"... to deploy significant combat power in support of the under-performing Russian ground forces. On the first day of the invasion, an anticipated series of large-scale Russian air operations in the aftermath of initial cruise- and ballistic-missile strikes did not materialise. An initial analysis of the possible reasons for this identified potential Russian difficulties with deconfliction between ground-based surface-to-air missile (SAM) batteries, a lack of precision-guided munitions and limited numbers of pilots with the requisite expertise to conduct precise strikes in support of initial ground operations due to low average VKS flying hours. These factors all remain relevant, but are no longer sufficient in themselves to explain the anaemic VKS activity as the ground invasion continues into its second week.... One potential argument is that the VKS fighter fleets are being held in reserve, potentially as a deterrent against direct intervention by NATO forces. This is unlikely to be the case.... [T]he continued pattern of activity suggests... that the VKS lacks the institutional capacity to plan, brief and fly complex air operations at scale...."
Writes Justin Bronk, Research Fellow for Airpower at RUSI.
Posts
78 comments:
Putin needs to buy American-made jets.
Funny, I was just reading this article in another tab. The cause is probably pretty complex, not the least because the air force wasn't really prepared to start the war. Sadly, it's more than possible they'll get their act together just as the Ukraine becomes less and less capable of using their own air force.
The Ukraine is fighting a brave and noble war. The longer it goes, the less likely it will end well for them unless the Russians lose their nerve and pull back due to options or world opinion or something non-military.
The thing about war is that it shows you exactly where your military is. How your equipment holds up, how your strategies work, your logistics, your supply plans- or lack of them. It shows the willingness and ability of your soldiers to carry the fight and follow orders. It shows your dominance or lack of it. It shows how an enemy can parry your strategies with their own, even when outmanned and outgunned.
And it also shows everyone else. Think: Viet Nam, Afghanistan.
The level/quality of training for Russia's military has generally been relatively low, and there have long been doubts about the quality of their equipment, particularly due to poor maintenance practices. That is a likely factor. Limited numbers of high tech weapons (due to budget issues) also a likely factor.
Don't get your hopes up. He might be just starting a long game of chess. As kids, we called this Playing Possum.
It appears from reports that the Russians are flying combat ops in and around Syria. Ought to be learning something.
Used to be the Soviet anti-air doctrine was, "If if flies, it dies," which may not sound as good in Russian. Certain corridors are provided for Soviet aircraft to leave and return over Soviet lines. Doesn't matter who you are, if you're flying someplace else, you're a target.
Be interesting to see what post-Soviet divergence there is, if any, from Russian practice to Ukranian practice, along with the electronics and hardware. Be a hoot if the Russians can't tell who's who (whom?) telling them to do stuff. Might be tougher than against NATO.
Now analyze Joe Biden's inability to ramp-up energy production, and openness to buying oil from Iran while desperate to negotiate a nuclear deal with them.
limited numbers of pilots with the requisite expertise to conduct precise strikes in support of initial ground operations due to low average VKS flying hours.
speaking as someone kicked out of Civil Air Patrol... Flight Time is Crucial
Armies are expensive. They don't produce anything unless they take loot.
Modern warfare doesn't really offer ways for armies to feed themselves as they advance.
Jet Fuel is expensive.
Russia is invading a 40+ million population nation with a fair number of personal weapons.
In the past Sieges were decided based on who ran out of food fastest. The army would run out of food and immune resistance would fall. Disease followed. Moral broke on one side or the other.
Russia just doesn't have enough troops to occupy a country of this size.
"Victory" will be too expensive. Their options are defeat or mass casualty.
Where is the need? Anyway, they have Hunter's laptop contents ready to "send".
I'm sure there are many reasons for the Russian military not performing as they had expected. One of them is that most of the their troops were not aware that they would be invading Ukraine and once there had little desire to kill their Slavic brothers. There have been a number of reports of Russian units believing that they were still on a military exercise when they invaded.
Two days ago, three captured Russian state police officers, who came with the Russian troops to maintain order, gave a press conference stating that the invasion was wrong and they were deceived about what the goals were. I've watched the video below twice and it doesn't look like they were coerced into doing the press conference and saying what they said. They give their names and lots of detail about the operations they were in. It's over 20 minutes long. The most moving segment is at round 8:00 when a Russian Lieutenant Colonel talks about his feelings of what is happening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swip6WZ2jJM&t=391s
What is not being discussed by most people are all of the financial rubicons being crossed.
There are tectonic shifts in the financial world happening.
SWIFT is being supplanted and sacrificed on the altar right now. The Swedish Bank seizure was carried out because banks are going to be a thing of the past soon.
The Aristocracy is trying desperately to seize Russian Oligarch crypto. They want to use this to wedge their way in to control of the crypto market. Some large Ethereum chain wallets have recently been found to be controlled by Chase bank.
