Ukraine war mega thread

[OhOh]

Hold on to your drink of choice, what has happened?

The Observer US foreign policy

The Donald and the Kremlin Don: how Trump’s toxic legacy helps Putin

Simon Tisdall


The Donald and the Kremlin Don: how Trump’s toxic legacy helps Putin | Simon Tisdall | The Guardian

I'll let you read the Guardians, "foreign affairs commentator's", reasoning.

It was not THE LORD's, fault,

It was not the farting POTU's, fault.

It was the ex-POTUS Trumps fault.

Will NaGastan place sanctions on the ex-POTUS Trump? Has he any assets they can freeze?

Can we all blame Trump now?

[David48atTD]

Sadly, Ukraine is now having its arse kicked.

Play with the propaganda anyway you want but the facts stand.

I wouldn't define it as an arse kicking, but agreed, there has been a momentum shift as Russian troops slowly grind forward.

---

The Russians may be learning from the mistakes of the Ukraine war. But are they adapting fast enough?

This week, events in Ukraine continued to demonstrate the fluid nature of war. After their successes in the Battle of Kyiv, and the Battle of Kharkiv, the Ukrainians ceded territory in the east. It is indicative of the Russian military's determination to continue its Ukrainian campaign.

The Russians have made steady, if slow, progress in the conduct of their eastern offensive in the Donbas. These tactical advances are probably part of a wider Russian operational design to envelop the territory that forms the last parts of Luhansk under Ukrainian control.

But the Russian successes in the east are also indicators of another more important trend in this war: the Russians are starting to learn from their earlier failures.


Mick Ryan is a strategist and recently retired Australian Army major general. He served in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan, and as a strategist on the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff. His first book, War Transformed, is about 21st century warfare

HERE

[bsnub]

adly, Ukraine is now having its arse kicked.

Not sure what rubbish you are reading, but Ukraine has launched several counter-offensives and has pushed the Russians back on several fronts. The war is in a state of tit-for-tat right now. It is a meat grinder for Russia...

Mounting casualties among Russian junior officers will likely further degrade Russian capabilities and lead to further morale breakdowns. The UK Ministry of Defense stated on May 30 that Russian forces have suffered devastating losses amongst mid and junior ranking officers. The UK MoD reported that battalion and brigade level officers continue to deploy forwards and into harm's way—rather than commanding from rear areas and delegating to lower-ranking officers—due to senior Russian officers holding them to an “uncompromising level of responsibility” for their units.[1] The British Defense Ministry further reported that junior officers are in charge of low-level tactical operations due to a lack of professionalism and modernization within the Russian Armed Forces and that the continued losses of these junior officers will complicate command and control efforts, particularly in Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs) cobbled together from the survivors of multiple other units.[2] ISW previously assessed that continued demoralization and poor command and control among Russian forces could present Ukrainian forces opportunities to conduct prudent counteroffensives, particularly as the Russian military continues to pour resources into the battle of Severodonetsk at the cost of other lines of effort.

Dissent at home...

Domestic dissent within Russian military circles, claiming that the Kremlin is not doing enough to win the war, continues to grow. Former Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Igor Girkin (also known as Strelkov) condemned Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s statements about the priority of the “special operation” in Ukraine being the liberation of the Donbas.[3] Girkin claimed that the Kremlin has forgone the ideological underpinnings of the conflict by focusing the conflict on the Donbas, rather than the entirety of Ukraine. Girkin complained that Kremlin officials are no longer questioning the legitimacy of the existence of Ukraine and that the concepts of “denazification” and “demilitarization” have been forgotten. Girkin accused the Kremlin of appeasement policies and stated that the threat of defeat continues to grow.

Girkin’s dissent is emblematic of continued shifts within circles of Russian military enthusiasts and ex-servicemen. As ISW has previously reported, the Kremlin has repeatedly revised its objectives for the war in Ukraine downwards due to battlefield failures. The Kremlin is increasingly facing discontent not from Russians opposed to the war as a whole, but military and nationalist figures angry at Russian losses and frustrated with shifting Kremlin framing of the war. Russian officials are increasingly unable to employ the same ideological justifications for the invasion in the face of clear setbacks, and a lack of concrete military gains within Ukraine will continue to foment domestic dissatisfaction with the war.

