Ukrainian Defensive War against the Russian Invasion - Mark IV: The Partitioning of Discussion

[mindlessobserver]

Hohols are losing too many men is the eternal cope

This is all based on the optimistic battlefield reports that keep going up the chain in the Russian Army. Too much ass covering and not enough hard nosed assessment of what is going on. I think the most shocking part of this is that after a year of warfare the Russian Army is STILL clinging to its peace time beaurocracy ass kissing, telling the boss what he wants to hear and inter service factionalism.

Even now Ukraine should not be doing as well as it's doing. Bakhmut SHOULD be over and done with by all metrics. But it seems that instead of concentrating the necessary forces we have three different factions of the Russian Army attacking in three different places to try and outdo each other. We had the regular forces try and take Vuhledar, leading to one of the most lopsided catastrophes a tank formation has sustained since the battle of Kasserine Pass. At the same time Shoigu's pet PMC is busy trying to take Avdiivka, a town Ukraine has entrenched in concrete for an entire decade. Predictable results ensue. And then we get Wagner in Bakhmut. All three efforts are half assed because all three are done individually in spite of the others.

All the while everyone involved on the Russian side are sending reports to Russian Media and the civilian government about how awesome they are doing. FFS, if you actually zoom out to the map of Ukraine as an entirety, Russia has moved the line of contact West a grand total of 15 Kilometers at most. After MONTHS. You have Russian milbloggers masturbating at the latest gains against the Hohols that if you actually take a ruler out amounts to 1/2 of Farmer Boris' back up cow pasture.

The only significant gain the Russians have after the winter campaign is Soledar. And even that gain has proven ultimately pointless because when it came time to land the follow through and really stick it into the Ukrainians, the Russians just did not have the strength. Now Wagner is three sheets to the wind in the Sunflower fields. They can't retreat, and they can't advance. Absolutely fucked.

 

[namai337]

Real

View attachment 4918812

Aight they will need a new clasificacion if it goes through also there are already dream concepts for it and Chally2

Fucking insane ukie engineering at it agian

 

[mindlessobserver]

Aight they will need a new clasificacion if it goes through also there are already dream concepts for it and Chally2 View attachment 4923508
View attachment 4923512
Fucking insane ukie engineering at it agian

Ukraine built the USSR's tanks. It would be a horrible dishonor to not put their stamp on the western imports. I bet a good part of it is good ole fashioned grift. A make work job to keep the engineers of the Kharkiv works employed. You will live to see German tanks bedecked in Communist reactive armor ride to battle with Orthodox crosses emblazoned on them. Man made horrors beyond your comprehension.

 

[Thomas Talus]

and is 100% going to win this war.

I mean, I don't think it's impossible; this has become a war of relative attrition rates, and Russia still has more men to throw at the problem, plus there's always political uncertainty regarding how much support can be provided to keep Ukraine afloat. But the things that Russia could do to improve their situation seem to largely be things that the relevant people are dispositionally ill-suited to implement, like unified strategies rather than competing fiefdoms, command structures based on demonstrated competency rather than political support, etc.

 

[mindlessobserver]

I mean, I don't think it's impossible; this has become a war of relative attrition rates, and Russia still has more men to throw at the problem, plus there's always political uncertainty regarding how much support can be provided to keep Ukraine afloat.

Gonna dispel this right now. Ukraine has a blank check. Ukraine has done more with NATO military aid in 1 year then literally every other third world shithole handed decades worth of funding. The US and the EU are going to fund Ukraine's military for however long it takes. They FINALLY have a horse worth betting on in the great game.

But the things that Russia could do to improve their situation seem to largely be things that the relevant people are dispositionally ill-suited to implement, like unified strategies rather than competing fiefdoms, command structures based on demonstrated competency rather than political support, etc.

They won't. The entire structure of the Russian state is organized against victory in this war. The simple truth is Russia had to win this fight in the first 4 weeks or not win it at all. They can't win. Because winning to the Russian state as it exists now means different things to different factions within it. And each faction is working at odds to the over all purpose of the others.

Russia lost the war the moment they failed to capture Hostomel Airport. We must now sit through the years long epitaph.

 

[Ghostse]

Gonna dispel this right now. Ukraine has a blank check. Ukraine has done more with NATO military aid in 1 year then literally every other third world shithole handed decades worth of funding. The US and the EU are going to fund Ukraine's military for however long it takes. They FINALLY have a horse worth betting on in the great game.

