take time. The narrower the area becomes, the larger the number of infiltrating units for free warfare Ukraine can have in an area. Just like with Kharkov which is now starting to be concluded, I move Izyum east of Oskil to cleanup on my list.
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The very large area east of the Oskil river and north of the Slovyansk – Severedonetsk line is not prepared for defense by the Russians for the reason that they have had the Izyum offensive as western flank protection and all their units down at the front pushing south. There is probably no plan for defense of that area and Ukraine stands west and south of it and can/will push from both sides over time. Sure, the Russians can dig in but it will not be a well-prepared defense, they do what they can with what they have.
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When it eventually becomes a question of holding Donbass proper, the southern front, or Crimea, my money is on the Russians abandoning this area and having their supply of Donbass proper via Rostov-na-Don instead. The Russian ministry will spin some new white lie about how they always intended the city of Donetsk to be the real goal of the whole war and then they will pull out.
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Now they have really only kicked the can down the road because when they withdraw from this area, they give Ukraine a cozy distance to the supply routes between Voronesh – Rostov na Don and it will start to become difficult to supply down there due to constantly destroyed convoys.
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I don’t get the same feeling that Ukraine is at max capacity here but rather that they are conserving their maneuver units with the purpose of having an intact army to occupy the borders when the Russians are thrown out. Now this is contradicted by the very simple fact that Ukraine has not started any counteroffensives down at Kherson or the southern front, which would be tactically very smart. Until they do that, my assumption has no support in their actions really and must be considered speculative at best. Considering that the Russians are still on the offensive, in my opinion there is value in letting them finish first before showing your cards and where you intend to press next because then you deny the Russians the chance to reinforce that front section. However, one should try to take back what can be taken before the Russians have managed to reinforce the southern front, Crimea, or east of the Dnieper or whatever they have planned.
Right now they are probably not doing that because they have to defend Belgorod and really want their potato field down at Severedonetsk, but at some point they will (if they can).
12:34
Yes exactly, my thought for a while was that they had taken out some rear area there, bigger than a tank platoon and maybe some artillery that had the range to the small communities west of the Dnepr and “under” Kherson but then it got really intense there and messages flew by for a week that there was a forest fire in the nature reserve at that location and now Erik14 found out that it is a fairly large area that has caught fire. We probably have to write that off as a forest fire.
Now it’s probably the Russians’ responsibility to extinguish it and one can assume that they won’t do it.
13:16
Jumping on the point about Ukraine being at capacity max, I wrote something below that I have a different opinion but that it is disproved by the fact that Ukraine is not conducting offensive operations on the southern front so I really can’t argue for it other than it is my strong belief that there will be movement near Kherson and Zaproznye, but there isn’t…
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What I do see, however, is that Ukraine is trolling Belgorod like only a Ukrainian can, Zelensky has stated that they will take the city if they can, they are up at the border, the Russians have evacuated some village and Ukrainian reconnaissance has crossed the border into Russia.
Now we’re really just waiting for a selfie from one of the mechanized brigades where they stand pointing at a Russian place name and grin.
The result will be that a pissed-off Putin rushes to higher command who are sitting and rocking in a chair close enough so he doesn’t completely lose his breath (a couple of doors away) and shouting mixed with an unarticulated hissing demands that Belgorod be defended to the last man and that all Ukrainians on Russian soil must be immediately crucified. Belgorod will need to be fortified/defended, not against a Ukrainian offensive but because it cannot be ruled out. This will tie up some units up there and they are then on Russian soil and thus pose no threat.
Step two in the trolling will be that some infiltrated Ukrainian puts on one of the mechanized brigade’s uniforms and stands with a takeout bag outside a well-known McDonald’s in Belgorod in the middle of the night and takes a selfie with a real Ukrainian grin with the text, “lovely lunch, no one stopped us from buying some cheeseburgers” and that’s how it will go, Ukraine will mess around as much as they can and the Russians will have to have some kind of defense up there. The fight is taken to Russia but not really.
13:47
So it’s east of the Dnepr (well) so quite thin with Ukrainians or have I completely misunderstood?
No, but something started the fire that then developed into a forest fire.
13:52
For some reason, it seems they are pressing towards Severodonetsk and along the entire Donbass line but just because it’s quiet on the southern front probably doesn’t mean that the Russians are finished there, there really hasn’t been much fighting near Kherson and on the southern front except towards Vuhlderar and the old favorite northwards along the Donetsk Oblast provincial border.
However, it seems to be a very active free war down there and the density of Russian units is low. On the SIM map yesterday there weren’t many SIM cards active down there at all.
15:15
Yes, if they bring up reserves on a large scale, and I don’t really know where to look for that, they can push on limited front sections. The reserves are one of the bubbles I’m looking for because if they bring in a million men who dig in up to their earlobes it will be impossible to take them all out. What works against them is that they are operating WW2/Soviet style but they don’t have the equipment or really the numbers for it, roughly.
15:18
I probably confused myself in the above post, disregard that, I was doing like three things at once and had a thought in my head and it was mostly luck that I didn’t post an invoice here instead and that a Chinese guy is now sitting scratching his head after running Google Translate on the message and wondering if Johan has finally completely lost it, the signs have been many.
15:40
AB first article was “Russian battalion sunk when trying to cross river,” now the choice of words was probably unintentionally alluding to the Russians’ total incompetence but it’s among the funniest things written, “drowned” or “sank” might possibly have topped it.
11:08
Now the Wikipedia map only shows cities and who owns them, but if you look at most maps now, Ukraine (and these should be the heavy elephants that have started moving, I am sure of it now) has pushed in a wedge north of Izyum in the forest area NW of the city. You could probably sense it for a week now when it has been bright red on FIRMS.
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They should have the N-S road under direct fire and the bridge over to Borova under indirect fire as well as the eastern of the two roads under indirect fire. Simply put, instead of cutting everything off up near Kupiansk, they have soon managed to make a retreat from Izyum necessary anyway.
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Now the thousand-kronor question is whether there are any vehicles left to go north or if the Russians have to leave their trenches and simply march in goose-step straight north through, one might guess, a fairly formidable obstacle course with ambushes, fixed artillery targets, and minefields.
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If I may guess, I think a retreat eastward via Oskil is under direct fire, but the Russians can always push east of the Oskil river to try to create a corridor and clear out the Izyum area, but if no order to retreat is issued, if there are any battalion commanders left to give an order to, then the survivors are probably hiding in their trenches reading telegrams about how Russia has soon won the war?
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We will see, but Ukraine has certainly pulled a Kiev with the Izyum offensive west of the Oskil river, and that was probably the highest priority focus point for the spring offensive really with its 22 BTG or whatever they pushed down there. There are probably some BTG to protect the western flank of the Izyum offensive, but there the heavy elephants are probably maintaining the pressure.