Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-23 and Invasion

[Richard Hakluyt]

The Russian army is just not that big, due to the cost of modern weaponry I guess. Given the failure of their precision attacks I'm not sure the Russians have many options apart from terror to cow the Ukrainians.

[grumbler]

You are headed towards a world of hurt when the civilians in a city you occupy move towards the sound of gunfire.

[Tamas]

The Russian army is just not that big, due to the cost of modern weaponry I guess. Given the failure of their precision attacks I'm not sure the Russians have many options apart from terror to cow the Ukrainians.

Even the Americans failed utterly without terror measures in Iraq.

[Berkut]

The Russian army is just not that big, due to the cost of modern weaponry I guess. Given the failure of their precision attacks I'm not sure the Russians have many options apart from terror to cow the Ukrainians.

Even the Americans failed utterly without terror measures in Iraq.

[grumbler]

The Russian army is just not that big, due to the cost of modern weaponry I guess. Given the failure of their precision attacks I'm not sure the Russians have many options apart from terror to cow the Ukrainians.

Even the Americans failed utterly without terror measures in Iraq.

  Good call.

[Tamas]

The Russian army is just not that big, due to the cost of modern weaponry I guess. Given the failure of their precision attacks I'm not sure the Russians have many options apart from terror to cow the Ukrainians.

Even the Americans failed utterly without terror measures in Iraq.

What I mean of course is they never attempted terror tactics. They probably would have failed if they did, but they never tried. They also clearly failed.

[FunkMonk]

The Guardian had an interesting piece on the head of the Russian central bank :

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/mar/05/russias-central-bank-head-is-mourning-for-her-economy

She sends coded messages through what she wears? Sounds like the perfect US Fed chair 

[Josquius]

Also on coded messages the queen's yellow and blue flowers when meeting the Canadian pm was a nice touch.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Another interesting piece in the Guardian :

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/09/ukrainian-opera-director-yevhen-lavrenchuk-freed-italy-russia-interpol

Its about the misuse of Interpol by Russia in their program of repressing political dissent.

[OttoVonBismarck]

The comparisons to WW2 as a way of saying Russian losses are not bad is far afield of the mark. WW2 invasions in Europe involved many more men than we had here, and they also represented a much simpler deployment of material and equipment. The total logistical burden to support WW2 divisions (the standard operating unit in the war) vs equivalent numbers of Russian troops (Russians organize on the tactical battalion level, which is much much smaller) was obviously much higher than Russia faces for invading Ukraine just because of the huge numbers of infantrymen--the food and water and etc requirements of humans hasn't changed really since WW2 and all that stuff requires logistics to move around.

However WW2 armies were much less mechanized than modern armies and much less reliant on equipment aside from standard infantry kit, relative to the total number of troops i.e. a U.S. Army Infantry Divisions was made up of 3 Infantry Regiments, division artillery divided into 4 battalions of field artillery, a tank battalion, 2 anti-tank battalions, and an anti-air battalion, then a number of support, recon, signal and medical battalions/detachments. All told a WW2 Infantry Division in the U.S. Army was around 14,000 men with around 9000 infantrymen in the division infantry regiments. So around 65% of the strength of the division was pure infantry. A Russian Battalion Tactical Group is 600-800 men with only around 200 as infantry, the rest are attached to the hundreds of vehicles that the BTGs use to move around and the artillery and MLRS that are attached at the battalion level in the Russian Army (in the U.S. our standard tactical operations unit is the Brigade Combat Team or BCT--around 4000-5000 men, divided into a number of battalions. There are reasons, most of them related to poor manpower and lower defense spending, that Russia's military is geared around smaller battalion oriented tactical units.)

The modern Russian military is nothing like a WW2 military--those military forces were backed by mass mobilization and true war economies. The United States for example didn't manufacture a single car for the civilian market for like 4 years, almost all rubber was reserved for military use, families had to use ration cards for common goods, children were employed collecting scrap metal, women were brought into the workforce in large numbers to work factories etc etc. Russia is not operating a war economy or mass mobilization. Within the context of how the modern Russian military is structured, its losses thus far are nothing other than a disaster.

The idea that Russia may just be in a WW2 era battle and thus the numbers aren't bad is not a good idea because if Russia was coming to a WW2 style battle it brought about 10x too few men.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Terror tactics aren't a magic wand guys, we can point to any number of wars far nastier than anything likely to happen even in Ukraine and sometimes they went on for decades despite horrific terror tactics being used. Remember that there were large parts of Nazi occupied Europe that never came close to pacifying partisans and required basically permanent German garrison forces in what was absolutely an unsustainable situation. The Japanese who in many ways were worse occupiers than the Nazis, never stamped out the Philippine insurgents for example. Terror tactics aren't a magic way to cow a modern insurgency.

We know from the books of history that the Mongols for example would basically offer a city the chance to submit or be massacred, and the ones that refused to submit, stood as negative examples for other cities, which often lead to cowed cities paying tribute. But how well did that actually work? The Mongol Empire grew fast but then fractured fast, and its successor states were often nothing like a model of stability.

[The Brain]

And as has been mentioned partisans in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, continued the fight into the 1950s.

[grumbler]

What I mean of course is they never attempted terror tactics. They probably would have failed if they did, but they never tried. They also clearly failed.

Bait and switch? 

Saddam Hussein agrees with you about the clear US failure, though.

[Sheilbh]

Interesting from TASS on conscripts: Putin's spokesman says he has been debriefed on the military's alleged failure to abide by instructions not to use conscripts in Ukraine war and that prosecutors are now investigating.

This is where I think the palace coup side of things becomes a risk. Shoigu and Gerasimov are probably in the firing line for this. But I think Putin's at more risk (though still very limited) if, for whatever reason, the military feels they're going to be thrown under the bus for Putin's decisions. Again of course Shoigu's a very accomplished political operator who can't realistically replace Putin himself which I think makes him key.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Shoigu may suck at military though, the whole "modernization" and restructuring of Russia's army into these smaller battalion combat teams and some of the logistical implications are actually fairly likely part of why they are struggling right now, and those were all Shoigu reforms.