2023-07-08 -

11:14 – Johan No.1

Ukraine has thus knocked out nearly 700 tube artillery pieces during June and 57 MLRS. Is there anyone who believes this is not an existential crisis for the Russian artillery?

In May, 550 tube artillery pieces were lost.

According to Minusrus, there were supposed to be 5689, and 4330 are knocked out today. Ahead of the winter offensive, RU was supposed to have about 2600 artillery pieces left or something (I don’t actually remember the exact number)?

Googling gives the number 5000 and then one can guess that there were stockpiled ones.

They had and still have more, but it’s not the easiest to shake out 700 new guns in a month including crews.

The day before yesterday, Anders1 summarized it all quite nicely and discussed the tube artillery wearing out. David D continues to post these staging areas in Crimea, Belgorod, and Rostov that just keep filling up with equipment that needs repair.

I also remember that in every offensive where they quickly took terrain, they capture hundreds of hard vehicles and artillery that just stand in front-line rear areas with technical faults. 30% have been flying around as some figure, but it wouldn’t surprise me if RU has a higher percentage.

Add to that ammunition shortages, or at least difficulties in supplying ammunition to the firing units.

Looking at FIRMS, it is mostly red on the Russian side except around Kherson, and that is far from last year’s blanket of fires caused by Russian artillery.
NASA | LANCE | FIRMS

I think it is indisputable that the Russian artillery has been decimated so hard that they no longer provide the support they should according to doctrine, and artillery is the backbone of the Russian army.

The fact that fewer hard RU vehicles are knocked out is presumably because they are very short on armor – I see no other explanation.

They have also heavily knocked out air defense and other defensive capabilities during late spring and summer.

AHKP at the southern front was largely knocked out, partly against the airports and then 9 shot down?

Now soon there will only be Russians in holes left with their near PV and all the mines – other capabilities have been decimated very hard.

We did the same math with Russian tanks in March or April and concluded that if losses continued they would be down to zero in July 2023. Losses are never constant and more vehicles come to the fronts than we think, but we have irrefutable evidence that T62 and T54-55 are used in offensive attacks instead of just being infantry fighting vehicles or a buried turret, so they definitely have problems with their hard vehicles now.

It’s quite simple – if they had T90, T80, and T72, they would be fighting with those.

There probably aren’t thousands of T90s in mountain caves in the Urals just waiting for the West to run out of vehicles – a Russian psyop myth.

RU winter offensive aimed to prevent UA winter offensive. The Russian counterattacks now aim to delay UA summer offensive as much as possible; ideally, they want UA to take such heavy losses early that they give up their attempts.

The question is then who runs out of soldiers first; everyone says Russia can mobilize the most, but my money is on the Russian side as the signs are many.

The fact that we are at the second war summer and UA has the initiative on all fronts should not be underestimated.

The fact that RU never mobilized to meet this low point is telling about the situation in Russia.

All videos where a group with an IFV and a tank beats a Russian platoon with some wounded never stop coming.

And so on.

We are really just waiting for a larger Russian retreat; the question is what comes first – Bakhmut or the Dnipro front.
The Azov push is under construction.

I also see no signs that UA will run out of gas, although the militaryland map is a bit tricky right now; I saw some version yesterday where all brigades were deployed in new positions and now I can’t find it.

UA should be able to keep the pressure up until the ground bearing capacity stops it in October, and that is more than enough for the bigger breakthroughs we all are waiting for.

Azov 3rd Assault brigade with their “stormtroopers” (always fun) have been fighting since May.

Is there any unknown factor we haven’t counted on – I don’t think so, RU is finished and it’s a matter of grinding down their last capability here and getting through the minefields.

Since they started late, there is a risk that the ground bearing capacity pauses towards the end of September, but since the whole year has been unpredictable so far, maybe we will get a dry autumn?

Putin is the guy with the worst luck in the world, so it’s reasonable that he gets the weather against him as well.

However, if you read the Russian side’s take on the situation today, the spring offensive failed because UA is not taking ground.

They then go on to discuss Russian production capacity which is sharply increasing and that the West is emptying the barns so that the “war of attrition” is in RU’s favor.

There is a narrative out there trying to paint this picture so that the West will start to hesitate.

One can only sincerely hope that leaders in the West can see past this obvious Russian psyops that have worked for 1.5 years.

On the battlefield, Russia is well on its way to losing the war and the only way out of this without voluntarily retreating is to try to talk the West down.

If Ukraine has defended itself for 1.5 years against everything the Russians could throw at them, it would be downright embarrassing if the West blinks to Russian cheap rhetoric.

The fact is that a geopolitical atomic bomb has gone off and we are facing a new world order.

I have that bet about two cases of beer with the guy at work and he keeps referring to what Russia is – “it’s impossible for them to lose because they are not Syria or Libya, this is Russia we’re talking about here!”.

I have belatedly decided that the best thing would be if the country Russia turned inward and broke up. Partly for the colonized minority peoples but also for a future threat.

Exactly what it should look like, I have no idea, and that it will be peaceful we can probably forget, there is no Gandhi in Russia.

The next worst outcome is if Russia is pushed back to the 1991 borders but starts a new cold war and rebuilds its capability.

The worst is if they get a piece of land in some kind of forced negotiated peace from an unsettled West.

Can RU continue after being thrown out of UA – theoretically yes, but the likelihood of a bigger bubble is then sky-high and anything can happen. This has historically happened in Russia when the pressure cooker started to bulge outwards.

Zelensky keeps pushing – he visits Snake Island. That man is tireless and together with the other leaders they have dropped everything for 1.5 years and are doing their best to win the war.

Erdogan surprised us, we wrote when we heard about the meeting that Putin would send a peace envoy through Erdogan and that seems to be the case?

However, after that meeting Erdogan came out almost as a UA supporter, which was a bit surprising.

Orban also seems to have given up and the support from China through various statements or deliveries is not there.

The fact is that today, July 2023, no one really expresses their support for Putin anymore.

It will be a long summer but UA is heading towards a landslide victory in this war, that is indisputable and you hardly need to be a diagnosed optimist to see all the signs now.

11:50 – MatsExtrude

Thanks!
I am convinced that the Russians are now starting to have serious problems with artillery and tanks. The question is how long it will take before, and what happens when, someone dares to tell Putin.

11:55 – Johan No.1

11:20 about the weapons depot that LW posted was interesting – looks brand new and equipment that presumably belonged to an elite unit?

It wasn’t super big but at least a battalion?

So they have managed to overrun a better unit so fast that they didn’t manage to take the equipment with them and the depots are not on the front lines but a bit behind?

11:58 – Johan No.1

Yes, it would be interesting to find out how accurate the information was that the leadership and Putin in Russia received.
Probably a huge filter in ten layers before they got a tailored version.

12:04 – MatsExtrude

If it hadn’t been for the stolen bicycle and refrigerator, I would have thought it was Ukrainian propaganda filming their own depot and just claiming it was Russian.

Could it be that the last ones who left were ordered to clean up because Putin got tired of the world seeing the pigsties the Russians normally leave behind?