13:27
There are three outcomes this winter,
-The Russian team manages to hold out and defend their defensive positions by sacrificing tens of thousands of soldiers’ lives.
-Ukraine makes large territorial gains by sheer force and gives Putin the worst possible start to spring.
-Ukraine’s winter blow brings the Russian army in Ukraine down entirely and there is an organized Russian retreat across the border where they leave all heavy equipment and sit like bunches of grapes on trucks hugging their washing machines slurping cheap vodka from paper cups.
The most likely is probably the second, that Ukraine retakes northern Luhansk, makes the chess move down towards Azov, presses on towards the darkest Donbass from three directions, and blows up ferries as much as they can down in Crimea – the Russian combat dolphins will probably be completely excited in the stands.
Uphill for Putin this spring then when his imperialistic shining army is to go on renewed offensive but has no opening. If they try to transport themselves down to the darkest Donbass, it’s SOF and HIMARS dash that applies. In the darkest Donbass, they are fought in the rear and UFA and so on. The same on Crimea.
Then it remains to try to jump on a stretch of border from Russian territory where Ukraine has been diligent and fortified better than the Maginot Line (we like the French), which ends in the usual chaos with dead Russians.
I read in the thread that someone wrote that the Russians have half their ammunition left and that China delivers ammunition. I personally think China is more involved than one is led to believe, but since it is conspiracy (until it no longer is), I park that.
There are enough tanks and they have +4 months to train the next round of mobilized.
The unlucky ones were probably the mobilized in this round because they are shot by their own blocking troops, Ukrainian defense, or die of cold depending on what comes first, and it is really close at the finish line.
There should also be around +150,000 soldiers left in fighting condition (including convalescents) from the “original” army, Guards, VDV, Marine infantry, Spetsnaz, reconnaissance, you remember all the rounds with early stealth mobilization and finally the training battalions. I am quite sure that the losses right now are LPR/DPR and, as the blogger wrote, mobilized minorities and undesirables. Like when Wagner dies, it’s the prison that loses its prisoner. I read somewhere that just the VDV would have been 60,000 men, but then of course they ran an Afghan, so we don’t know.
They have probably also gotten the artillery going and the combat leadership is right now trying to figure out how to get out better than today’s high-knee attacks that are probably directly embarrassing even for them.
If they get Belarus on their side, it might be some half a million fighting better than we have seen so far. Wounded are presumably sent back to the unit after convalescence?
However, it should be clear that Belarus is undecided and the wild card popular revolution in Belarus is quite high on my list.
The Russian combat leadership is not completely clueless, so where Ukraine’s capability is higher – wing grenade drones, HIMARS, artillery radar and all that – they are now trying to tactically adapt and include it in training. A few weeks ago we reasoned that you could neutralize wing grenade armageddon with shelters or covered fortifications. They probably also spread the depots and above all place them in locations Ukraine does not want to HIMARS away.
It will be interesting to see how the Russian infantry and armor move forward in the spring; maybe they take a card from Ukraine’s playbook and try to spice up the infantry with near-PV and then tank support instead of armor-heavy that just gets shot away?
It is crystal clear that Putin both can and wants to have a low-intensity war where his defensive positions hold and Ukraine’s infrastructure and motivation are worn down over time. Today, the country of Ukraine is devastated and Russia feels the war. Russian losses are enormous, but we should probably not make the mistake of thinking the army is defeated; they have a rather unique ability to come back fresh in round two and look like nothing has happened. This is probably because everyone in the previous defeat is dead or in the gulag, and the next round of cannon fodder has not yet understood the magnitude of what they are getting into due to the country’s censorship.
I read that the proportion supporting the war has dropped drastically, so maybe it will be different this time, but we have hoped for quite a lot since the start of the war and Russia has always surprised negatively instead.
That is precisely why the winter offensive is so important; now Ukraine has the chance to deliver the slap that makes it really hard for Putin to hold back tears. The units on the front lines are not important; they are expendable. What is important this winter is to take terrain, preferably dominant terrain.
If the pressure gets too high, the Russians will also be forced to send units in training too early (too little too late) to Ukraine, thereby draining spring offensive capacity that way.
I believe Ukraine will go full throttle all winter while fortifying the front against Russia in the best possible way.
When the Russian spring offensive starts too late and with too little, Ukraine will defend for a while and then launch a renewed offensive when it dies out – unless the war is over before then.