This cannot be overstated and is a primary cause of my support for Ukraine instead of the usual impotent grousing about the Eurocucks letting Putin get away with it again: they are actually fighting back. I mean sure they'll lose Bahkmut in two more weeks, but they halted - and pushed back - the 2nd & 3rd most powerful armies in the world Ukraine with Slavic fighting spirit and a dozen HIMARS launchers.

I mean, I don't think it's impossible; this has become a war of relative attrition rates, and Russia still has more men to throw at the problem, plus there's always political uncertainty regarding how much support can be provided to keep Ukraine afloat. But the things that Russia could do to improve their situation seem to largely be things that the relevant people are dispositionally ill-suited to implement, like unified strategies rather than competing fiefdoms, command structures based on demonstrated competency rather than political support, etc.

Russia's involvement will not stop while Putin draws breath.
I would suspect in the great tradition of Soviet leadership handover that minute he croaks his successor will blame him for all ills and then roll back his most retarded and unpopular actions.
Again, while the rates of attrition are relative, Ukraine has 30 years before they reach the final days of Nazi Germany in terms of expended manpower.

 

[Snekposter]

Russia lost the war the moment they failed to capture Hostomel Airport. We must now sit through the years long epitaph.

Let me repeat what Crown Prince Wilhelm told an American journalist after the First Battle of the Marne:

We have lost the war. It will go on for a long time but lost it is already.

Any policy of decisive battle that fails will inevitably degrade into attritional warfare, as we're seeing here in Ukraine. Now, I don't think Russia will manage to bleed Ukraine white, not with every single Ukrainian knowing the stakes are, and Ukraine has been beyond anyone's expected level of competence to the point we're seeing T-55's hauled out of storage, likely for modernization and deployment. Personally I think that at some point someone in Russia is going to run the numbers on the war and conclude Putin needs to take an unexpected fall out of a window simply because they personally have lost too much money, whether it was because of imports from the West or because the war is making it harder to divert things to the black market on account of the FSB crawling up everyone's asses to make sure something gets to the front.

I would suspect in the great tradition of Soviet leadership handover that minute he croaks his successor will blame him for all ills and then roll back his most retarded and unpopular actions.

"Meet the new boss, totally not the same as the old boss and everything bad that happened is the old boss' fault, even if my signature was on the papers."

 

[teriyakiburns]

Ukraine-Russia war latest: Russian troops facing 'slaughter-fest' in Bakhmut

Russian troops are "getting slaughtered" in Bakhmut, a top US general has said.

www.telegraph.co.uk

Ukraine-Russia war latest: Russian troops facing 'slaughter-fest' in …

archived 30 Mar 2023 09:48:33 UTC

archive.is

Snippet. Rest at source since it's a live blog sort of affair. Lots of headlines and stories to peruse on the archived page.

Ukraine-Russia war latest: Russian troops facing 'slaughter-fest' in Bakhmut

Russian troops are "getting slaughtered" in Bakhmut, a top US general has said.

General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said: "For about the past 20, 21 days, the Russians have not made any progress whatsoever in and around Bakhmut.

"So it's a slaughter-fest for the Russians," he told US politicians at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Russia's military forces in Bakhmut.

"They're getting hammered in the vicinity of Bakhmut and the Ukrainians have fought very very well."

The mining city of Bakhmut and surrounding towns in the eastern industrial region of Donetsk have been the focal point of assault for much of the 13-month-long invasion by Russia of neighbouring Ukraine.

The average number of daily Russian attacks on the front line reported by Ukraine's general staff has declined for four straight weeks since the beginning of March, to 69 in the past seven days from 124 in the week of March 1-7. Just 57 attacks were reported on Wednesday.

 

[namai337]

 

[Corette]

People seem to take addition of ERA as an affront to tank's machine spirit or whatever.
What's the big deal? Shouldn't it be somewhat ok as long as tank can handle extra weight?

 

[MS Paint Gigachad]

New cope.exe patched to the Vatnik run program. Wagner never wanted Bakhmut anyway. They just wanted to kill hohols. Great success.

View attachment 4919961

“You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you, we might tire of it first, but in the end, our vatniks will spin it as a great success.”

― Prigozhin or somehting

 

[Coffee Mugshot]

People seem to take addition of ERA as an affront to tank's machine spirit or whatever.
What's the big deal? Shouldn't it be somewhat ok as long as tank can handle extra weight?

