Here we go again-Ukraine once again

[Dargo]

A CNN team near Soledar witnessed Ukraine forces ferrying troops out on Friday afternoon, in what appeared to be an organized pullback from the town. Said withdrawal orderly with "no sense of panic." https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-...a4b066faaf144b

Note: these two cities are not important, this battle is used by Ukraine to prepare for other coming actions and this battle has cost the Russians a lot you can say they do not care for lives, but they do fear the whole situation appointing the main general of the Russian army to the war theater is a sign they have no clue to get out of this situation.

[Dargo]

Originally Posted by Skybird

Ukraine is running out of spare parts for certain Russian-made equipmentm Dargo. Same for ammo. THAT is a problem for sure. And that is why they want to accelerate the transition to Western-made weapons and platforms. They need to.



Anyway: why tnaks are sitll relevant in modern warfare is described by Die Welt. Myself, I too said before the war that tanks may be obsolete in the wake of drones and ATGMs - but who am I to question the Ukrainians' experience. I stand corrected.
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Some experts believe that tanks are too vulnerable for today's wars. But there is much to suggest that the German Leopard 2 in particular could be used to recapture Ukrainian territory. Kiev's troops know exactly why they continue to ask Berlin for supplies.

In recent days, the SPD's foreign policy spokesman has caused some astonishment among experts. For example, Nils Schmid had told the BBC that the German government's refusal to supply Leopard 2 battle tanks to Ukraine was because they could "change the dynamics on the battlefield." Ukraine expert Franziska Davies commented on the statement on Twitter with a visibly unnerved, "That's what the hell it's all about!"

Others wondered, for the umpteenth time, whether Germany is really serious about Ukraine winning this battle for its own territory against the aggressor Russia. Thus, the strange distinctions between offensive and defensive weapons keep popping up in the German debate, just as if Ukraine did not need offensive weapons to regain lost territory.
And that is ultimately what the Leopard 2 debate is about. Ukraine has been very good at defensive combat, which usually demands more casualties from the attackers than from the defenders when they operate out of well-fortified positions. Now, however, the goal is to retake territory occupied by Russia, and to do so, the Ukrainians will also need heavy battle tanks to penetrate the now well-fortified Russian positions.

In the Kharkiv area, they still managed to break through with mechanized units (equipped with military vehicles, note) in early September because they took the thinned-out Russian units there by surprise, so that they managed to make significant gains in terrain even with their limited offensive assets.

However, the Russians will not be so easily overwhelmed in the future. For example, the Russian withdrawal from Kherson from the west bank of the Dnipro has led to a frontline straightening that has allowed Russia to better fortify the front - often with multiple defensive lines in succession - and to occupy it with the help of newly mobilized recruits.

To break through these without suffering catastrophic losses themselves, the Ukrainians need, among other things, more Western-made heavy battle tanks. Because they are clearly superior in armor and firing precision to the Soviet- and Russian-produced models that both sides have been using so far. And because the Ukrainians are also slowly running out of spare parts for their old tanks after more than ten months of extreme use.

The Leopard is the most suitable replacement because it is available in Europe in considerable numbers, because it consumes less fuel than the American Abrams and because it is also considered to be less maintenance-intensive, especially since the supply and spare parts logistics from Europe would be relatively easy to organize. With its 120-millimeter gun, the current version of the Leopard 2 has considerable penetrating power and is capable of reliably destroying intended targets, even when traveling at high speed in a bumpy environment.

But in light of modern, digitized drone warfare, are heavy battle tanks even relevant today? In the West, heavy battle tanks have long been out of fashion because they seemed too cumbersome for the era of counterterrorism that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

And the early experience of Russia's war against Ukraine also led to a fierce debate among experts about whether tanks had not now become too vulnerable to, say, small, shoulder-launched anti-tank weapons, with which the Ukrainians inflicted heavy losses on Russian formations.

"Russia's bungled invasion and the remarkable strength of the Ukrainian defensive struggle have highlighted the diminishing penetrating power of heavy and expensive military units challenged by more agile, easier-to-operate and crucially cheaper systems," wrote military thinker Phillips O'Brien of Scotland's University of St. Andrews in The Atlantic, for example. "Tanks, warplanes and warships will be relegated to irrelevance and replaced by new tools of conflict."

At first glance, the numbers seem to bear that out. According to Ukrainian figures, Russia has lost 3100 tanks in this war - significantly more than the larger European NATO countries of Poland, Germany, France, Britain, Spain and Italy combined even have in service.

Researchers from the open-source platform Oryx were able to verify at least more than 1,600 Russian tanks destroyed, abandoned or captured by Ukraine when evaluating images from social media, for example, while 450 tanks lost on the Ukrainian side could be identified.

However, many military experts vehemently disagree with the impression that battle tanks are therefore obsolete in modern land warfare. Robert Lee, for example, who has intensively observed and documented the Ukraine war from the beginning, attributes the high Russian tank losses - especially in the early stages of the war - to several factors.

