10:02
That rebel battalion standing around hanging their heads in old surplus gear is quite telling, isn’t it?
If they avoid fighting, it will probably spread like wildfire and if they disappear into the night, I imagine that rumor will spread among the rebels too. Maybe they solve it by letting them defend the tip where they think Ukraine’s counterattack will come.
10:16
Now I’m in too, near Kherson there have been 5 brigades for quite a while and the 5th Tank Brigade which has been inactive as the blog writes. There are also 2 artillery brigades on either side of the Dnieper down there, one of which has Twitter-confirmed new barrels.
On the east side of the Dnieper south of Zaporozhye, they have sneaked in the 128th Mountain and a NG brigade that probably functions in combat. The mech brigade has defended for quite a while. That two artillery brigades don’t make more noise I interpret as them building up for an offensive.
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The question is where the destination is for the 1st Tank Brigade and the 15th & 62nd Mechanized? The 46th Air Assault seems to have moved to the eastern front. On Izyum’s western flank, the 93rd Mechanized and 25th Airborne have been sitting playing cards for a good while.
If you guess, brigades in reserve have been re-equipped and leftover materiel has either gone to brigades/battalions rotated out of the front line or reinforced some NG brigade. Slovakia is repairing Ukrainian materiel + captured equipment now, so there should be a flow of that towards Ukraine. At least 1st Tank can be guessed to have destination Izyum. Maybe the mech brigades are split, one south, one north?
10:40
I also learned that 4000 embedded agents and infiltrating Spetsnaz were supposed to take out all pilots, senior officers and politicians, flower delivery at the door or police checkpoint. Preferably on Midsummer’s Day or Christmas Day and then an expected invasion but surprising in the same way as in Ukraine, maybe in connection with an exercise. All exercises were supposed to be won in the end, “airborne landing defeated” but several times it was like an emergency response in any suburb at lunchtime and you felt how the hell would this go in a real situation, probably really badly. The only thing in this war that struck that chord was really the airborne landing at Hostomel. Everything else has just been chaos, running out of fuel and one big fiasco (without diminishing Ukraine’s effort).
What I wonder about is if a Soviet/Russia 1985-1995 could have done better but for Sweden’s part we have the Baltic Sea so the answer is probably no chance. As we then disarmed, the Russian army also evidently declined sharply. Then the infiltrated Russians mostly seem to have been busy stealing money from Russia, smuggling and opening brothels at embassies so how big the threat really was is debatable but we’ll never know. In Ukraine it obviously worked really badly since they didn’t even manage to deliver the bribes.
11:07
I was sitting thinking about it and it’s a bit hard to figure out which side is burning, just that it’s burning and that there is fighting over Lyman. FIRMS unfortunately doesn’t give us nationality on what is burning.
Looking at the past week, it’s pretty clear that it’s heating up at the Kherson front line, who is hot is hard to say, but it’s not pre-bombardment ahead of an offensive (yet) and then a bit messy east of Malynivka.
14:20
12:56, Svitlodarsk yes they have taken positions behind the waterways and blown up the bridge. It was a bit unexpected that the Russians pressed there but as said, they have taken position behind the moat instead of in front and that success probably didn’t come for free. There shouldn’t really be much Russian capability there but Ukraine might have defended more easily perhaps but there is a mech brigade there on the maps.
14:33
Yes exactly, key personnel and then the old classic – fuel, ammunition, competence, food – for a tank to roll. Ukraine has its maneuver brigades intact, command chains, and preserved competence transfer, they replenish over time.
Russian BTGs are being wiped out, at least the entire spearhead just as you write.
It’s reverse Darwin for the Russians but Darwin applies for Ukraine 🙂
Now the blog wrote that it’s an INFANTRY attack against Avdiivka which is totally insane, rear units promoted to infantry.
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Then maybe it’s as bad as hoped and what is being worn down now is the last with offensive capacity and then the cooks and drivers have to go on defense. Then they need 3-6-9 months more to train something decent for round 3 and by then Ukraine is already at Star Wars level in materiel and the soldiers have learned English with a London accent.
16:10
On one hand they get local superiority if they foolishly gather everything in one field (a bit simplified), the other is as Emanuel writes that they have quite a lot of National Guards and territorial and they have a bit lower quality than the maneuver brigades. Many of the prisoners we see in videos are exactly those. Often they probably have the task to defend a community and then the maneuver brigades move around and when it gets overrun they have had a harder time rooting out. If you look at the unit map you see roughly where they are, just don’t show it to XSI33 🙂
https://militaryland.net/ukraine/deployment-map/
19:57
I’m the wrong person to answer but if we now know that the 5th Tank Brigade is trained and ready and standing twiddling thumbs down by Odessa. If it was a crisis why isn’t it at the eastern front? Sure it’s a hot situation but Ukraine has been able to build up a reserve and it’s that reserve they are going on the offensive with.
