14:34
The generals are lining up to announce how difficult UA’s offensive will be and that they won’t send more weapons right now.
Psyops, worthless communication, faulty thinking – UA’s offensive will go badly but they won’t get more materiel, or something like that, I don’t know but I’m getting tired of it anyway.
If you have the energy, you can google what they said in February last year because there were countless people who thought Kiev would fall.
https://twitter.com/NOELreports/status/1642029923861938176?s=20
I think they need to take Johan No.1’s positive course.
22:02
Had a short night shift for me, the couch looks way too comfortable.
Can recommend the beer Cuca, it’s available in Portugal but brewed in a country where I spent almost 10 years and where Cuca was quite a central part of the diet.
The t-shirt my uncle bought for his ten-year-old son read – “beer built this *something* body.” The point is that the t-shirt should have read “cuca built this *something* body,” then it would have been accurate and I would have bought about ten of them in size small that fit like a glove.
*don’t remember what it said on it, “beautiful”?
12:26
April 1st is probably best to keep a low profile, but one certainly had a good laugh at those old antique flamethrowers the blogger posted above, Noel posted before April 1st so that must be true, right?
(or maybe I was the only one who fell for today’s April Fool’s joke and will get stuck in a self-reinforcing mocking loop that never ends 😀)
I have started speaking in terms of irrefutable evidence that the Russians are digging really deep into their reserves.
Again – they have limited transport and workshop capacity, and if they bring up antiques like the T55, it’s because they don’t have T80s and T90s to take up that capacity – logic even a preschool class would understand if you swapped it out for carrots and candy bags instead.
Just because UA hasn’t started its spring offensive yet, people make the classic mistake of overestimating their defensive lines too, when T55s and old WW2 anti-tank weapons are rolling to the fronts.
We already know from before that everything they do turns out terribly, so why would they be gods at building defenses?
Dragon’s teeth are triangles that are laid on the ground instead of buried, and the suicide cubes probably stand directly on the ground instead of being buried and are easy targets.
We’ve seen how they’ve tried to cover the fortifications but that doesn’t work either.
UA has been scouting their fortification system since last autumn and knows every reinforced fortification, surely they will drop drone grenades to flush them into the concealed fortification and then hit it with a 155mm high-explosive shell.
A breakthrough is over an area defended by a battalion – say 300 soldiers, about 5-10 tanks, and a bunch of IFVs.
We know UA has thousands of drones dropping wing grenades, thousands of suicide drones, superior real-time intelligence gathering, guided air bursts, guided ammunition against hard targets. We know that on one night shift a drone group took out 10 tanks once and 6 tanks another time.
In my world, the pre-attack on a defensive line will be so effective that at minimum no hard vehicles remain, in the middle all AT missiles and infantry fighting vehicles are knocked out, and at most everything in defense is destroyed, with 300 Russians dead in the fortifications when they roll over them.
The Russians pile RPG grenades up, they have their AT missiles somewhere, some ammunition depot – everything is a wing grenade away from being knocked out and UA knows exactly where it is.
For a breakthrough, you concentrate forces and then try to break through at a weak point.
The Russians are Russians and don’t move their tanks every hour, they have to stay where they are.
The soldiers have their firing positions and the ammunition isn’t moved around.
All the bridge layers can probably be used to bypass minefields by crossing small waterways the Russians think are impassable.
Yep, the minefields are the big threat but consider that the all-seeing eye has daily photos of the defensive lines since last spring so my guess is UA knows where every minefield is.
Defensive lines rarely work the way you think – to stop an opponent.
At best, they delay an opponent so you can get reserves forward and push him back.
Those reserves are already worn out after the winter offensive…
WW1 is often brought up as an example of how it will end but it’s a bad example because then they went on foot across the fields. Ukraine will have a spearhead for breakthrough that is fully mechanized.
This will go fast and be violent. Then UA will go deep as well and that’s when it can get difficult if RU brings forward its rapid reaction forces but my money is on them being heavily decimated after the disastrous winter offensive.
Right now, at least I feel like we’re in the eye of the storm, videos of Ukrainian preparations keep flooding in but they haven’t started yet. Can you blame them when there’s knee-deep snow in Bakhmut?
When the ground will dry up after so much snow is a bit unclear right now…
Everything has already been written 100 times and Budanov seems busy because I no longer get his situation updates.
I think the tweet below sums up so nicely what has historically happened when UA has hit a Russian low point and pressed the right spots – huge retreats and absolute chaos.
I don’t believe for a second it would end differently the 3rd or 4th time, depending on how you count.
https://twitter.com/Tendar/status/1641787604684210186?s=20
The bow is drawn to the breaking point and if we understand that the arrow must be released, UA understands that too.
Anything less than a full offensive is worse unless the Russians immediately withdraw from Ukraine, but they seem to need a gentle push to be motivated to do so.