The Aristocracy is desperate right now. They are lashing out like a cornered animal.
Some things are going to be happening over the next several months.
People who get into the Cardano blockchain right now will be very happy over the next 6 months.
There's one more possibility: Russia is holding back the VKS not as a deterrent, but as a reserve. Russia has to worry about China as well as NATO.
Probably maintenance issues with the planes. Russians are great on design but maintaining things is not so great.
If the Ukrainian air forces are at all competent how can a road-bound line of vehicles forty miles long be anything but a shooting gallery? Either they suck, or the Russians have some kind of air superiority.
He seems to be mixing two things up. The Russian Air Force HAS air superiority. But they haven't been using it to assist their ground forces by air strikes. First, it could be he Russians don't want to inflict civilian causualites. Second. the Russian army doesn't need massive air strikes, they've done quite well without them. Third, THe Ukrainaians don't seem to have a lot of mobile forces that can be attacked from the air. We've seen the massive Russian convoy, where are the Ukrainian convoy? My impression is the Ukrainian forces aren't doing a lot manuevering. They've basically are lined in the South and defending Kharlov and Kiev.
Finally, for 80 years the USA has a tradition of using massive numbers of aircraft for Ground support. And they've never beem shy about killing civilians. 25,000 French Civilians died in 1944-45 from Allied bombing. God knows how many Iraquis and Afghans were killed. The Russians never had the resources in WW II (Mostly depending on the single engine IL-2) to use massive Ground support for the Red Armies victories. And I don't know how much they used Aircraft in Afghanistan. My impression was it was more helicopters.
Richard Aubrey said...
Used to be the Soviet anti-air doctrine was, "If if flies, it dies," which may not sound as good in Russian. Certain corridors are provided for Soviet aircraft to leave and return over Soviet lines. Doesn't matter who you are, if you're flying someplace else, you're a target.
My initial (admittedly non-professional) thought is that scenario only works if you have a pretty darn good idea of the location of all your trigger-pullers, they know where they are as well, and then will exhibit fire discipline when the zoomies come over the horizon. With all the breakdowns and traffic jams causing units to be wandering over Ukraine territory I have to wonder how effect such rudimentary deconfliction would be.
David Begley said: "Putin needs to buy American-made jets." According to recent news reports, the availability rates for U.S. military aircraft are pretty pathetic, too.
I may well be wrong, but I read this quote from Putin as a threat to annex Ukraine if they keep up the all out war
https://twitter.com/RWApodcast/status/1500095814076710915
The same guy posted a Russian joke: "The Russian Army had a Ukrainian soldier surrounded and pinned down, and they yelled to him 'give up already, you can't win' and the Ukrainian answered back 'A Russian never surrenders!'"
Compare and contrast to U.S. deployment and effectiveness of air assets in the first hours of the Iraq war.
One of many things shrouded by the FOW.
It's possible that the most capable Russian assets are deployed and active elsewhere, as mentioned. It's possible that the Russian forces as a whole suffer from the same things that plagued Tsarist and Soviet forces the same: low-ed and low-skilled conscripts leavened by shitbird NCOs and corrupt officers, wholesale inefficiency and inertia, avoidance of personal responsibility.
The Tsars and Reds were able to develop effective ways of war, despite these 'third-world' handicaps, for short or frontier conflicts. 1904-5 nearly toppled the regime, 1914-17 toppled two, the Poles defeated the Reds in 1920, and the wars against Finland 1939-44 show
the limits of morale and motivation in their different ways.
That said, on their own turf Russians and Ukrainians (and all the neighbors) can be motivated beyond the imagination of most Westerners.
"He might be just starting a long game of chess."
Yeah, this is the opening gambit, and the real war will be economic and drag on for years. He is now talking about economic libertarianism in Russia to bring back his economy, and revoking all intellectual property rights for sanctioning countries, making hacking and selling Microsoft products, or copies with less feature bloat, for example, legal. He's backed into a corner, without doubt, but I am not sure that seizing the yachts of Russian playboys abroad is causing him any tears.
OMG, Howard. You're saying Putin is playing a "long game of chess" by deliberately failing to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses and taking the country within days. That the 40-mile convoy stalled and stopped in its advance to Kyiv is some Knight enfilade move. And those attacking forces playing possum is a brilliant strategy as we've seen before when the Wehrmacht was on the outskirts of Stalingrad.
Ukraine is a big place: Google says 230,000 square miles. So that's well over 1 square mile per Russian soldier. (Yes, Putin has plenty more --2 million for all Russia-- but they're not all easily shifted into Ukraine, and the logistics would be crazy).
So ultimately each soldier in Putin's invasion force has to hold a square mile of Ukraine. Just try imagining that.
