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Russian Invasion of Ukraine - tactics and logistics

Ukkarime has need into new comytolled awas. So far no nukes.

Like a cartoon. Scratah s line in the dirt and say I dare you to cross this line. Line gets crossed, draw a new line, ok I dare to cross THIS line!.

From reporting Putin never actuary;y defined where the boundary of New Russia is.
 
I looked in the linked article and didn't see it. My apologies, and thanks for posting it here.
 
What a $100,000 Russian drone is made of

The Ukrainians shot a video of the “unpacking” of one of the Orlans they captured. That’s how the world found out that the drone, which costs around $100,000 apiece, has a Canon camera attached by sticky tape instead of special imaging equipment, and an ordinary plastic bottle instead of a fuel tank.

Watch the video.

View attachment 40584

https://theins.ru/en/politics/255724
I think Orlan-10 is a good tool for the job. We can make fun of the fact that it's jerry-rigged with duct tape and plastic bottles, but it's a feature, not a bug: easy to fix on the field and improvise if electronics aren't available. That drone is intended for one purpose, and it's to spot for artillery, and it does that job very well. Russia has or at least had thousands of them, so they can have multiple drones flying at the same time and because they're dirt cheap, it's not a huge loss if Ukraine shoots a few of them down. They'll just launch another. (Although I've seen reports that Russian artillery crews are running out of them in some places, and forced to use commercial DJI Mavic quad copters.)

$100k cost is probably what Russia used to sell these for, not the manufacturing cost.

Orlan-10 is one of the most effective weapons of this war and I bet there are many militaries in the world that are either learning how to shoot them down, or to make their own equivalents.
 
Russia’s draft is targeting Crimean Tatars and other marginalized groups, according to activists. - The New York Times
In the Soviet Union, they were stigmatized as disloyal and driven into a decades-long exile far from their native land.

In an eerie echo of that exodus, many Crimean Tatar men are now fleeing to Kazakhstan to escape conscription in Russia’s hastily called draft to reinforce its army in Ukraine, which Tatar activists see as a continuation of Moscow’s long history of repressive policies.

In one region on the Crimean Peninsula — the Tatars’ homeland and part of Ukraine that Russia has occupied for the past eight years — all but two of 48 people who received draft notices were ethnic Tatars, according to the Ukraine-based Crimean Tatar Resource Center, a rights group.

Elsewhere on the peninsula, Russia called up Tatars in numbers far disproportionate to their share of the population, Ukrainian officials said. Dozens of Tatars sought legal help to avoid the draft.

“When we analyze the mobilization, we clearly see this is a continuation of the Crimean Tatar genocide,” Eskender Bariyev, the director of the resource center, said in an interview. “It’s a violation of Indigenous rights,” he said, adding: “There are already too few of us.”

‘A kind of murder’: Putin’s draft targets Crimea’s Tatars – POLITICO - "Members of Muslim minority community fear that Moscow sees mobilization as way to get them killed on the front lines."
Since Russia’s so-called partial mobilization, announced after Russian forces suffered a heavy defeat in northeastern Ukraine, Ukrainian monitoring groups say several thousand draft notices have been distributed in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula that Russia occupied and annexed from Ukraine in 2014. At least 1,500 draft notices have been handed out in settlements inhabited primarily by Crimean Tatars, a Turkic Muslim minority who opposed Russian annexation and make up about 13 percent of Crimea’s population of 2 million.

The new draftees will join thousands of Ukrainians who have already been called up to fight from Russian-occupied Donetsk and Luhansk in east Ukraine.
 
With the delivery of the turbine, we called [Vladimir] Putin’s bluff. He cannot use this pretext anymore and cite technical reasons for declining gas deliveries. It is a well-known playbook by now: Russia wanted to stop gas deliveries and blame our sanctions regime for the result. We are seeing this in several fields. Russia is also blocking Ukrainian grain exports and blames Ukraine and the sanctions for the chaos in food markets worldwide.
 
. At least 1,500 draft notices have been handed out in settlements inhabited primarily by Crimean Tatars, a Turkic Muslim minority who opposed Russian annexation and make up about 13 percent of Crimea’s population of 2 million.
Doesn’t sound like a very intense genocidal “targeting” campaign. 1500 notices sent to ~250k Crimean Tatars … assuming they all respond, are all accepted and all killed, killing 0.6% of them isn’t going to drive them to extinction.
 