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My worst scenario before the spring offensive was that Ukraine lost almost the entire pocket/bulge north of Horlivka and the Russians haven’t even crossed the river. We’ll see but I don’t see a threat in the Russian attack, sure Ukrainians die and no attempt to diminish that here.
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I remember talking about a line Dnipro-Pavlograd and a bit eastward for a while, a natural defensive line they could fall back to. It’s a long way to that.
21:00
According to the unit maps, the 58th Army is behind the southern front and consists of 7 BTGs. They may have been rotated there and decent BTGs have gotten a ticket to Severodonetsk. Significant in that the BTGs at the southern front seem to be in a slightly worse state than the unit maps might suggest. We guess that half-dead BTGs have been rotated there.
21:00
They haven’t exactly worn themselves out behind the southern front, I think?
21:03
Answering myself regarding whether the Russians have secretly moved forward 30-50-100 BTGs that they are now attacking with.
I don’t think so, you have yourselves seen the commercial satellites and how good the images are, and military capability is even higher. If a bigger threat against Ukraine was on the way, we would know it, and Ukraine would know it before us.
Now Ukraine has NOT sent its reserve to the front but is grooming it for an offensive.
So Russia has not managed to build up for a huge blow and Ukraine can control the situation.
The Russians will not be able to handle the situation when Ukraine goes on the offensive.
So, that will be my analysis of the situation 🙂
22:28
Now we also have the 45th Artillery Brigade S Zaporoznye to balance out all the negativity in the thread 🙂 There are a total of 3 artillery brigades at Kherson – southern front. Then we have an artillery battalion and another artillery brigade at Mykolaiv.
An artillery battalion has 12-18 barrels. An artillery brigade probably has several times that, one can guess, surprisingly hard to find the number of barrels here but I imagine an angry bamboo forest at 45 degrees spitting fire.
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This also means that the Russian Air Force is quite tamed by now because these brigades have been held back. Then when I talk about reserves I always forget the 45th Air Assault and the 35th Marine Corps Brigade that protect the coast beyond Odessa. Eventually, they can probably be moved up as well and let tired NG take over now that taking a boat is synonymous with being torpedoed for the Russians.
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Now it’s not possible to speculate but a little theory that floated around earlier in the thread was that if Russia manages to take Luhansk Oblast and Putin prepares for his victory speech with some mouthwatering gargling and learning two sentences by heart, then Ukraine would steal Crimea. Now that’s nonsense but opening a new front in the south is not, it would be very logical if, when being pushed back in the arc/pocket north of Horlivka, to let go of the northern and southern flanks. In the north, we don’t exactly see the same buildup and now the Russians are starting to push from the south from Belgorod which is perfect for those BTGs they would need somewhere else.
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This is going according to plan is the only conclusion, a bit early for Zelensky to open the caviar tin (exaggerated for effect) but the delaying battle in the pocket/arc north of Horlivka is playing out while building up for an offensive.
It went so-so for the Trump supporters and their – “trust the plan” so you don’t dare say that but CNN is rarely right so when they say it’s done it should be the opposite https://youtu.be/KOpAdy8cLzg
22:49
Yes, today it was gloomy in the thread. Now to something sad, we have probably stopped adding up Russian BTGs because we don’t know their capability but I got it to 131 on uawardata. That’s quite a big jump from 97 so they have probably revived a few more BTGs during the past month. It has been very quiet about reinforcements/reserves for the Russians for quite a while now so that one sneaked up.
09:49
Grilled BTG as usual, I think it’s clear that the Russians are starting to run low on tanks and someone in the thread wrote that they now have fewer infantry in the vehicles, 28 versus 150 perhaps indicates that?
It could also be that it’s artillery against fixed positions and easier to take out buried armor?
https://twitter.com/DefenceU/status/1528993149783269376/photo/1
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Something we haven’t discussed for a long time is what reserves the Russians are bringing in, I read nothing about it at all after what they mobilized for the spring offensive. Now, of course, Ukraine has managed to get the Russians to go on the defensive in Belgorod and the rest they throw against Popasna and Severodonetsk but is there more, where are the Russians from Syria for example?
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Now that even the Russians are starting to talk about a Ukrainian offensive, maybe the narrative that Ukraine is finished, stretched to the max and that’s why nothing is happening can be allowed to roll around and die, it has almost taken hold as a truth and combined with peace advocates wanting to freeze the conflict it’s a bit dangerous.
Do you think these 32 BTGs include the 9 in Kherson and the now 19-20 at the southern front (damn, it goes up every time you look…). The attack will probably come down there and so that should be where they have gathered what they can, I think.
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In the middle of it all, it flies by that the Russians are supposed to try to move towards Zaporozhye because they have pushed in more units along the southern front but that could also be in defense, I think. It would be absolutely great if they tried an attack down there.