A less silly problem is holding not a square mile of territory, but a frontier. Google says the land portion of the Russia-Ukraine border is 1200-plus miles. That's over 6 million feet. You could take Putin's 200,000 troops and space them every 30 feet. Of course you'd have no reserves, no second shifts, nobody doing anything useful like driving supply trucks or cooking meals. Just 200,000 guys standing there on the border.
Maybe this absurd exercise gives some sense of how easily Putin's forces can get swallowed up and picked off by 40-odd million very angry Ukrainians.
Very unstable situation here. PS: on the logistics side of it, I hear that many Russian trucks are breaking down because they are equipped with really crap Chinese tires.
Lucien said...
If the Ukrainian air forces are at all competent how can a road-bound line of vehicles forty miles long be anything but a shooting gallery? Either they suck, or the Russians have some kind of air superiority.
It's no good shooting up the convoy if the Ukrainian Air Force can't replace the ordnance expended shooting up the convoy. And if they did the Russians would just send another convoy.
It's easy to stop a road bound convoy* by knocking out two or three of the lead vehicles and two or three of the most rearward vehicles. And after they clear the wrecked vehicles and start moving again, hit two more lead vehicles and stop the column. More efficient use of a limited stock of aerial ordnance.
Alternately you can go after their fuel dumps and stall them out that way, which is what I'm seeing analyst say they may be doing. This is also an efficient uses of limited ordnance stocks.
*Which the Russians are. Ukraine has had a mild winter and the steppe is not frozen, so it's mud, mud, mud (AKA the rasputitsa). So not only are they road bound, but they are bound to paved roads. Makes me wonder if there's not a faction in the Russian army who're trying to screw Putin.
A few observations:
1. Fast jets are of limited use for air- to ground ops without guided munitions. The USAF spent years trying to make the F-16 do what the A-10 does, without success.
2. Do the Russians even have SAM suppression units akin to the old USAF ‘Wild Weasel’ squadrons? Without this capability, their ability to operate over Ukraine will be severely limited.
3. Russia’s experience in Syria is of little relevance. It’s easy to drop bombs when no one on the ground is shooting back with anything better than an AK47. MANPADS and mobile SAMS make it much more like our experience over Hanoi than over Syria.
Perhaps Russia not using their full air power is the tacit deal for NATO not imposing a no fly zone. I can see NATO telling Putin, if you put bombers in the air we can’t be sure where they are headed and what they are carrying, so we will have to respond accordingly.
If they don't have air superiority they do have air dominance. As for ground attack, cloudy conditions at low-level are a hinderance especially since Russian and Ukrainian tanks and infantry fighting vehicles are , if not the same, very similar. The chances of fratricide are astronomical.
In his speech justifying his invasion, Putin has been clear that his major motive for his invasion was to keep Ukraine out of NATO.
However, I have not understood what prompted Putin to act now. After all, the entry of Ukraine into NATO was not imminent. Furthermore, it seemed likely that NATO never would agree to include Ukraine.
Putin stated also a secondary motive: "The people’s republics of Donbass have asked Russia for help."
However, any such request for help did not seem urgent or compelling.
Today, however, I read a very interesting statement in an Unz article by Mike Whitney:
[quote; emphasis and link added]
Most Americans fail to realize that Zelensky’s rejection of Minsk was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Russian officials had worked for 8 years on Minsk hammering out terms that would be agreeable to all parties. Then — at the eleventh hour — Zelensky put the kibosh on the deal with a wave of the hand. Why? Who told Zelensky to scrap the agreement? Washington?
Of course.
And why did Zelensky deploy 60,000 combat troops to the area just beyond the Line of Contact (in east Ukraine) where they could lob mortal shells into the towns and villages of the ethnic Russians who lived there? Clearly, the message this sent to the people was that an invasion was imminent and that they should either flee their homes immediately or take shelter in their cellars. What objective did Zelensky hope to achieve by forcing these people to huddle in their homes in fear for their lives? And what message did he intend to send to Moscow whose leaders looked on at these developments in absolute horror?
Did he know his actions would set off alarms in Russia forcing Putin to call up his military and prepare them for a possible invasion to protect his people from– what looked to be– a massive ethnic cleansing operation?
He did.
(end quote)
Unfortunately, Whitney did not provide a link to the detail about Zelinsky's deployment of 60,000 Ukrainian troops beyond the Line of Contact that had been established by the Minsk Agreements.
T]he continued pattern of activity suggests... that the VKS lacks the institutional capacity to plan, brief and fly complex air operations at scale....
I have another possible reason. Through the history of NATO & post-war Western Europe, a country's air force tends to be made up of highly technical officers & non-coms (because flying jets is a highly technical business). Pilots from the western European countries, even those outside of NATO like France & Franco's Spain, often knew lots of other pilots from other countries. It often made the Air Force the most "liberal" of a country's military (e.g. Spain's Air Force was very supportive of joining NATO in 1986).
