10:15 – MatsExtrude
+1 (or +150,000, I wouldn’t be surprised if your wish comes true).
13:10 – Johan No.1
Many good comments 👍
We ourselves had a total win today, the six-year-old made it through the half hour of football playing at the end of training without a hint of crying and he was on the floor twice, swept the legs from an opponent who landed like a wet sack with a smack on the floor (then he usually gets sad for their sake because he is peaceful) and got a couple of hard balls on his body. It was a broad smile all the way through and he understood who was on his team and which goal he was supposed to shoot at 😀
18:23 – Johan No.1
Chuck Pfarrer has interpreted the General Staff’s report about “in the vicinity of Kreminna” as UA being in the city of Kreminna.
He doesn’t read the entire intelligence picture before making his analyses which is quite remarkable since he sells himself as a great strategist.
10:02 – Johan No.1
Got confirmation that it was the 14th Spetznaz brigade that also took heavy losses near Vuhledar along with the 155th and 40th Marine brigades, and one can guess that the 72nd brigade is also finished. The situation with the units is chaotic…
DPR units have also suffered heavy losses, and it is their (relative) elite units that have been wiped out.
I absolutely stand by what we started discussing back on January 6th, that the Russians are throwing in their best remaining units here and that is extremely positive 👍
Today we have a new record in losses and it’s almost making one wonder if our guess from a few days ago that we’ll reach 150,000 by the anniversary is correct 😀
(maybe we need to get the numbers for the 24th as well, so by February 25th, after all there are 14 days left and they will probably step on the gas rather than ease off here?)
At Kreminna and northwards we know that a bunch of VDV regiments are going first and that the fighting is intense. We also know that UA’s 10th brigade conducted a counterattack with at least a company around Bilohorivka – that was very unexpected actually and signals strength from UA.
In fact, they have made a successful counterattack near Vuhledar and smaller consolidations near Bakhmut and Soledar, but at Bakhmut there are also tactical retreats. They don’t give up anything without a fight here.
Then we got word that another three (3) brigades have gone and died in front of Donetsk, that was from Kriegsforscher who is a reliable source, and apparently a UA veteran. It slipped a bit under my radar.
Not to forget the 8 BTGs that went to zero during the assaults on the southern front, since they brought up 8 more…
Or the enormous losses they continue to take in Bakhmut and Soledar where it’s VDV + some “elite units” as well, I’d like to know which ones…
Are we waiting for a major offensive, then what is this – about a dozen brigades from the best they had left wiped out?
But it will be interesting to see what Ukraine unleashes from the reserves when (if) the Russians ramp up the intensity significantly.
We have seen what can happen near Vuhledar but we probably haven’t seen everything yet.
There are – tungsten rains, guided ammunition for 155mm, 2500 suicide drones and guided ammunition for the ground attack. Then we have all the air brigades and regular artillery guided in by drones with wizard-level accuracy.
SOF is waiting all over northern Luhansk and remotely placed mines are either laid out or at least they have the list with coordinates of where to shoot.
The infantry has their close PV, the minefields are laid out and in the second or third line tanks are standing waiting for targets, slightly bored.
Ukraine will absolutely be forced into tactical retreats on some front section but the Russians will take geologically incomprehensible amounts of dead if they plan to increase the intensity very strongly in their offensive here.
Northern Luhansk is a bit dull but in a couple of weeks they will presumably run out of gas there since the weather is on Ukraine’s payroll.
You saw the video of the company that had a briefing before their attack yesterday, you only have so much information and it is never complete. You go according to training and try to adapt to the situation as best you can. Nothing is easy and it’s damn hard to get a company to act in a winning (field) manner, not to mention a battalion or a brigade. If you fail you die.
The Russians barely manage to go straight ahead without running over each other and Ukraine’s counterparts are probably drilled in battalion attacks at least and can handle combined arms warfare in real time. They also have real-time intelligence gathering with drones and probably also good intelligence before start from the all-seeing eye.
The difference is astronomical and I thought about how much better they are than our final exercises towards the end of conscription and especially that they in real time know what it looks like on the opposing team, that makes all the difference.
The Russian national team of incompetence is currently taking such enormous losses that it’s hard to actually take in, I think Kriegsforscher focused on one area in his OSINT and presumably there have been further assaults in front of Donetsk (the whole area I’m thinking of) that went just as badly, since nothing has moved and Liveuamap has lots of red rifle circles everywhere. You can probably add 3 brigades to the previous losses to cover the whole area.
Right now operation Getflykt (or rather operation refuse war) and palace coup are pretty high on my list. I find it very hard to see how this can go unnoticed. Russian milbloggers are completely insane over Bakhmut here for example.
If the intensity goes to zero in the coming weeks it’s because the army refuses war but we haven’t seen that yet, they are still doing their best to die.
It’s a bit early but pretty soon we can probably ring the bell that there will be no general mobilization, it’s February 11th…
Then no one needs a thinking cap to understand that the Russians have run out of their capable units and have nothing to hold back with when UA goes on the offensive. Summer 2023 will be peace in our time again.