The various takes on it I've seen come from this meme thread where namai probably got the image:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibl.../story_of_how_the_kontakt_1_got_onto_the_2a4/
Archive

And a fairly scathing criticism of the practice from this Polish defense journo (in Polish, use translate if needed):

https://twitter.com/RemigiuszWilk/status/1641356381004394497
Archive

The arguments in favor of it are that 'it can't hurt, maybe even helps if it's late-gen ERA.'

Arguments against it range from 'it could damage/destroy its own armor and any nearby friendly infantry' to 'this is a precision engineered vehicle and field upgrades like this by non-specialists are dangerous and probably degrade the effectiveness of the platform in various ways that the non-specialists aren't thinking about.'

 

[teriyakiburns]

Arguments against it range from 'it could damage/destroy its own armor and any nearby friendly infantry' to 'this is a precision engineered vehicle and field upgrades like this by non-specialists are dangerous and probably degrade the effectiveness of the platform in various ways that the non-specialists aren't thinking about.'

Can't speak for the Leo, but it will definitely be counter-productive on the Challenger's chobbham armour.

 

[Trig.Point]

I got that in the video as well. The Challenger was intended to fight insurgencies.

They left 4 of them in Iraq after the invasion. The Thermal Imagers were shit, so they installed an Israeli RWS on the turret, however the only way they could get the cables into turret was through the loaders hatch, which meant it couldn't be closed. The MOD wouldn't allow any modifications to the commanders and gunners display, so they just shoved the controls in the already cramped loaders position.

They never deployed to Afghanistan because they claimed they weren't suitable, then the Danes brought their Leopard 2's. Luckily UK defense journalists are all lazy hacks, who rely on the MOD feeding them stories so it never got picked up on. These are the same members of the Press who declared the Snatch Landrover to be a deathtrap, and then when the MOD made minor changes and changed the Snatch's name to Vixen, they all accepted it as a new vehicle.

Russia's involvement will not stop while Putin draws breath.
I would suspect in the great tradition of Soviet leadership handover that minute he croaks his successor will blame him for all ills and then roll back his most retarded and unpopular actions.
Again, while the rates of attrition are relative, Ukraine has 30 years before they reach the final days of Nazi Germany in terms of expended manpower.

There's a scene in Enemy at the Gates where Nikita Khrushchev arrives at a HQ and announces he's been sent by the "boss" to 'take things in hand'. Now Khrushchev massively overstated his role at Stalingrad, but he was a senior member of the Soviet government and having him there made things a lot easier for generals like Zhukov and Voronov to work.

Putin doesn't have a Khrushchev though, and his political system means he can't. He also can't employ competent Generals (he sacked the one that organized the retreat from Kyiv and saved several divisions, replacing him with a hack who'll just sit there dumbly while he lectures him on TV.

As well as being well equipped, Ukrainian soldiers are well paid, with massive bonuses for combat Arms on the front line, have good living conditions when they're in camp. They also despite all the complaints seem to have confidence in the militaries disciplinary system. Which is rare among even western militaries.

I think the the thing that is going to do the most damage to Russia is emigration. The fucked up conscription system is going to push more and more of the workforce out of the country. Even patriotic Russians aren't going to sign up for an Army where they're going to be starved and brutalised receive low quality training and then be sent under equipped into a major war zone.

This Putin obsession with the Wagner group, shows how much of a midwit he is. Russia needs proper professional soldiers, and he thinks a bunch of criminals will do instead.

 

[Astro Galactic Megalul]

Hohols are losing too many men is the eternal cope

In my eyes any is too many. They were just minding their own business and now find themselves in the middle of a war. Can't say the same for subhuman scum who invaded.

 

[SBG]

Too expensive grain last year

Too cheap grain this year

Make up your minds!

The governments apparently screwed up with just shuffling the grain along to markets in Africa and with how fuel prices have been it's probably really fucked with the local farmers in Europe. It's just a matter of the government needing to do subsidies or something to help out their farmers short term.

Not sure why this is supposed to be evil of Ukraine though to want their economy to continue.

 

[teriyakiburns]

They never deployed to Afghanistan because they claimed they weren't suitable

IIRC they claimed the heat was too much for them, which makes me wonder if Oman is regretting its purchase. Or maybe it was because half the country is on a plateau and the air is too thin?

These are the same members of the Press who declared the Snatch Landrover to be a deathtrap, and then when the MOD made minor changes and changed the Snatch's name to Vixen, they all accepted it as a new vehicle.

