Ukraine war mega thread

[helge]

a landlocked rump state.

In my opnion, Moldova has been landlocked too long and it seems fair if some ukranian Black Sea coastline, could be donated to those nice people.

In return, the Poles might be willing to give up a corridor from Lvov to the Baltics for the ukrainians.


Nothing should be off the table, when sanity takes over

[bsnub]

Nothing should be off the table, when sanity takes over

You are right, and soon the sanity will win and Russia will be ejected from Ukraine by force and clowns like you will tuck your faces into your coats and vanish into the shadows.

[sabang]

Russia will be ejected from Ukraine by force and clowns like you will tuck your faces into your coats

How long have you been saying that now, yawwwn. Long enough to be downright embarrassing anyway.

[bsnub]

KILLING FIELDS: Wagner PMC ‘recruited’ as many as 50,000 convicts from RU prisons & delivered them into combat in UKR. @Biz_Ukraine_Mag
posts this photo from Bakhmut; UKR artillery killed more than 60 of them as they unwisely crossed open terrain near the line of contact.

Cannon fodder...

[helge]

I'll be Bruce Welch then

[bsnub]

How long have you been saying that now, yawwwn. Long enough to be downright embarrassing anyway.

It has been happening for the last 7 months. What planet are you living on? Kyiv, Kharkiv, Kherson. On and on.

[helge]

Kinda miss the edit function here

^^ Looks nasty

[helge]

To be honest it does surprise me that the Ukraine, with all their fancy western weapons, hasn't been able to eradicate conscripts without training, boots and with rusty rifles, yet.

[bsnub]

BAKHMUT/1950 UTC 7 JAN/ Despite a unilateral ‘Christmas’ cease fire’ RU’s 6th Separate Cossack Motor Rifle Reg. & Wagner PMCs attacked UKR troops in the vicinity of the salt mine complex at Soledar. RU units have gained control of the urban area east of the rail right-of-way.

Russia has been trying and failing for months to take Bakhmut. A city of next to no strategic value. After all of these months of trying and literally thousands of dead, they have not even entered the city proper. Yet somehow Sabang and his drunk buffoon propagandist handlers celebrate for taking the small outskirts town of Soledar after months of trying. The reality...

[bsnub]

To be honest it does surprise me that the Ukraine, with all their fancy western weapons, hasn't been able to eradicate conscripts without training, boots and with rusty rifles, yet.

They are. There just happens to be a lot of them. They need to stop to eat and reload.

[sabang]

the small outskirts town of Soledar.

Small city, of 10,500. So Bakhmut is now surrounded on three sides. Just imagine the song and dance you would be kicking up, if Ukraine had such a victory. And of course, the place would have "enormous military significance".

At first, the Western media, relying on Kiev, claimed this now depopulated town was a “strategic” asset, just like Kherson City. For the UAF, Kherson turned out to be a liability rather than an asset and they have pretty much abandoned it, losing scores of men due to shelling and drone strikes from across the river. The Russians had previously occupied Kherson City with elite troops. These are now relocated to other areas where they are more useful. In other words, the Russian “retreat” was a victory. And UAF “success” was failure.

Now, with massive Ukrainian losses all along the contact line and inland as well, thanks to daily missile strikes, and the destruction of Ukrainian energy systems, Zelensky is downplaying Bakhmut’s significance. Not such as big deal, he now seems to be saying.

ed if Bakhmut is not important now — why sacrifice up to 1000 men a day for it? Col Andrew Milburn, no friend of the Russians and who was in “that horrible and miserable place” says:

Ukraine is a “corrupt, fucked-up society” run by “fucked-up people” Ukrainian soldiers “kill dudes who surrendered,” commit “atrocities”.

Col. Andrew Milburn

Zelensky is not even a good comedian. Bakhmut is his worst joke ever.

https://southfront.org/new-years-sitrep-the-end-of-the-tunnel/

[bsnub]

So Bakhmut is now surrounded on three sides.

But it is not.

Just imagine the song and dance you would be kicking up, if Ukraine had such a victory. And of course, the place would have "enormous military significance".

Wrong again. I for months have been scratching my head as to why Russia is obsessed with Bakhmut as have most military experts. It has little strategic value. Ukraine has much larger victories over the last six months and i will not bother to rattle off the list because it is long and distinguished. Victories that did have actual "enormous military significance".

That said, I am not sure why you are celebrating. On the west side of the salt mines is a river with a hillside that is controlled by Ukraine. To encircle Bakhmut the Russians will have to cross that river and attack the defensive positions in those hillsides if they want to take the road leading into the city.

Good luck with that.

[sabang]

Many of us have been wondering for months why little zboy is so obsessed with it, given the crushing losses of men and material the ukies have been incurring. As they have commented, the Russians are just treating it as a meat grinder- why waste men and materials on a frontal assault?

This is speculation, but I also wonder if the rather abrupt ukie retreat from Soladar had something to do with the Russian strike on the reinforcements gathered in that unpronounceable railway town? Thus, reinforcements did not arrive.

