Insane in the Ukraine

[zaratustra]

What could Ukraine reasonably achieve by doing inroads into Russia, though

[Mongrel]

What could Ukraine reasonably achieve by doing inroads into Russia, though

It's kind of a dumb question, yeah. I mean there's tactical reasons to make brief raids to destroy key bits of infrastructure or such, but trying to outright occupy Russian terrain would be stupid. That said, some might describe a large-scale raid as invasion and obviously it's just fun to ask such a cheeky question.

It's also not unfathomable if Russia ended up mounting continual attacks from Russian soil even after being driven out of Ukraine, though I have no idea how Russia would even have the means to keep attacking should they take enough losses to force all Russian forces in Ukrainian territory back over the borders.

[Destynova]

Trying to invade would get Ukraine all of the nukes. Far better to drive them back over the border.

[Upthorn]

I mean... they could make a case for liberating Crimea, but other than that the only reasons I can see for Ukraine to venture into Russian territory are to cripple their military infrastructure, and to free Ukrainian civilians that were forced to flee to Russia.

[Mongrel]

Trying to invade would get Ukraine all of the nukes. Far better to drive them back over the border.

Yep.

I mean... they could make a case for liberating Crimea, but other than that the only reasons I can see for Ukraine to venture into Russian territory are to cripple their military infrastructure, and to free Ukrainian civilians that were forced to flee to Russia.

Crimea is basically going to depend on if the Crimeans want to by a clear majority or not. If yes, they can go in, if not forget it. The isthmus alone would be a living nightmare to try and cross against an active enemy: 10 of km open ground at low elevations, with one road and not much room for much else.

Even then, it would still be a nasty place to clear, as the Russians and Ukrainians both know from WWII. If the bridge to the Russian mainland on the eastern cape of the peninsula is down (thus denying Russians a land link for reinforcements)... then maybe? Still tough as hell, and absolutely not something fun to try against a hostile and militarily-defended population.

And then there's Sevastopol.

The Donbas, well, I'm not sure how many people from the Russian-occupied Donbas will even be left alive after all this, given how hard they've been and are still being stripped of literally anyone that can walk, hold a gun, and absorb Ukrainian bullets.

[Mongrel]

...and then under his breath, "eh, well, Iraq too."

Not kidding. Watch it for yourselves.

What do I even say here?

[Crick]

Ah, it's like I'm a kid again hearing him fuck up a pretty standard speech on the news.

[Mongrel]

You know how folks talk about Russia's huge number of armoured reserves? But also how we know a bunch of those are older tanks, and how there's all sorts of guesses about how many of them still work or are useful for anything?

Well here's a thread which gets into things and has a look at the numbers.

The tl;dr is that Russia may have lost as many as FORTY-FIVE PERCENT of all its serviceable tanks, with a disproportionate number of these being of the more modern models, and that at current rates of loss, Russia could literally run out of tanks by the end of July.

Has there ever been a major power whose on-paper strength was proved to be a complete lie as damningly and quickly as Russia in 2022?

[Mongrel]

Not too much going today, mainly Russian trying to build multiple lines of fortifications near Kherson in anticipation of a large Ukrainian counterattack there.

Popasna, just outside the Donbas, has been one of the few places where the Russians have been having some (very modest) success. They're after the town because it's a crucial rail intersection. Which leads us to this interesting thread on Russian rail logistics and how they might be supplementing their actual trains with truck-trains:

Also Telenko liked one of my tweets so now my notifcations are going boom, lol. SENPAI NOTICED ME.

[Mongrel]

Remember when I said Putin had gone Full Hitler by taking direct operational command?

'I'm smiling': Ret. Lt. Gen. Hertling reacts to Putin news

Well, if he's regularly issuing orders at the level of colonels or majors, he's more or less past that point now. I'm not sure it's that far, but if he's taking over from a host of generals, he'll be issuing direct orders to Colonels at least, which would be an absurd and incredibly unsustainable level of micromanagement even for a person theoretically capable of making the correct decisions.