It may very well be that Russia's Air Force is simply refusing to follow orders. Perhaps out of a spirit of Slavic Brotherhood. Perhaps out of the knowledge that if the shit hits the fan & NATO sweeps east into Russia, they're all going to be dead in a week.
Some questions I would like answered:
What role did the US Government play in encouraging, guiding and funding the Maidan protests against elected President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014?
In particular, what role was played by the Obama Administration's "Point Man on Ukraine", Joe Biden?
What does the US Government know about Ukrainian violations of the Minsk Agreements that occurred shortly before the Russian invasion?
In particular, did Ukraine deploy tens of thousands of soldiers beyond the so-called Line of Contact?
Was secret actions being done to include Ukraine in NATO?
Were secret actions being done to give Putin the impression that Ukraine would be included in NATO in the near future?
From the beginning I've scratched my head over the timing of the Russian attacks. You would think that they, of all people, would know better than to launch a war at the tail-end of winter with the spring thaw, and all its mud, looming. There is a reason their main thrust is a 20 mile traffic jam on a single road -- stupidity.
I'm guessing their air war planning is equally as knuckleheaded.
is the reason to disbelieve Putin claim of de-Nazisizing in Ukraine because the West support is AntiFa
FWIW, you publish your air campaign plan in what's called an ATO (Air Tasking Order), giving every flying unit involved everything from specific mission, to target areas, callsigns, squawk codes (Modes I, III, and IV), backup missions, escape and evade instructions if shot down, Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) assignments and procedures, where to air-to-air refuel, AWACS frequencies...the list goes on...and on...and on.
Any given Joint exercise includes an ATO and a Joint 24/7 team (primarily USAF and USN) to write, coordinate and publish it.
Based on what I experienced when dealing with Russians (end of the Bosnian campaign in the late 90's) that kind of established procedural process wasn't something they put a lot of attention on. I was working with the USAFE commanding general, who later became Commander, Air Combat Command and before too long CSAF. Interesting factoid: His first day at work as USAF Chief of Staff was 9/11. What a way to start a new job.
Anyway, The Boss showed us a piece of paper that had the Russian plan for humanitarian aid deliveries for the folks in the Former Yugoslavia after the fighting stopped. It was kind of a big cartoon of how they were going to do it. Airplanes, arrows, various symbols of run a logistical support airlift. Worked for them, I guess, but I don't think you could do that for a full-scale are campaign in a combat theater. But that's just me.
The fact that the severe limitations on the Russians' military performance are coming as a big surprise is a huge indictment of the US intelligence services. Once again, they were caught unaware by world events.
Mike Sylwester:
What role did the US Government play in encouraging, guiding and funding the Maidan protests against elected President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014?
...
In particular, did Ukraine deploy tens of thousands of soldiers beyond the so-called Line of Contact?
A Slavic Spring in the Obama, Biden, Clinton, McCain, Biden Spring series.
Unfortunately, Whitney did not provide a link to the detail about Zelinsky's deployment of 60,000 Ukrainian troops beyond the Line of Contact that had been established by the Minsk Agreements.
**********
first question I would ask, does Ukraine **have** 60,000 troops to deploy in one place, neglecting their borders and defenses in other places?
Brought forward from the cafe thread last night.
The US knew exactly what it would take to prevent the war from happening, but keeping Ukraine out of NATO was too high a price to pay to avoid this war.
It sounds like you don't even know “what it would [have] take[n] to prevent the war from happening.”
As Claire Berlinski recently put it: “This seems a relevant moment to remind readers that dissolving NATO was precisely what Russia demanded in its ultimatum before it invaded Ukraine. It did not demand that Ukraine abstain from joining NATO, as many seem to think.”
Read the whole thing.
Mike Sykvester said:
Today, however, I read a very interesting statement in an Unz article by Mike Whitney:
***************************
From that article:
"Does Zelensky know that NATO is openly hostile to Russia and regards Russia a serious threat to its expansionist ambitions?"
Huh? Just what country subjugated Eastern Europe after WWII and thus made NATO necessary in the first place?
What "expansionist ambitions" does NATO, a defensive military alliance among 30 countries, have to rule over other countries?
Why has NATO not forced other countries, esp EU countries, to join the alliance?
Why didn't NATO immediately act to send troops into and subjugate the East Bloc countries when the USSR fell?
On the contrary, why did most of those countries ask to join NATO to prevent Russia from taking them over again?
SteveWe said...
OMG, Howard. You're saying Putin is playing a "long game of chess" by deliberately failing to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses and taking the country within days. That the 40-mile convoy stalled and stopped in its advance to Kyiv is some Knight enfilade move.