[misskit]

Wagner’s Desensitized Prison Fighters Keep Staggering Into Bakhmut Like This Is a Zombie Apocalypse

BAKHMUT, Ukraine—In the smoke-filled basement of a nondescript building in the city center of Bakhmut, eastern Ukraine, the men of the SKALA intelligence battalion are getting ready for a risky reconnaissance mission. One of them is burning a last cigarette in the dimly-lit hallway. Clad in a bulletproof vest and helmet, a bearded soldier wraps yellow tape around both his arms—a sign used by Ukrainian soldiers to identify each other on the battlefield. “Be careful out there, there are snipers in this area,” a portly officer warns him, rising from his office chair facing a flatscreen TV that intermittently broadcasts the live-feed of a drone flying over carnage in the city. “I can’t die, my mom won’t let me,” quips the soldier with a weary smile, checking his gear one last time before heading out.


The previously-muffled sound of outgoing artillery becomes sharper and louder as the door to the street swings open. They take off.

“The situation is pretty tense, but we’re controlling it,” says 23-year-old Alexander, clutching his American-made M4 assault rifle. “We’re holding.” With his buzzcut and boyish looks, the young man wouldn't look out of place in a trendy nightclub in downtown Kyiv. Yet, for weeks, Alexander and the grizzled soldiers of the SKALA battalion have been weathering the storm of daily Russian assaults and shelling on Bakhmut, hunkering down in the basement and doing daily sorties in the gray zone—the stretch of land between Ukrainian and Russian positions. Named after its founder and leader Iurii Skala, the SKALA battalion is tasked with conducting air and ground reconnaissance, as well as “cleaning operations”—a euphemism meaning assaulting enemy positions and taking out the Russian soldiers manning them.


“The drones are our eyes, out there,” says Alexander. Out there is Bakhmut—a salt-mining town of 70,000 inhabitants known for its sparkling white wine—that has been devastated by months of relentless Russian shelling, and gruesome trench warfare that has prompted comparisons with the Battle of the Somme or Passchendaele. The town is a major transport hub and sits on a strategic highway that runs through Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Yet, some—including one of Ukraine’s top generals—have argued that the town’s strategic value is dubious at best. However, it is one of the few frontline areas where the Russians are still on the advance, and the success-starved Russian high command is desperate to claim a victory, at any cost. Some have theorized that the capture of Bakhmut would constitute a personal prize for Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the infamous Wagner paramilitary group, whose mercenaries make up most of the Russian forces in the area. The U.S. believes Prigozhin has a financial motive: Wagner has often seized lucrative gold and diamond mines in areas where it operates in Africa, and Prigozhin may have set his sights on the salt and gypsum mines around Bakhmut.

According to Rem, a former car dealer from Dnipro now correcting artillery fire with the help of his drone, most of the soldiers sent in suicidal assaults on Ukrainian positions in Bakhmut are “zeks,” or convicts, recruited by Wagner to bolster the number of Russian forces in Ukraine. “Mobiks [conscripts] are usually scared, and they scatter when they get shelled. Those guys are not scared,” he said.


Of the Wagnerites, Rem says that they’re a much more effective fighting force than they’re usually given credit for: “They’re making progress, after all.” Desensitized to violence and with nothing left to lose, the prisoners—many of whom are violent criminals including murderers and rapists—are considered by Ukrainian soldiers a tougher enemy than the average army conscript.

The Russian tactic of sending prison recruits to attack Ukrainian positions—allowing them to identify defenses for the artillery to pummel afterwards—has proven effective, though slow and deadly. While no major breakthrough has occurred, they have been slowly eroding Ukrainian defenses, and creeping every closer to the eastern outskirts of the city.


This assessment was echoed in late December by Oleksandr Danylyuk, a former national security adviser for Ukraine currently working on military planning, who said of the prison conscripts: “They are—I cannot say fearless—but they have nothing to lose pretty much. So, they are attacking constantly and they’ve been killed in big quantities as well.”


Yet those incremental gains on the eastern approach to the city have come at a cost for Russian forces, as evidenced during Prigozhin’s well-publicized visit to the frontline over the New Year. In a series of videos released by Russian news agency RIA Novosti, the Wagner boss first visits a basement filled with the bodies of his fighters, many of them convicts, killed during the battle for Bakhmut, before complaining that “every house [in Bakhmut] has become a fortress”—and that it sometimes takes a week of fighting to take a single house.


According to a U.S. official quoted by The Guardian on Thursday, out of an initial force of nearly 50,000 mercenaries, Wagner has sustained more than 4,100 killed in action and 10,000 wounded, including over 1,000 killed between late November and early December near Bakhmut.

Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the city in late December underscored the symbolic value of “fortress Bakhmut”—and the sacrifices made to defend it. A Ukrainian officer serving in the East, who asked to remain anonymous, ventured an estimate of a dozen casualties a day.


Outside SKALA’s command center, the streets are almost empty, save for a couple of civilians hurrying along, carrying grocery bags or pulling carts filled with empty water bottles. The thundering sound of shelling echoes through empty avenues and deserted public squares, bouncing off the facades of destroyed residential buildings and closed-down shops. Here and there, the rocket of a GRAD multiple rocket launcher can be spotted planted upright in the asphalt.