"Three key factors explain Russian tank losses: a lack of advance warning and preparation, poor strategy that exacerbated supply problems, and too little infantry to protect the tanks," Lee writes in a study on the security website War on the Rocks. Often, for example, it was problems with supplies of spare parts, fuel or ammunition that led to an unusually high number of tanks abandoned by their Russian crews and only then destroyed by Ukrainian units, he said.

"If you're going to conduct offensive operations against fortified defenses, you have to mass a lot of combat power, and tanks are still the most likely to survive that," Lee says. "Without tanks, a military fighting a major land war would have to rely on armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles to fill the same role, resulting in a greater number of catastrophic failures and higher loss of life."

Lee also points out that the Ukrainians are now preeminent experts in what is actually needed for modern land warfare. "The Ukrainians have more experience with conventional warfare than any of our countries, and they continue to deploy tanks and ask for more," Lee said. "That's a pretty good indicator that main battle tanks are still relevant."
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I think same goes for Russia they are low on usable material, tanks are and will be the fist of an army to get tanks to Ukraine the US only need to send Abrams (they do not really need to send them only say they will) to force Germany to send the leopards maybe next meeting in Rammstein has any result.

[Rockstar]

Originally Posted by Dargo

…. appointing the main general of the Russian army to the war theater is a sign they have no clue to get out of this situation.

I think appointing Gerasimov to replace Surovikin had little to do with ol’ Valery’s military prowess. It was a political move of Putin ‘circling the wagons’. Putin’s inner circle which includes Gerasimov see Surovikin as a threat and don’t trust him to remain loyal.

[Dargo]

Originally Posted by Rockstar

I think appointing Gerasimov to replace Surovikin had little to do with military prowess. It was a political move of Putin ‘circling the wagons’. Putin’s inner circle which includes Gerasimov doesn’t trust Surovikin to remain loyal.

Yes that to, Gerasimov is loyal to Putin where Surovikin is loyal to the army Russian leaders always distrusted the army afraid of a coup.

[mapuc]

Skybird wrote

"As the saying goes: In war, amateurs focus on tactics, professionals focus on logistics."

I do not disagree here-However a officer has to think in tactical terms to:

1. Defend its own logistic and the roads/tracks from factory/hub to the front.
2. Destroy the enemies logistic and they road/tracks and factory/Hub.

Markus

[Dargo]

With Soledar under siege, Ukrainian and Russian troops are stretched, facing shortages of reserves, equipment and ammunition. And the weather could quickly turn warmer. Temperatures in eastern Ukraine have been well below freezing in recent days, hardening the ground and opening a window for potential winter offensives by both sides.

But such pushes may not come, either now or during a more sustained cold spell. Military analysts within and outside Ukraine say that while the shift from muddy to frozen terrain is important in enabling the use of wheeled combat and support vehicles, it’s just one of many factors commanders would consider before risking a major new assault. More important are the availability of reserves, equipment and ammunition, and the need to create weak spots to exploit in enemy lines. Both sides are being stretched by slow, but resource-sapping offensives already underway. Russian forces are trying to take Bakhmut and nearby Soledar, while Ukrainian troops are attacking Kreminna and Svatove; all are small-to-mid-sized towns in the eastern Donbas region that Russia claims to have annexed, but only partially occupies.

“The situation around Soledar and Bakhmut is forcing our command to use more reserves in this direction, so it may be that in the close future there won’t be enough left to conduct a big offensive in the south, from Zaporizhzhia, or anywhere else,” said Igor Levchenko, head of strategic modeling at New Geopolitics, a Kyiv-based think tank.

How the conflict evolves over the coming months is likely to be determined less by changes in weather than by the relative success each side has in wearing down the other’s forces and reconstituting their own by spring, Levchenko said. The risk for Russia, according to a European defense official, is that in Bakhmut it makes only a minor tactical gain at the cost of huge personnel losses. A similar mistake in the summer left Russian forces exhausted and over stretched, opening the door for Ukraine to launch successful counter offensives in the fall. Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, said on TV on Tuesday that Soledar, 10 km (6 miles) from the outskirts of Bakhmut, was close to being taken, though “at a very high price.” Claims later in the day from the Wagner mercenary group to be in control of all but a pocket in the center of Soledar could not be verified.

Though poorly trained, recently mobilized troops have shored up defenses around Kreminna and Svatove, slowing Ukraine’s advance. Taking Svatove would allow Ukraine to cut a key Russian logistics route for operations in the Donbas. Newly announced supplies of armored fighting vehicles from the US, Germany and France, as well as growing signs that NATO standard tanks could follow, would better equip Ukraine for a fresh offensive. Officials in Kyiv, meanwhile, have expressed concern over the possibility of a renewed Russian attack from Belarus, just 150 km north of Ukraine’s capital. Ukraine’s general staff have been “masters of operational design” to date and will spend weeks or months setting conditions for the next, decisive phase of the campaign, said Ben Hodges, a former US Lieutenant General and commander of the US Army in Europe, in emailed comments from Tbilisi, Georgia.