Key Takeaways

• Russian forces continued to incrementally capture areas of Severodonetsk but have not yet fully encircled the city.
• Russian forces focused on regrouping near Izyum to renew offensives towards Slovyansk and Barvinkove and conducted only minor, unsuccessful, attacks. Russian forces are making incremental advances towards Slovyansk and seek to assault the city itself in the coming weeks, but are unlikely to achieve decisive gains.
• Russian forces in Kharkiv continue to focus efforts on preventing a Ukrainian counteroffensive from reaching the international border between Kharkiv and Belgorod, and Ukrainian forces have not conducted any significant operations in the area in recent days.
• The limited Ukrainian counterattack in northern Kherson Oblast did not take any further ground in the last 48 hours but has disrupted Russian operations. Russian forces launched several unsuccessful attacks against the Ukrainian bridgehead on the east bank of the Inhulets River.
• Mounting casualties among Russian junior officers will further degrade Russian morale and command and control capabilities.

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 30 | Institute for the Study of War

[bsnub]

This video may have a sensational headline, but he uses excellent topographical maps to explain why Russians have made gains in some areas and lost ground in others. He also explains why some retreats made by the Ukrainians have been done for tactical reasons to be able to defend from the high ground. Excellent video and worth the watch...

[harrybarracuda]

The Russians have all but secured the Luhansk region. It has been slow progress but they are steadily achieving their goal of securing the whole of the Donbas.

I don't know if the Ukraine army retreated from Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, but they needed to if they don't want to be surrounded.

Yes I'm aware of that but we're still talking about what they have been trying to take for four years.

[harrybarracuda]

Who thinks Scotland will roll over and let Ukraine win? *

When Scotland walk out at Hampden on Wednesday night, it may feel like the whole world is supporting their rivals.


Just three months after the Russian invasion, they will be playing Ukraine for the chance of a place in the World Cup in Qatar.

(* would be a great excuse)

[sabang]

India, China, Pakistan etc are grateful. Russia don't care, it has turned it's back on Europe and announced it. Pay in rubles, or fvck off. Well done guys.

[harrybarracuda]

India, China, Pakistan etc are grateful. Russia don't care, it has turned it's back on Europe and announced it. Pay in rubles, or fvck off. Well done guys.

You forgot to add a "*sob*" at the end.

[sabang]

Thanks for the History lesson.

[sabang]

** Sob **

[bsnub]

Thanks for the History lesson.

You could always benefit from a schooling, since you damn sure are no good at predicting whether or not a war is going to start.

[bsnub]

The Russian military, beaten down and demoralized after three months of war, is making the same mistakes in its campaign to capture a swath of eastern Ukraine that forced it to abandon its push to take the entire country, senior American officials say.While Russian troops are capturing territory, a Pentagon official said that their “plodding and incremental” pace was wearing them down, and that the military’s overall fighting strength had been diminished by about 20 percent. And since the war started, Russia has lost 1,000 tanks, a senior Pentagon official said last week.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia appointed a new commander, Gen. Aleksandr V. Dvornikov, in April in what was widely viewed as an acknowledgment that the initial Russian war plan was failing.

Soon after his arrival, General Dvornikov tried to get disjointed air and land units to coordinate their attacks, American officials said. But he has not been seen in the past two weeks, leading some officials to speculate as to whether he remains in charge of the war effort.

Russian pilots also continue to demonstrate the same risk-averse behavior they did in the early weeks of the war: darting across the border to launch strikes and then quickly returning to Russian territory, instead of staying in Ukrainian air space to deny access to their foes. The result is that Russia still has not established any kind of air superiority, officials said.

The Russian military has made some progress in the east, where concentrated firepower and shortened supply lines have helped its forces fight intense battles in recent days. After three bloody months, Russia finally took Mariupol in mid-May, potentially creating a land bridge from the Russian-controlled Crimean Peninsula to the south.

As Russia struggles to move forward, Ukraine has also suffered setbacks. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine recently said that as many as 100 Ukrainian servicemen might be dying every day in the fighting. And on Tuesday, Russian troops advanced toward the center of Sievierodonetsk, a city that has become a central focus for the military since it shifted its attention to the east.

But some of the areas that Russian forces managed to seize have been quickly contested again, and sometimes retaken, by Ukrainian troops.