3/5/22, 10:38 AM
Steve, you're a typical example of species Dumbass Americanus. "Overwhelming" cities filled with missiles designed for urban warfare would be outright suicidal. The Russians have experience of trying such tactics in Chechnya during the first war, and the result made them certain to never try it again. The convoy isn't "stalled," it's fortifying Hostomel Airport. Which should make it rather easy to reinforce the Russian encirclement of Kiev while staying outside the range of most Ukrainian artillery.
I know most Americans aren't qualified to opine about gridiron strategy, never mind warfare, but goddamn you could stand to get your news from a more intelligent source than MSNBC or Hannity.
Mike Sylwester said...
Some questions I would like answered:
You know all the answers. I think what you want is an official accounting. Which, you also know, isn't going to happen.
-Putin is being methodical. He's not risking his best soldiers or equipment. Everything is going according to plan.
-Putin is getting crushed in Ukraine. He's already lost, even if he wins.
-other.
Either they are not capable, or they aren't risking their air forces in a CAS role. I am going with not risking myself.
screed reads like he is just marking turf by hoof-scraping the ground
Biden wants to save his coup
Putin says no more coup for you
Mike Sylvester - So you find reliable sources the Unz Review and Mr. Putin himself? Unz Review writers, including Unz himself, have denied the Holocaust and praised the infamous anti-Semitic tract Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
NATO is a red herring. NATO is there to defend the free world from the likes of Putin. No one with any common sense thinks it has any interest in attacking a backwards country like Russia and start a thermonuclear war.
Ukraine was not close to joining NATO. Among other things, all 30 members would have to agree including Putin apologists like Hungary.
It was a land grab pure and simple. Ukraine has abundant natural resources including some of the most fertile soil in the world. Russia gets full control over the warm water port in Sevastopol. And Putin's vision of reuniting the old soviet union becomes closer to reality. In his mind, Ukraine was never a real country, even though its uniqueness and traditions go back to the Ninth Century, when Kiev was the most powerful state in Europe. Moscow was nothing until hundreds of years later.
I'm sure Putin also didn't like to see, and didn't like his people seeing, that Ukraine was slowly developing into a functioning liberal democracy much more interested in looking west and not east for its future.
You also fail to mention that the 1994 Budapest Memorandum where Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons (the third largest stockpile in the world) in exchange for guarantees from Russia to respect Ukraine's then existing borders.
Sometimes things are as simple as they look. Putin is an evil man.
SteveWe: I hope I'm wrong and you're right.
effinayright said...
Mike Sykvester said:
Today, however, I read a very interesting statement in an Unz article by Mike Whitney:
***************************
From that article:
"Does Zelensky know that NATO is openly hostile to Russia and regards Russia a serious threat to its expansionist ambitions?"
Huh? Just what country subjugated Eastern Europe after WWII and thus made NATO necessary in the first place?
What "expansionist ambitions" does NATO, a defensive military alliance among 30 countries, have to rule over other countries?
Forget it, Jake. It's Unz.
Last time I was over that way they were going on about "Judeo-Nazism" to explain how Putin was right about needing to denazify Ukraine despite Zelenskyy being Jewish and Kyiv being home to a major Holocaust memorial site (Babi Yar).
Ratcheting up the pressure by staying out of the cities and bombarding them into submission is a plausible strategy, but it will test the Russians as much as the Ukrainians. Smacks of the sort of incrementalism that loses support pretty quickly, even in places like Putin's Russia.
"Putin says no more coup for you" is great, Narayanan. Putin as coup-nazi.
"The convoy isn't "stalled," it's fortifying Hostomel Airport."
**********
How does a convoy stuck miles away from an airport "fortify" it?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/putin-thought-ukraine-would-fall-quickly-an-airport-battle-proved-him-wrong-11646343121
Why, at this "fortified" airport, are Russian planes filled with troops not landing by the dozens each day?
Is it because the Ukrainians are shelling the shit out of the airport to deny the Russkis the ability to do so?
". He might be just starting a long game of chess."
That anything like the 4 dimensional chess Orange the Clown was supposedly playing? If so, one can only hope it will be just as effective.
BobD. Point is not the Ukes shooting back. Point is RTB. Do the bases where the Russian aircraft are housed in or near Syria have air defenses and how are they operated? Do the Russian pilots have to follow some version of the ingress corridor technique, which requires coordination and communication? If so, somebody would know how to work them wrt the Ukraine.
And if they do have the old doctrine, how easy is it for the Ukes to spoof it? As I say, do they have the same equipment and use the same freq? Or can they be tuned to do so?
But another point is all the PR about Stingers. Are they being used or not? The Wild Weasels of Viet Nam era went after good-sized SAM sites, some with Shrike missiles homing on the site's radar. Or if the location were pretty locked in, a conventional bombing run, or perhaps a bombing run after the place was blinded by a Shrike.