A couple of blocks away from SKALA’s headquarters, sixty-something Hrihorii is busy cutting firewood on the car park of his residential building, seemingly oblivious to the outgoing artillery fire booming in the distance. Clothed in warm winter clothing and black plastic boots, the man says he has no intention to leave his apartment – despite the windows having been shattered the day prior to our visit. “I am waiting for the Ukrainian army to win,” he says with a smile. “I am not leaving.” Next to him, food is simmering in a pot placed over an open fire. The crater from last morning’s shelling is located a mere feet away from his improvised kitchen. Had he been cooking at the time of its landing, Hrihorii would have died.


Back at the command post, a group of a dozen soldiers are returning from a mission in the “gray zone.” The soldiers, drenched in sweat and amped up on adrenaline, hurry through the door, cursing loudly. Roman, a soldier from Dnipro, lights up a cigarette and introduces the other members of his crew, in broken English : Vansi, a heavyweight soldier who had served in Donbas in 2015, and “Bakhmut,” who now serves in the charred ruins of his hometown after sending the rest of his family to safety in Bulgaria. “I haven’t run like this in twenty years,” exclaims Roman, panting. According to him, 50 year-old Russian T-62 tanks were operating in the area. “We couldn’t see them, but we could hear them,” he says. The use of such obsolete models points to the growing deficit of equipment and vehicles among Russian forces, a problem compounded by the sanctions that have targeted the country’s military industry. Yet Ukrainian soldiers say the Russians shouldn’t be underestimated. “It’s still very loud out there, the fight is not over,” says Roman, putting out his cigarette.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/wagner...lypse?ref=home

[sabang]

Ukrainian losses are far more than Russian. You don't have to be pro-Russian to know this, just pro truth.

[pickel]

Ukrainian losses are far more than Russian. You don't have to be pro-Russian to know this, just pro truth.

Considering you continually get caught out posting "truth" from proven liars, I'll wisely disagree with you. To be fair, I think overall the casualties are probably similar, not greater. But not in Bakhmut. That is Prigozhins own macabre theatre of death for convicts rolling the dice on freedom.

[misskit]

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, January 7, 2023
Jan 7, 2023 - Press ISW


Recent Russian gains in Soledar do not portend an imminent encirclement of Bakhmut, contrary to claims made by Russian sources. Even at the most generous interpretation of Russian milblogger narratives, which claim that Russian forces are fighting on the outskirts of Razdolivka (about 6km northwest of Soledar), Russian forces are still far from being within striking distance of an operational encirclement of Bakhmut. In order to effectively cut Ukrainian ground lines of communication (GLOCs) into Bakhmut, Russian forces would have to establish control of the T0513 Siversk-Bakhmut highway (currently 7km west of the furthest point of confirmed Russian advances in the Soledar area) and reach the E40 Slovyansk-Bakhmut highway (13km from the furthest point of confirmed Russian advance in the Soledar area) at least. Considering that the recent rate of gains in this area has been on the order of a few hundred meters a day, at most, it is highly unlikely that Russian forces will be successful in cohering a mechanized push towards these GLOCs and move towards encircling Bakhmut. Ukrainian forces in Bakhmut would still have GLOCs available even if the Russians cut the E40, moreover, making the entire discussion of an encirclement at this point bizarre.

Institute for the Study of War

[harrybarracuda]

making the entire discussion of an encirclement at this point bizarre.

Which won't stop sabang droning on about it as if it is a done deal.

[bsnub]

Ukrainian losses are far more than Russian. You don't have to be pro-Russian to know this, just pro truth.

You really are a fucking full stop clown. The Ukrainians are far better equipped, trained and have more experience at this point of the war. The reason why, you ask? Because they take FAR fewer casualties than the Russians. Their commanders care about their men, unlike the Russians who use their troops as cannon fodder.

You are just spewing more fucking complete horseshit as always. Bozo the fucking clown...

[bsnub]

[sabang]

bsnub is just plain real dumb.

[HuangLao]

bsnub is just plain real dumb.

Dumbed down, actually.
Like too many.
A sad state.

[harrybarracuda]

Jeff *really* wants a spot on the wanketeers first team, doesn't he?
Talk about trying hard.

[bsnub]

Jeff *really* wants a spot on the wanketeers first team, doesn't he?
Talk about trying hard.

They are all utterly pathetic.

[sabang]

Oh yawn. Atalayar,com is a French/ Spanish news site-
Atalayar - Las claves del mundo en tus manos
It has nothing to do with the Kremlin, or 'Russian propaganda'. Isn't it about time that you boneheads realised that there is media outside of the diminishing anglosphere? What squealing little baies.

The journalist, Maria Senovilla, is a Russian propagandist? You fools-

Maria Senovilla: "In Kherson I heard the testimony of a mayoress who was tortured for 16 days because she did not want to collaborate with the Russians" | Atalayar - Las claves del mundo en tus manos
Maria Senovilla: "Bakhmut is the blackest point of the Ukrainian war. Up to 400 Ukrainian soldiers a day are being killed" | Atalayar - Las claves del mundo en tus manos

Grow up, little bitches.