[Mongrel]

(the CW'd images are just sacks around abandoned positions)

[Friday]

Welp, just caught up on this thread. I figured if I was going to start reading the news again, I may as well start with the one horrible thing that is going well.

Glad to see Russia is getting its ass kicked! Unhappy to see all the theft and rape and traps left behind that specifically target civilians, but as someone else said, this is how Russia always fucking does wars.

I'm trying to picture the endgame for Putin, and as loathe as I am to do Hitler comparisons (not because of Godwin, but just because it's everyone's go to and usually there are better examples, like how Trump (imo) is a lot more like Mussolini than Hitler, complete with how he's Putin's lapdog just like Mussolini was Hitler's) I think it is starting to apply pretty hardcore. At least in the sense of how he's handling the war as far as dealing with getting his ass kicked.

I was thinking about that and how everyone always calls everyone a tactical genius if they win all the time. Like how everyone (including his enemies) was sucking Hitler's dick in the early part of ww2 and calling him such a brilliant military genuis mastermind 4d chess awesome elon musk. Just like how a lot of people thought Putin was just absolutely the biggest fucking awesome nutsack and man he's gonna totally be cool and brutal and efficient and win everything HE'S UNSTOPPABLE OH MY LORD HAVE YOU SEEN HOW COOL AND AWESOME HE IS? YEAH EVIL SURE BUT MAN HE JUST HAS SUCH A BRILLIANT, TACTICAL MIND MY GOD HE'S ALMOST AS COOL AND BRILLIANT AS MY FAVORITE, ELON MUSK WHO WILL COLONIZE SPACE. ALSO COLD FUSION IN 5-10 YEARS.

No.

The true brilliant tactician is someone who handles losing well. Someone who turns that shit around. Someone who does NOT fire all their generals who are telling them the truth about how badly the war is going.

Anyway, Putin is not that. So I'm curious about his endgame. I would say he's inevitably going to do a Hitler (meaning assassination attempts against him will start, and eventually succeed or he'll kill himself) but he has an option that Hitler didn't: nukes.

I honestly cannot predict if he will use them. At all. And what we will do if he does.

This of course assumes he continues to lose. If Russia does somehow turn this around, well.

My friends and I discussed the possibility of just... lying about winning. Can he manage to do that? That would require turning Russia into an isolated state with no outside contact/info. Permanently, I mean.

[Mongrel]

The thing that makes me refrain from comparing Trump to Musso is that that's giving Trump waaaayyyy too much credit.

Musso might've actually been the smarter one between him and Hitler given Musso was the one who actually wrote and formulated and codified capital-F Fascism. Though either way they both ended up suffering the classic fate of the greedy dictator - Hitler was Hitler and Musso gambled on Hitler winning, and we know how that bet went.

Muskie and Trump is a good comparison though. Grifters with a grasp of selling themselves and slagging opponents, but it's all a paper-thin front. There's no real creativity, or even much ideology other than "I'm awesome, you suck, me me me".

Regarding Putin, he's even more cowardly than most dictators, and reportedly fears death enormously. So I don't know about nukes... doesn't rule out their use, but I think under everything he knows the personal danger to him gets a LOT bigger if he plays that last card.

[Mongrel]

Very little has been happening, hence the lack of posts.

Russia is throwing huge chunks of whatever troops they have to try and "encircle" smaller and smaller chunks of Ukrainian land (see the "Lowered Expectations" map on the previous page - we're currently at the "June???" marks... well, actually a bit further in than even that). In fact, technically, they've abandoned even that, in favour of tiny localized encirclements as a method of gaining terrain, using most of the forces previously stationed together at Izyum, as well as other forces cannibalized from other sections of the front.