Some reports I've read have the Russians doing a lot of shelling and making missile strikes on targets behind the front lines, on infrastructure. They seem to be imitating the Ukrainian tactic of destroying targets behind the front lines to disrupt supply and communication. The problem is they are not hitting military targets. Are they that inept, do they just not have the right intel, are they just launching ordnance and munitions thinking that eventually everything downrange is going to be dead? It's hard to believe they are that incompetent but observations seem to indicate just that. They are still fighting like they did in WW2, bombard, bombard, bombard. If the Ukraine military had been as capable eight months ago as it is today the Ruskis would have had their asses handed to them.
I suspect it's that they are ordered to hit the logistics targets but are unable to actually do so so they hit whatever and claim it's logistics. So much of what we are seeing out of Russia looks like underlings ordered to do things they can't and pretending they're actually doing so.
 
Ukraine is too tight with the information, and rightly so. Loose lips and all. Russia is hitting targets they know exist: mostly civilian infrastructure. Ukraine, I assume is getting intel from western sources and pinpointing it with their drones. What the US, Brits might have high in the sky looking down, I do not know.
I did read in this latest weapons package is 500 M982 Excalibur artillery shells. Looks like something good for cleaning up around cities or maybe a nuclear plant. Friendlies can be as close as 75 meters to target.
Excalibur is pretty much the tube equivalent of HIMARS.
 
what we are seeing out of Russia looks like underlings ordered to do things they can't and pretending they're actually doing so.
That makes a lot of sense. Friends would tell me that when the Berlin Wall came down and they entered East Berlin, the soldiers were living in dilapidated quarters. Also they were never allowed to mingle with the general public. This makes sense if you don't want your subordinates to learn new things or ever take the initiative. Everything Russian military is top down and in the west soldiers are taught to take the initiative to accomplish their mission, even down to the lowliest boot.
 
The Ukrainian armed forces were initially like the Soviet one, but after being defeated by the Russians when Russia conquered part of the Donbas, Ukraine's military leaders decided to reform their armed forces to be more like Western ones. They very evidently succeeded.
 
The Ukrainian armed forces were initially like the Soviet one, but after being defeated by the Russians when Russia conquered part of the Donbas, Ukraine's military leaders decided to reform their armed forces to be more like Western ones. They very evidently succeeded.
Yes. And Putin was a KGB agent in East Germany. I can imagine the kind of existence he had. No wonder he and so much of Putinstan is so fucked up in this sense.
 
As expected, the cowardly Russians respond to the attack on the strategically important Kerch bridge with attacks on civilians in cities across Ukraine during rush hour traffic. Which of course changes nothing on the battlefield. Unless hardening the resolve of Ukrainians and the west was the goal.
In other news, in an effort to deflect the blame for the piss-poor performance of the Russian military, Putin does more shuffling of leadership positions. It's like watching the Cleveland Browns go through quarterbacks. Army General Sergei Surovikin is now in charge of the entire "special military operation". Surovikin has a reputation of being tough and direct on the battlefield and with his subordinates. He's been in charge of southern operations in Ukraine since July so, big deal. He can be as tough as he wants. It's not going to change the army he has got and the army he is fighting. And Putin is just trading out one brutal leader for another. It's all just to deflect blame away from Putin. As Russia continues to lose the war, Russia's nationalistic milbloggers will finally look to Putin as the problem or go silent. Putin is just buying himself time. Funds, equipment, the quality of personnel are all on the wane. Meanwhile, Ukrainian personnel have proper military training, Biden with a bucketful of dollars, and a smorgasbord of weapons at his disposal.
Are you ready for your winter of discontent, Vlad?
 
Putin is starting to take off the gloves. Will need to suggest most of Ukraine are Nazis now to justify these attacks.

article said:
“In the event of continued Ukrainian acts of terrorism on Russian territory, our response will be harsh and in terms of its scale will correspond to the level of threats,” Putin said.
Yes... in response to an attack on a bridge that was infrastructure, Russia attacked and killed Ukrainians.
 
Putin is starting to take off the gloves. Will need to suggest most of Ukraine are Nazis now to justify these attacks.

article said:
“In the event of continued Ukrainian acts of terrorism on Russian territory, our response will be harsh and in terms of its scale will correspond to the level of threats,” Putin said.
Yes... in response to an attack on a bridge that was infrastructure, Russia attacked and killed Ukrainians.
Hey now, Ukraine could have killed hundreds* of civilians with that bridge attack.

*assuming you are counting in base 2
 
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