Stingers are man portable at least to the point where you can get as far forward as you can on wheels and hump the things to a good firing position. They have no signature and no radar emissions. Just some guys colored like or covered in mud on the edge of a grove of trees keeping their heads down until it's time. The Wild Weasel lesson does not apply.
@doctrev
"The convoy isn't "stalled," it's fortifying Hostomel Airport. Which should make it rather easy to reinforce the Russian encirclement of Kiev while staying outside the range of most Ukrainian artillery."
That is, beyond a doubt, the most dumbass explanation I've ever read. The convoy is 20 miles away from Kyiv and is 40 miles long. If the Russians intend to encircle Kyiv, how do they get there with all those wheeled vehicles? Through the fields? An encirclement with a 20-mile radius will require more than 40 miles of troops and equipment that will also require additional logistical support of food, fuel, and munitions. "Rather easy to reinforce the encirclement"!? That seems to be beyond their capabilities now.
For whatever reason, the simple fact is that after ten plus days, the Ukraine has not folded. It is also clear that Putin the Terrible thought his army would overwhelm the Ukrainians, soft on Western corruption.
The longer this plays out, the more temper tantrums can be expected from PTT.
For several years, I have been wondering why the Russians were not so much of a deterrence to the Israelis operating over Syrian airspace. Now PTT has provided the answer.
Perhaps Putin is afraid of destroying Old Kiev which is filled with churches and monasteries which are the basis of Alexander Dugin's claims about "1000 years of Christianity in Russia." Kiev is on the Dnieper which empties the Black Sea. The civilization and religion of the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople which is on the opposite shore of the Black Sea moved up the Dnieper river and has continued to exist in Kiev in an unbroken line. Moscow is further north on or near the headwaters of the Dnieper, the Volga and rivers and lakes leading to St. Petersburg and was settled later and then still later became important. The Russian empire and the Soviet Union controlled the cultures along all three watercourses but the Russian Federation does not control the territories along the Dnieper. The claims being made about Russia and its deep civilization are actually claims about towns and history inside the Ukraine. So on one hand Russia has to grab the Ukraine and on the other, if Russian has to grab the Ukraine then Russia can hardly claim as its own the deep Christian history it is asserting. And what if, God forbid, Russia has to kill thousands of Kievans and reduce Kiev, the supposed center of its [Russia's] history to rubble? what if the Russians destroyed St Michael's golden domed monastery in Kiev again as did the Soviets? "We had to destroy Russia to enable Russia's sacred mission." will that work?
"and selling Microsoft products, or copies with less feature bloat, for example,
I'd buy a copy!
"And why did Zelensky deploy 60,000 combat troops to the area just beyond the Line of Contact (in east Ukraine) where they could lob mortal shells into the towns and villages of the ethnic Russians who lived there? Clearly, the message this sent to the people was that an invasion was imminent …"
The suggestion is that Putin feared that Ukraine was about to invade Russia!
You know that's ridiculous, right?
SteveWe said...
That is, beyond a doubt, the most dumbass explanation I've ever read. The convoy is 20 miles away from Kyiv and is 40 miles long. If the Russians intend to encircle Kyiv, how do they get there with all those wheeled vehicles? Through the fields? An encirclement with a 20-mile radius will require more than 40 miles of troops and equipment that will also require additional logistical support of food, fuel, and munitions. "Rather easy to reinforce the encirclement"!? That seems to be beyond their capabilities now.
3/5/22, 4:07 PM
... I don't know how to break this to you, but modern urban encirclements don't look like medieval ones. Aerial surveillance has never been easier, and the whole point of bringing mechanized infantry along with armor is effortless interdiction of lesser forces, especially unarmed trucks. Not that it matters, because Ukrainian armor and mechanized infantry pretty much don't exist right now, which drastically limits their mobility. I don't know WHY Westerners are obsessed with portraying the Russians as backwards, but reinforcement and logistics are extremely easy when the forces are close to your own borders and roads.
As for the idea that Russian troops need to land at the airport: lolwut? The Russian border isn't far away. It's easier by all accounts to simply bring soldiers across the land border, especially alongside their mechanized APCs and tanks, but having an airport allows a level of flexibility to logistics that land travel simply can't match. The convoy itself stretches from Ivankiv to Borodyanka: controlling the roads to Makariv is child's play. Now there IS a stretch of highway that isn't currently under Russian control: pretty standard when you want civilians to evacuate a city before taking it.
It seems like Vlad believes the smoke Don is blowing, but that fucker has some Stalin survivalist DNA.
Blogger Chris Lopes said...
That anything like the 4 dimensional chess Orange the Clown was supposedly playing? If so, one can only hope it will be just as effective.
