Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-23 and Invasion

[Admiral Yi]

How do you hide the preparations of a major offensive when the enemy has satellites?

Travel by night and park under trees.

[PDH]

For Yi, if this works...it is data from the end of 9/9 though it shows the retreat from Izyum today.

from this twitter thread - https://twitter.com/JominiW/status/1568737425597386752?s=20&t=dlP1g1vRc8OZyLdB5wo7sA

[Admiral Yi]

That's a lot of map.

[Admiral Yi]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUEDRKLbKZU

Paean to HIMARS.  Nothing new (except maybe production ramp up) but very nicely done

[Barrister]

I've never been so fucking proud to be of Ukrainian heritage as the last few days...

Slava Ukraini!  Glory to Ukraine!

[Josquius]

I hope I live to see the day someone makes a "Death of Stalin" style movie about Russia during this war.

Head of intelligence: Lord Putin. We have it on very good authority that the Ukrainians are planning a massed attack on kherson. This provides an excellent opportunity to crush them once and for all

Putin: What is this intelligence?

HoI: they have been repeatedly shouting "LOOK EVERYONE WE ARE VERY DEFINITELY GOING TO ATTACK KHERSON."

Putin: and its not a trap?

HoI: not at the rate they're saying it no


Putin: ok. Send all our troops to kherson

[Sheilbh]

I've never been so fucking proud to be of Ukrainian heritage as the last few days...

Slava Ukraini!  Glory to Ukraine!

From Kozacha Lopan:


Which is basically on the Russian border so it looks like all of Kharkiv oblast is or is about to liberated.

[Legbiter]

Nice DIY liberation.

[Legbiter]

Russian frontline right now must be a total mess. Ukrainians need to set up a Red Ball Express to provide logistics. Keep chasing them, the Russians are like the Germans getting the hell out of France in 1944.   

[Sheilbh]

Interesting thread from Mark Galeotti on the Russian narrative at this moment:

Mark Galeotti
@MarkGaleotti
Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the Kremlin's 'newspaper of record,' is as stodgy as you might expect, but in light of the extraordinary Ukrainian successes in the past few days, it's instructive to see what it's telling Russians today (and what it's not). A short thread 1/
First, and most obvious, there's not even a hint of the Ukrainians' advance from Kharkov deep into Russian-held territory. Quite the opposite, instead there are tallies, drawn directly from MOD briefings, of alleged enemy losses (4000 KIA since 6 Sept) 2/
At the same time, again picking up a recent theme of Kremlin propaganda, much talk of 'foreign mercenaries' fighting on Kyiv's side, although of course they too are, Russians are told, being hammered 3/
But even so, the propagandists can't help but trip themselves up. The account of how a Mi-35 gunship crew allegedly thwarted a Ukrainian river crossing might be comforting to the paper's readers...assuming they don't look at a map, because... 4/
By placing the action at Sen'kove, on the Oskil River (which seems to have been taken already), it is admitting just how deeply the Ukrainians have already gone. Presumably, they are relying on readers imbibing the triumphalist tone and not digging into the detail. 5/
But this illustrates some wider issues. 1) The Kremlin seems stunned, and has not yet come up with a plan as to how to try and spin this, so to a large extent the media are ignoring the bad news until they get a directive. No one wants to show initiative lest they get it wrong 6/
(Which is, incidentally, the same Soviet-style defensive thinking that is bedevilling the military, especially disastrous in a time of rapid and unpredictable change) 7/
2) The Kremlin is happy to lie, but can't just ignore realities, and so is really struggling to create any positive narratives on issues where some basic fact-checking is possible. This is the kind of dilemma we saw in Chechnya (x2) and the Sov war in Afghanistan, and... 8/
...Tends to be a sign that the state's control over the narrative is cracking. It is not so much IMO that Russians up to now have necessarily *believed* the official line so much as that they have had no reason to both *disbelieving* it as that is dangerous... /9
...both politically and also morally. I remember one parent of a vet from Afghanistan I interviewed for my PhD. She said "I didn't want to believe what people were saying about the war, because if I did, then I would either have to act or be a part of it." /10
This desire to avoid the truth as long as possible is a very human one, alas, but especially prevalent in authoritarian regimes. But in due course - and esp as the official narrative becomes less and less credible - it does break over time. 11/
The evening TV 'shock jocks' will still rant, but they matter less than many believe. When even core state propagandists like RG are at a loss, despite their closeness to the administration, then this is a sign of political pressure, maybe even crisis. 12/end