It is also likely that they have already started and will continue trying to blackout/cut off electricity supply where they can down in Crimea, darkest Donbass, and the Russian cities they can reach. As long as Russia does this, I see no fault in a proportionate response. If Russia goes out and unanimously promises, and stops, their missile attacks, there might be reason to reconsider.
The NS maintenance route outside Ukraine’s land border is, if not already consequence-exposed, the top priority to target. Because then the entire darkest Donbass and Crimea become as difficult to supply as Kherson. Now there are all the mother depots that create moon craters down there, but over time it makes a difference.
According to earlier information, most brigades are at active fronts, but I believe territorial forces have now been trained to such a high level that they could manage the defense of the front against Russia quite excellently – we should start seeing territorial brigades as light maneuver brigades now that count towards combat power. Decent infantry.
Ukraine is also preparing for spring offensives and all Eastern Europe’s workshops are working overtime to repair all the equipment they can here, and ammunition production has presumably started after almost a year now. When spring comes, they should have more heavy weapons than today even if Western armor is absent.
Ukraine is very well aware that the territorial losses after 2014 led to the current situation and that Russia has broken every agreement along the way. They will continue until the country is liberated and then they will defend their border with force because anything else leads to something worse.
Being forced out of your warm defense in the middle of the coldest winter and retreating a distance to try to defend completely without heat, shelter, or cover is not easy – then it is easier to continue retreating. The blogger has been saying this for a while now and it should absolutely not be underestimated.
Therefore, there can probably be quite large territorial gains in areas where the Russians have not prepared a deep defense, and according to some Twitter god, they have a terribly bad defense system that is WW1 style and can be broken through quite quickly. Ukraine fortifies communities with overlapping fields of fire that are incredibly much harder to attack. Near Kherson was probably a special case because the entire VDV prepared the defense there.
Now Russia has probably never had the conditions to win this war; the initiative was lost in the first week, but this winter will probably decide how long the war lasts.
13:12
Occasionally I read first posters who have taken the time to create an account just to thank the thread, but the thread often does not respond to these very kind posts and has lost the farewell to the blogger from time to time, which was a bit of a custom before the donations took off. Then, of course, there was some supporter the other day that everyone liked and that became the day’s discussion.
It can never be said too often that now there is even Russian proof that the blogger makes the Russians angry, and if you are on par with the herring and mink thread in Skalman, you are automatically a heavyweight. It also seems that Magnus Redin’s proposal to strike the TU95 drone carriers a few weeks ago was taken up by Ukraine; there is no end to what the blog delivers.
The Ukrainian winter offensive is approaching, the offensive that will probably be completely decisive in the war. I might even have polished this post a bit too long, so it has started. After a few days with low/high (I think high) minus degrees, just below zero, the frost has set in my garden when you walk on it. Over in Luhansk, it has been below -10 for a while and it seems it can stay below zero for at least two more weeks, risk of rain after that, it looked like?
I think you are starting to see mechanic videos again where they drive on the frost in winter terrain, so it’s not entirely unreasonable that the ground now bears.
If there is something that gives chills every time, it is the videos of a Ukrainian mechanic battalion on the move; you can’t get tired of them. Two weeks is quite a long time in offensive terms (if it does get wet after that) and you can achieve quite a lot if you have softened up the toad in the pit beforehand, which they absolutely seem to have done because there is full speed on pre-combat at the southern front and northern Luhansk.
You don’t really get the impression that the West thinks this is the decisive moment in the war, but that horse is no longer worth taking on – it is what it is. That Ukraine is once again begging for Western armor is probably no secret, and that the West delivers just as little is probably no secret either. Romania probably threw in the towel and is trying to persuade the West to deliver, Macron countered by wanting to give Russia guarantees, and Scholtz had some strange reasoning going on (but Germany delivers good weapons).
It is telling that the difficulty with repair chains only applies to tanks, not IFVs, artillery, IFVs, or ATGMs.
The shortage of numbers within the weapon system apparently only applies to tanks and not IFVs. A bit strange, you might think, since the risk of Russian missiles in the EU is infinitely higher than the risk of ground combat, so logically you should have sent tanks before IFVs if you think about preserving your own defense capability – the logic falters badly. (Both are needed, one system has been sent, the explanatory models for why the other was sent do not hold up).
One should probably also highlight that when this winter is over, the peak of technical failures in Europe’s nuclear power plants and electricity production has been the largest ever in all categories and that this peak is enormous – I stake my password to Cornucopia on that. It will be claimed throughout the journey that technical failures/natural causes are to blame, but the Kilimanjaro in the middle of the chart will speak for itself when it is summed up sometime this summer.