“ Funny, I was just reading this article in another tab. The cause is probably pretty complex, not the least because the air force wasn't really prepared to start the war. Sadly, it's more than possible they'll get their act together just as the Ukraine becomes less and less capable of using their own air force”
I think that the big problem that the Russians face is that they haven’t spent nearly enough money over the decades maintaining the military hardware they have. For example, tires should be checked and trucks moved every couple months. Turns out that a lot of their truck tires were Chinese made, old, and greatly weakened by the sun. The US military spends billions every year maintaining their equipment. They do routinely move trucks, and check and replace tires. So much of their logistics train, riding on those sun weakened Chinese tires, in the midst of the Ukrainian mud season, just quit working. Jet fighters and bombers are even more fragile. Part of their Soviet era thinking was to make up in quantity what they don’t have in quality. It worked during WW II. But the equipment is much more complex, and fragile, now.
My impressions of what I have read is this- the Ukrainians don't have concentrated forces of anything against which aircraft strikes are useful. The first night the Russians took out the military infrastructure that they could identify with missiles. After the first few days, what is left for the aircraft to attack but civilian targets?
We know from many years the Russian Navy is just awful... nuke subs sink, carriers can't fly planes, cruisers have engine breakdowns, etc... and we know from Afghanistan and Iraq Russian tanks are the pits. And rocket tech? No where near China or USA.
So what does this mean?
Well with the awful COVID problems (you do know their vaccines were also sub-sub-par) they are having huge problems internally.
Russia is a paper Tiger... and is trying to be as bad ass as they can to scare people into submission. Not unlike Hitler's Germany before WW2.
Beware.. this could become WW3.
First World War...
1. Democrats held the presidency with a pacifist.
2. Massive entanglements with national agreements of defense (kind of like NATO.) A number of alliances involving European powers, the Ottoman Empire, Russia and other parties had existed for years, but political instability in the Balkans (particularly Bosnia, Serbia and Herzegovina) threatened to destroy these agreements.
3. Globalization of economy causing severe problems.
4. Spark that set it off was was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary. In June 1914, a Serbian-nationalist terrorist group called the Black Hand sent groups to assassinate the Archduke in Sarajevo, Bosnia (not all that far away from the Ukraine.)
Second World War...
1. Democrats held the presidency with a pacifist.
2. Massive entanglements with national agreements of defense (kind of like NATO.) UK, France, Poland, Holland, etc.. and other powers .vs. the Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan.)
3. Globalization of economy causing severe problems (world wide depression, Japan's reliance on OIL and scrap iron from USA, etc.)
4. Spark that set it off was was the German invasion of Poland (after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia.)
Third World War...
1. Democrats hold the presidency with a f*cking senile idiot and his f*cking idiot VP.
2. Massive entanglements with national agreements of defense, that is Nato on one side and Russia, Belarus, China, etc.. on the other.
3. Globalization of economy causing severe problems. Inflation rising, COVID disruptions, ship backlogs on west coast, illegals crossing the border, massive debts....
4. Spark that will set it off??? Invading Ukraine now so who knows!!! Terrorist attack?
Best get your 1 year supply of food, iodine pills, ammo, guns, water, shelter...
Lets go Brandon!!!
Mobility is handy But there are two points. One is that General Mud went back on active duty. As it happens, good, black farm soil tilled annually makes really nasty mud. So even tracked vehicles are road bound to a great extent. Whether they can pull out and drive along the shoulder of the road past this famous forty-mile convoy would be nice to know. What do the engineers think about how that would affect the shoulders....
And you don't need mobility if you're already there. Waiting. And if you look, to a drone, like everybody else out in the country.....
It's hard to say this is a war of attrition. But, win, lose, or draw, it's a war of how-much-do-I-have-left-after-this. Including how many friendly oligarchs?
All the mind readers here: What more does Vlad have to do to meet your expectations?
OOPS wrong!...
https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/596950-while-america-watches-the-war-in-ukraine-biden-finalizes-a
Try again.
Aside from the great suffering, someday this is going to make a great movie. A bunch of old USAF, Israeli, and Japaneese pilots will rebuild P47's F4u's, P38, Zeros, and Me109's from a Ukrainian plane museum and attack neo-soviet armor on the road to Kiev. Rockets, .50 cal AP/incendiary, napalm, its all good. The stubble faced beer drinking heroes will chase Putin's minions to hell and back!!
Bumble. My comment combines two items, both inescabable. One is he's going to have less than he had when he started. The other is he cannot help noticing.
What he will make of it I don't know. I'd be surprised if his advisers predicted this loss rate. About them he does..what? His next set of advisers, seeing the first go-round do...what?
IOW, his next move is entirely unpredictable, but the premise that he is acting rationally is not prudent.
First World War...