While Russia may aim to use mobilized recruits to prolong the war until support for Ukraine from its allies crumbles, “I don’t see that happening in 2023,” Hodges said. “Rather I see Ukraine liberating Crimea by the end of August.” Russia’s President Vladimir Putin annexed the Crimean peninsula in 2014, turning it since into a support base for his forces in the rest of occupied Ukraine. Some military analysts have expressed skepticism at Ukraine’s capacity to retake it. While falling temperatures have been hardening the ground in the east since Jan. 6, at -8 to -14 degrees Centigrade they’ve also been too low for soldiers to fight effectively while spending days away from shelter, as any offensive breakthrough would require. “The human factor is far more important than the vehicles they can move” in winter, said Ed Arnold, a former British infantry officer now at the Royal United Services Institute, a London think tank. In freezing weather, morale, mobility and logistics all can get hammered, he said. Frozen batteries for drones and radio sets have to be recharged twice as often, while low visibility can render unusable the surveillance drones needed for artillery to target defenses. With both sides running low on artillery shells, the need for precision offered by drones has already at times silenced guns along the front. “What we call the ‘find’ aspect you need for any operation just becomes much more difficult,” said Arnold. “Even foot patrols that can normally cover 15-20 km in a day can suddenly only cover five, because they’re burning more calories, need to carry more food and just can’t do as much in the difficult conditions.”

Very low temperatures also can favor defensive troops that enjoy effective logistics, according to Arnold, enabling them to maintain warmth and stockpile food at frontline positions for as many as 20 days. Those are luxuries unavailable to an advancing force, which has to be resupplied in real time by trucks that use the same makeshift tracks repeatedly, quickly degrading them. The cold also can force errors, such as Russia’s decision to concentrate hundreds of troops in the relative warmth and comfort of a dormitory in Makiivka, within range of Ukraine’s HIMARS rockets. That saw 89 killed in a New Year’s attack, according to Russia’s defense ministry, many more according to Ukraine.

Most worrying to military planners, according to Arnold, is that a freeze can suddenly turn to thaw, leaving offensive troops exposed and unsupplied as wheeled support vehicles again become stuck in Ukraine’s notoriously glutinous mud. Tracked vehicles, such as tanks, can still operate, but not if fuel tankers can no longer reach them. Soldiers, similarly, would then be left without food, and artillery without ammunition or the ability to quickly move position after firing, so as to evade counter-battery fire. Temperatures in the east are forecast to rise above freezing again as soon as next week.

“The Ukrainians have a much better option,” said Arnold. “I would say that with what they already have and everything the West is giving them, they have one chance at a big push — so don’t go early.” The Bakhmut fighting is likely to remain intense regardless of weather, because Russian commanders have shifted tactics, relying on foot soldiers to punch through defenses, rather than the massive artillery barges followed by mechanized assaults that slugged their way through Ukrainian lines in the Donbas last summer. While Bakhmut has relatively small strategic significance, Russian commanders appear determined to take it regardless of cost, while Ukraine’s Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces Valeriy Zaluzhnyi said in a December interview with The Economist that his nation’s top priority was to cede no more territory. “It is ten to 15 times harder to liberate it than not to surrender it,” he said. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...dget#xj4y7vzkg

[Dargo]

Local beavers are helping Ukraine defend itself from a potential new front in Russia's invasion, Reuters reported on Thursday. The animals are unwittingly helping Kyiv by building dams that keep the ground marshy and impassable, a military spokesman told the agency. This helps Ukraine by making it less likely that an attack could come via Belarus, which borders Ukraine not far north of the capital Kyiv. Ukrainian officials had warned that Russia may wage an offensive through its ally Belarus into a region of Ukraine called Volyn.

Defense forces there, however, have been reassured by conditions on the ground, left impassable by miles of burst river banks, thick mud, and waterlogged fields. The swampy conditions have given Ukrainians an advantage, and time to prepare: a local military unit called the Volyn territorial defense has been conducting daily training exercises in the area, according to Reuters.

Its spokesman, Serhiy Khominskyi, praised the beavers, which he told Reuters were more working unimpeded, unlike in other years. "When [the beavers] build their dams normally people destroy them, but they didn't this year because of the war, so now there is water everywhere," he said. https://www.businessinsider.com/ukra...true&r=US&IR=T

[Dargo]

Soledar:
Ukrainian artillery teams continue to target exposed Russian units in Soledar.

In the area constant artillery battles continue over the town.

Ukrainian special operations foiled an attempt of Russian forces to bypass defences near the town and forced them to retreat. https://twitter.com/WarMonitor3/stat...29301463760896

What Wagner doing?

[mapuc]

^ Eating bullets and shells and other explosive stuff en mass

Markus

[Dargo]

Originally Posted by mapuc

^ Eating bullets and shells and other explosive stuff en mass

Markus

But I have a big win today, why Ukraine so mad?

[mapuc]

Originally Posted by Dargo

But I have a big win today, why Ukraine so mad?

Remember a status from Darth Putin

Our troops is expert in destroying HIMARS rockets

Markus

[Dargo]

Originally Posted by mapuc

Remember a status from Darth Putin

Our troops is expert in destroying HIMARS rockets

Markus

They sure boss, they already destroyed several M-2 Bradley's

[Jimbuna]

[Jimbuna]

[Jimbuna]