What the media sort of picked up on, but didn't actually understand, was an argument rumbling around the defence world that the snatch land rover was fatally vulnerable to IEDs with even the most primitive of delayed timers. The flat bottom meant that a relatively small explosive could penetrate the floor armour, pass straight into the cabin, and kill everyone on board. The reason this criticism of the snatch had come to a head, to the point the media noticed, was because an alternative already existed in the RG-31 MRAP. The MoD had trialled a version of the RG-31 during the balkan conflicts, but rejected it in favour of maintaining and uprating the existing landrover fleet, despite the RG-31's far superior crew survivability against mines and IEDs, and much better performance overall. The call was for the MoD to swallow its pride and re-investigate the RG-31 or RG-33 as a replacement for the land rover. Instead, the MoD decided to replace many of its land rovers in afghanistan with a cab-forward, windowless truck, which negated the only advantage the land rover had, by placing the driver directly over the wheels so that he could die with greater efficiency when he struck a mine. They were retired after about a year and a great number of needless deaths. They also took a land rover chassis and put a weird beach buggy frame on it for cross-country patrolling, this time with the driver sat in front of the forward wheels. Lethal. They didn't last long either.

The media don't understand anything they're talking about, of course, or they would have actually discussed some of this, instead of just demanding "FIX IT NOW!" until a minister bought them all another round of drinks.

 

[Pork Packer]

Ya know I was pondering why I had spent yet another week without hearing about Bakhmut falling during my lunch break today, and it just hit me that russia's cope for being routed from Kherson is the fact that they stole a fucking racoon from one of the zoos there and were spinning this as a victory for over a month afterwards and parading it around for propaganda

A quick search later and it seems they are still fucking rolling it out for the cameras

Like... I have made the comparison between russia and our own Ethan Ralph many times before now, but this just exemplifies the sheer "YOU MAY HAVE HUMILIATED ME, KICKED THE SHIT OUT OF ME, AND MADE ME SHIDD AND FARD MYSELF IN PUBLIC, BUT IM STILL WINNING BECAUSE I TRULLD YEEW!" patheticness that makes this comparison so very apt, as the only reaction both have when facing embarrassment and failure is to smear themselves all over with their proverbial shit and treat the fact they are the absolute nadir of white trash niggerbrain manlets as some kind of moral victory because of how much revulsion they inspire from everyone else.

 

[draggs]

Ya know I was pondering why I had spent yet another week without hearing about Bakhmut falling during my lunch break today, and it just hit me that russia's cope for being routed from Kherson is the fact that they stole a fucking racoon from one of the zoos there and were spinning this as a victory for over a month afterwards and parading it around for propaganda

A quick search later and it seems they are still fucking rolling it out for the cameras

Like... I have made the comparison between russia and our own Ethan Ralph many times before now, but this just exemplifies the sheer "YOU MAY HAVE HUMILIATED ME, KICKED THE SHIT OUT OF ME, AND MADE ME SHIDD AND FARD MYSELF IN PUBLIC, BUT IM STILL WINNING BECAUSE I TRULLD YEEW!" patheticness that makes this comparison so very apt, as the only reaction both have when facing embarrassment and failure is to smear themselves all over with their proverbial shit and treat the fact they are the absolute nadir of white trash niggerbrain manlets as some kind of moral victory because of how much revulsion they inspire from everyone else.

Red China went nuts with hilariously retarded propaganda over a box of mangoes the Pakistani Prime Minister gave Mao in 1968. A challenger has finally appeared in the form of Kherson Koon

Asiatics are fucking weird

 

[SBG]

Ya know I was pondering why I had spent yet another week without hearing about Bakhmut falling during my lunch break today, and it just hit me that russia's cope for being routed from Kherson is the fact that they stole a fucking racoon from one of the zoos there and were spinning this as a victory for over a month afterwards and parading it around for propaganda

A quick search later and it seems they are still fucking rolling it out for the cameras

Like... I have made the comparison between russia and our own Ethan Ralph many times before now, but this just exemplifies the sheer "YOU MAY HAVE HUMILIATED ME, KICKED THE SHIT OUT OF ME, AND MADE ME SHIDD AND FARD MYSELF IN PUBLIC, BUT IM STILL WINNING BECAUSE I TRULLD YEEW!" patheticness that makes this comparison so very apt, as the only reaction both have when facing embarrassment and failure is to smear themselves all over with their proverbial shit and treat the fact they are the absolute nadir of white trash niggerbrain manlets as some kind of moral victory because of how much revulsion they inspire from everyone else.

It's not hugely different from some of the silly propaganda pieces done for Ukraine. What I find striking is just how dreary their puff pieces are. Which I imagine comes from them not really having the money to supply their soldiers with enough to keep morale up.