1. Democrats held the presidency with a pacifist.
Isn't it ironic, that most wars in the 20th and 21st centuries were conceived, birthed, and progressed during Democrat administrations. Not the least of which was the second Iraq war that started with Obama's premature withdrawal from Iraq, accompanied by his and Biden's disastrous advocacy for the Spring series including the Slavic Spring with "benefits" and its 32 trimester aftermath in progress, and the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, people... persons left behind, with billions of dollars in state of the art military hardware left as housewarming gifts.
Abortion!... War! What is it good for?
“If the Ukrainian air forces are at all competent how can a road-bound line of vehicles forty miles long be anything but a shooting gallery? Either they suck, or the Russians have some kind of air superiority.”
Odd as it seems in a war of aggression, it does seem that that both sides are exercising a certain restraint. Partly for PR reasons, partly to avoid over-antagonizing international players (well, the ones who aren’t easily blackmailed), and probably partly from an awareness that, when this is over, they’re still going to have to live alongside each other. Even Putin is smarter than Rand Paul’s neighbor.
I struggled through all the comments here, heroically, many of them full of technical jargon and/or political/strategic reasoning meant to bolster one interpretation or another. However, none of it made much sense to me and most of it was contradicted by other equally assured technical points and/or political/strategic reasoning. I conclude the fog of war is thick so far and no one here really has a good grasp of what is happening or what Putin is up to.
I have so far found this thirty-minute youtube very helpful and recommend it highly . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=If61baWF4GE&feature=youtu.be
. . . in order to understand that what is going on here is not simply that Putin is an "evil man" as someone simplistically put it, but that Russia has substantial interests it sees as threatened by Ukrainian and NATO actions and gestures in recent years. I believe it was a colossal error to expand NATO to the edge of the former Soviet Union and to lead the Ukrainians to expect support from the West that it did not, is not now, and will in fact never get for its biggest ambitions. Tragic, perhaps, for it. But WWIII would be more tragic.
“This seems a relevant moment to remind readers that dissolving NATO was precisely what Russia demanded in its ultimatum before it invaded Ukraine."
What does your link actually say?
Had we acceded to these demands, it would have meant the end of NATO—of what value is Article V if under pressure, we throw out members of the alliance
So basically it's the opinion of some blogger that no deal was available to us because the deal that Putin offered meant the dissolution of NATO, in his opinion, therefore war was preferable to discussion. Putin's actual offer is blocked, apparently, I guess since we Americans are not to be trusted with it by our own government.
"Best get your 1 year supply of food, iodine pills, ammo, guns, water, shelter..."
**********
As any reader of modern post-apocalyptic novels knows (see Kurt Schlichter, for example), people who prepare for the SHTF and are thus not starving and desperate when it happens, will be noticed and eventually killed by those who are.
That's why they play the game.
I've been wondering about this. The Russian air force is extremely large and has many advanced weapon systems. So why are they having such problems getting control of the airspace over Ukraine? When the United States, and their coalition partners, attacked Iraq, they got control of the airspace quite quickly. The first reason for this is that the Iraq air force chose not to really engage them. The second reason was that there was not a tremendous number of portable, shoulder fired, anti-aircraft missiles out there in Iraq. The Ukrainian air force did not stand down the way that the Iraqi air force did. Also, the Russian military leaders might have wanted to preserve the Ukrainian air fields for Russian use. But I think that the biggest reason is that the Ukrainians have a LOT of advanced anti-aircraft and anti-tank portable missiles; definitely hundreds maybe thousands. It's not logistically possible to control the air space if the Ukrainian forces have an unlimited supply of these missiles. (Assuming that NATO keeps re-arming them.) If the Iraqi insurgency had access to thousands of these weapons (and made up a higher percentage of the population) the U.S. coalition would never have been able to control the air space over Iraq.
loudogblog
"I think that the big problem that the Russians face is that they haven’t spent nearly enough money over the decades maintaining the military hardware they have."
The fact is they don't. At best they have upgraded cold war electronic systems. They are at least 2 generations behind the west in technology. They have exactly one 5th gen flying airframe. They have two mission capable new Armada tanks. Everything else is upgraded cold war era machines. And as Bruce said above they are way behind on maitennace. They are way behind on training especially pilots for a ground support role. Which may be why they're losing so many vehicles.
effinayright,
I have read Schlichter's novels, recommended them to others, and I don't recall anything like what you are saying. Is Kelly Turnbull series focuses on the breakup of the US, with a fairly healthy conservative remnant doing just fine. Were there places in the People's Republic where survivalists get overrun, or are you confusing him with another author?
Rusty said:
"I think that the big problem that the Russians face is that they haven’t spent nearly enough money over the decades maintaining the military hardware they have."
That is true, but a shoulder fired missile will destroy an aircraft or tank regardless of its maintenance status. Plus, what about the maintenance of the pilots? From what I understand, they don't get enough annual flying hours to be at their top game. That might be a factor in why so many Russian aircraft are being shot down.
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