Ukraine has been mostly holding while occasionally giving ground in cases where the fireflight's not worth it, since for Putin no price in blood is too high to to pay for even an inch of Ukraine. This means the Russians might have a shot of capturing Severodonetsk, the easternmost city held by Ukraine (of some modest significance because it's the last city of any real size in Lukhansk the Russians do not control), but nearly all observers figure the Russian army will basically be exhausted even if that's a total success, with simply no capacity to mount another major offensive.

Even success even on such a small scale is far from guaranteed, as any attempt to capture Severodonetsk will draw the Russians into protracted urban warfare, where they have fared much worse than they have in more open country. Finally, a win in Severodonetsk would actually makes the Russians' logistics situation noticeably worse and help shape up the Ukrainian front line.

But while a Ukrainian withdrawal might arguably be strategically sound, for rather obvious reasons the Ukrainians aren't too keen on letting any more places with significant Ukrainian population fall under Russian control.

Anyway, after the fight for Severodonetsk goes one way or another, the questions become ones about how hard Ukraine can push back, can the Russians erect defences capable of holding the territory taken, and how quickly they might try to annex said territories. Pacifying the occupied territories is not going particularly well either, with increasing partisan activity taking place behind the lines (and the Ukrainians have taken to calling turncoat or Russian administrators as "Gauleiters" haha). This is especially relevant given how much Russia is depleting what little forces they have elsewhere in the east - they will be dangerously thin on troops in the east between the Donbas and the area north of Crimea.

The Russians also lost another general, though I guess this one doesn't count as much since he was retired and was flying as a mercenary for the Wagner Group.

The press-ganged cannon-fodder from the phony Donbas Republics are getting more vocal about being sent to die, especially given many of them have chronic health problems which would exclude anyone in an even halfway reasonable military draft from service. Of course the Russians figure they're just free, disposable bullet sponges, so who knows if this discontent will have any effect, but destabilization of the occupied Donbas (or what's left of it), isn't an impossible outcome.

Probably the most notable thing in the past day was this:

[Crick]

With the hold on their state media, why don't the Russians just go "well, we de-nazified them, mission accomplished" and then return home? Is it for a many complicated reasons?

[Mongrel]

I think that sort of lie is a yard too far.

You can make up a lot of lies about how a war is going, but it's pretty tough to pretend no fighting is going on *at all* while engaged in a full-scale conventional war of nations.

That said, the Russians are probably angling for something like that, by maybe "conquering" the Donbas and then calling that a win, and then hoping annexation "allows" them to make nuclear threats which will stop the Ukrainians... which... okay guys. If nothing else, their increasingly shaky control over occupied territories makes annexation very difficult, even with a ton of fudging and lies.

[Grath]

[Mongrel]

I like that, two months later, not only is that still correct, we could probably downgrade the request to just a dozen or so.

[Friday]

The Russians have always been shit at offensive wars. They're also shit at defensive wars, but slightly less shit in that they have winter to kill the invaders for them and invaders keep fucking sending in their troops without, you know, coats.

All the "French people suck at war, haha" memes should have been pointed at Russians this whole time. Despite the international "tough guy" persona Russian has as a nation, it's actually a terrible warrior with a terrible track record. And yes, a lot of that is bad commanders rather than how tough each individual Russian man (boy) is. I don't deny that. But a nation's rating of effectiveness as a military force must include how absolutely whacked out delusional their commanders are, and Russians are pretty much at the top of the pile when it comes to that.

[pacobird]

All the "French people suck at war, haha" memes should have been pointed at Russians this whole time.

bullshit dude it's italy, all day every day



other than an invasion of ethiopia they fucked up so hard there are still people today who think haile selassie was literally the second coming of christ, the only armies italians can beat are other italians

napoleon kicked their asses so badly it single handedly turned the tide of the french revolutionary wars

every single element of italian civilian and military leadership was so blisteringly incompetent at every point of world war 1 that even though they were on the winning side morale among veterans was so low at the end that they invented fascism

(specifically to your point about russia being shit on offense the invasion of manchuria at the end of ww2 is like, woah)