2023-03-12

08:47 – Johan No.1

It’s hard to keep count but in Vuhledar they have rotated out 12 brigades and brought in several more brigades that are now attacking.

They have continued to attack there with the same poor results – the miracle at Vuhledar stands.
The fact is that there are small attempts to advance almost all the time down there that fail in the most embarrassing ways.

According to Gregg, they have pulled 4 brigades from Kreminna and there are 12 left.
Since Defmon’s map is locked now, I guess we’ll have to start counting monkey heads on Deepstatemap instead 😀

To me, it looks like the Russians continue their attacks at Bakhmut, Bilohorivka, Avdiivka, Vuhledar and there is quite a mixed bag up in northern Luhansk. The common denominator is that they are not achieving success anywhere and as someone said as a light in the thread the other day – that Avdiivka holds is completely incomprehensible.

According to yesterday, the delaying battle inside the city of Bakhmut has probably begun but that does not necessarily mean that UA is giving up the city.

The boss in Zaporizia seems to have stolen a page from Lukashenko’s playbook because nothing is happening there and since they broke through 8 brigades there early in the winter offensive, there was an ambition level for a breakthrough.

The constant discussion about the dead:wounded ratio, I stick to 1:2 and March so far looks like it could land at +50,000 more.

It is completely impossible to figure out WHAT is being lost, in January it was mostly the (relative) elite units that went and died.

In February it was a mixed bag and then in March they sent in VDV, “real Wagner” and Spetznaz (if I did not misinterpret the unit map) in Bakhmut so there will probably be quite a lot of relative elite in the March batch.

A conservative figure would then be that around 70% of the remaining 150,000 soldiers who “were left” in the army since September 2022 are out of combat condition, either dead or without legs in some metal shed hospital somewhere, pondering their future career opportunities.

The Russian team’s offensive reserve they have left for task forces should be under 50,000. Then we don’t know how the winter weather has treated them either and even in a Russian BTG heading towards zero, I guess the last 10%-20% are not exactly eager for war anymore?

The rest of the army then consists of newly mobilized with different backgrounds and different lengths of training.

And added to that are LPR, DPR and Wagner.

We know the condition of Wagner – 80% losses.

We have to guess the condition of DPR and LPR but blogger Muntz considers them to be in very poor condition.

This is the reality ahead of Ukraine’s spring offensive, there is no silver lining to this and the best thing is that the Russians have achieved this entirely on their own. Ukraine has only been on the defensive since January 6.

Ukraine on its side has recruited to its “storm brigades” with one point in the job description – go first in the offensive. These are volunteer units and they received 28,000 applications – isn’t this the very definition of morale being at its peak?

I really wanted to post the photo of the two defenders in that 9-minute trench video but can’t find that tweet now, like a black hole Twitter if you don’t bookmark when they fly by…
They survived and they were happy and if anyone finds it please post it.

Have you seen this one, as beautiful pause music in blue. I’ve always liked ISW.
https://twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1634713021665648641?s=20

Or this one,
https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1634427332076109824?s=20

The bubble candidates are the bubble candidates and rules are rules but now we are through the Russian winter offensive where they have taken astronomical losses, the record for daily loss figures has probably been broken several times.

Besides that, UA has been striking bases for maybe three weeks now which is not counted in the statistics.

The Russian team in chaos has achieved absolutely nothing here and Ukraine is wildly conjuring about its spring offensive with hundreds of videos of advances and Western armor in Ukraine.

At the same time as we are flooded with videos of Russian units refusing war in various statements…

Is there anyone who still believes that the Russians can win?

Probably not, but is there anyone who believes that the Russians can freeze the front?

Probably not that either.

Now it is mid-March and the biggest crack of all, and I have been watching, is that there was never a general mobilization. Putin has completely avoided talking about this at all.

If you remember early January, the only answer to Leopard, if the EU were so bold as to send them, was to declare general mobilization in Russia and flood Ukraine with soldiers.

That-has-not-happened!

Another crack that has made the rounds is that several large Russian companies have started recruiting private armies. They are probably meant to protect the companies’ infrastructure if/when it becomes unstable in Russia.

Bradleys have been deployed in Ukraine (not completely sure but I’m betting on that).
https://twitter.com/fellasam79/status/1634322252928897026?s=46&t=fjZt2_zo-qggpc5WNadLJw

At least this general thinks the Ukrainian army is the best in Europe (pretty obvious that it is…)
https://twitter.com/treaschest/status/1634635925815717888?s=46&t=fjZt2_zo-qggpc5WNadLJw

09:07 – MatsExtrude

+1

(Deepstatemap has abandoned the monkey heads now..)

10:47 – Johan No.1

What do they have now instead, tombstones?

12:06 – MatsExtrude

Boxes with crosses in them, see LW’s map image.