[Crazy_Ivan80]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j803HpO_S7E&ab_channel=UkraineNewsTV

nice sit-rep

[OttoVonBismarck]

My baseline assumption has always been that the longer this goes, the worse it probably is for Ukraine. Primarily because Ukraine's entire population has to suffer from this war, and Russia has mostly isolated the effects away from its key population / economic / political centers. Additionally, I am skeptical of Western aid for Ukraine. There is a significant anti-Ukraine support bias in right wing rhetoric in the United States, and those same people could be running the legislature in a few months. The EU is also inherently sus, as countries like Germany, France etc are intrinsically unreliable in such matters. The only decently significant country I feel is highly unlikely to withdraw support for Ukraine is the United Kingdom. Turkey, despite keeping a weird diplomatic friendliness to Russia, also seems very committed to continuing to supply Ukraine with some of the weapons doing the worst damage to Russian forces (my intuition is maybe Erdogan wants to keep discussion channels and ties with Russia to avoid getting sucked too far into the U.S. embrace, and perhaps he also is inherently skeptical of a bigger Russian presence in the Black Sea, I don't know.)

But the recent Russian collapses have kind of told me that the state of Russia's military may be even worse than I already thought it was--and my views of it the last six months were already very low. The sort of morale problems we're seeing are indeed comparable to some of the morale based collapses seen in WWI and the opening phases of Barbarossa. However, unlike in WWII I am not sure what Putin's move will be to rally the troops. Stalin was fighting a true war for survival, and his people knew that, Russians seem to be about 75% anti-Ukraine and fine with destroying that country, but they don't seem to buy into this being a war of survival, and it is questionable how much broader Russian society would accept grave cutbacks to their lives to fund a war they don't see in that context.

Without a major change to Russian military recruitment and society itself, I do not know how Putin fixes the problem. It is worth noting that Russia has not actually had a full strength military in years, they had lots of "paper soldiers" prior to this war, so the idea that he is going to recruit another 180,000 is questionable because even in peace time they weren't able to fully staff the military. Further, if whatever trash recruits he can mobilize are just going to retreat at the first sign of trouble, that can actually have infectious effects on the military itself, conscripts who won't fight can spread bad morale throughout the entire military.

[The Larch]

More internal Russian rumblings, this time from Chechnya.

Kadyrov: "If today or tomorrow no changes in strategy are made, I will be forced to speak with the leadership of the defence ministry and the leadership of the country to explain the real situation on the ground to them. It's a very interesting situation. It's astounding..."

[OttoVonBismarck]

Worth pointing out Russia still has a lot of intrinsic advantages in this war, and there are many things Putin can do before deciding the invasion is a bust and finding a way to egress the situation while maintaining political legitimacy at home. Russia is looking wobbly but it would be foolish to count them out.

The flipside is we also appear to get almost no good press on any potential problems in Ukraine. Ukraine was an incredibly divided society prior to this war, with large factions that were strongly pro-Kremlin. It worries me that Zelenskyy has had to do a few purges of potential Russian 'loyalists' out of his administration, and that's sort of a back door way that Putin could still win this if he's able to destablize the Ukrainian government from within.

[Sheilbh]

More internal Russian rumblings, this time from Chechnya.

Kadyrov: "If today or tomorrow no changes in strategy are made, I will be forced to speak with the leadership of the defence ministry and the leadership of the country to explain the real situation on the ground to them. It's a very interesting situation. It's astounding..."

I saw something this morning about Chechen leaders saying the military aren't informing Putin what's going on and, in a way, I imagine they know as I understand Chechen forces are often used to keep other Russian troops in line.

But interestingly good Tsar/bad boyars going on.

As OvB says on morale - I think part of that is messaging and propaganda. It is difficult to justify hard fighting, national mobilisation or a war for survival when the official line is (now) that this is a limited special military operation to protect the DNR and LNR. Similarly I think has an effect on morale when that the line troops are getting but what they're facing is the resistance you'd expect for an invading army. I think that is a big dilemma for the Kremlin. It seems like you need more than a "special military operation" to justify a level of sacrifice and mobilisation necessary for Russia militarily, and it's not clear to me they're comfortable with that politically - again there's a parallel there with, say, Afghanistan or the Chechen wars. That dissonance I think is a risk at home and among the troops.