Consider Kharkiv. Russia spent six weeks bombarding the eastern city, once home to 1.5 million people, as troops encircled it.

But by May 13, control of the city had flipped again. “The Russians took Kharkiv for a short period of time; the Ukrainians counterattacked and took Kharkiv back,” Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said at a news conference at the Pentagon last week. “We’ve seen them really proceed at a very slow and unsuccessful pace on the battlefield.”

Ukraine is now pushing Russian troops north and east from Kharkiv, “in some cases all the way back to Russia,” said retired Gen. Philip Breedlove, the former supreme allied commander for Europe. “So now Ukrainians are threatening to cut off Russian lines of supply and pushing their forces to the rear.”

Cutting off Russian supply lines east of Kharkiv would put Russian troops in the same situation they were in after their advance on Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, at the beginning of the war, officials said. Ukrainian units carrying shoulder-fired Javelin antitank missiles picked off Russian soldiers as miles-long Russian convoys near Kyiv stopped moving forward. The invasion stalled, and thousands of Russian troops were killed or injured. Russia then refocused its mission on the east.

In the early weeks of the war, Russia ran its military campaign out of Moscow, with no central war commander on the ground to call the shots, American and other Western officials said. In early April, after Russia’s logistics and morale problems had become clear, Mr. Putin put General Dvornikov in charge of a streamlined war effort.

General Dvornikov arrived with a daunting résumé. He started his career as a platoon commander in 1982 and later fought in Russia’s brutal second war in Chechnya. Moscow also sent him to Syria, where the forces under his command were accused of targeting civilians.

In Ukraine, he established a more streamlined process. Russian pilots began coordinating with troops on the ground toward a similar objective in the eastern region of Donbas, and Russian units were talking to one another about shared goals.

But the invasion is not “proceeding particularly differently in the east than in the west because they haven’t been able to change the character of the Russian army,” said Frederick W. Kagan, a senior fellow and director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute. “There are some deep flaws in the Russian army that they could not have repaired in the last few weeks even if they had tried. The flaws are deep and fundamental.”

Russian Military Is Repeating Mistakes in Eastern Ukraine, U.S. Says - The New York Times

[bsnub]

Ukraine has started a large counter-offensive outside of Kherson. Today's battlefield update discusses...

[sabang]

The way I see it, if the Ukraine/ US don't start talking rational peace proposals soon, Russia is just gonna grind on and take Odessa and Kharkiv too.

[harrybarracuda]

The way I see it, if the Ukraine/ US don't start talking rational peace proposals soon, Russia is just gonna grind on and take Odessa and Kharkiv too.

Yeah but "the way you saw it" Puffy wasn't even going to invade.

[sabang]

Vlad won't give up the Donbass, neither Kerson I reckon Norts. I just hope he leaves it at that. This debacle could have been avoided with Diplomacy....

[sabang]

The way a lot of People saw it, who believed in rational Diplomacy.

[bsnub]

The way I see it, if the Ukraine/ US don't start talking rational peace proposals soon, Russia is just gonna grind on and take Odessa and Kharkiv too.

Still making shit predictions, I see. Completely clueless.

[sabang]

Luhansk gonna fall next. Shit prediction? Mariupol done and dusted.

[harrybarracuda]

WASHINGTON: President Joe Biden on Tuesday confirmed the United States will send more advanced rocket systems to Ukraine with ability to strike what he called "key targets" of Russia's invasion force.
"We will provide the Ukrainians with more advanced rocket systems and munitions that will enable them to more precisely strike key targets on the battlefield in Ukraine," Biden wrote in The New York Times.
A US official told reporters that the weapons being sent are Himars, or the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System.
With precision-guided munitions and a longer range than weapons currently deployed by Ukraine, the multiple rocket launchers represent an important upgrade at a time when the Ukrainians are battling Russian artillery in the east of the country.

Biden says US to send Ukraine 'advanced rocket systems' to hit 'key targets'

[bsnub]

^^

If they are so powerful, dippy, how come they got their asses kicked trying to take Kyiv and Kharkiv?

If you had the sense to watch the battlefield assessment I posted above, you would realize that things are not going well for the Russians despite the fact they took a couple of small towns.

[harrybarracuda]

If they are so powerful, dippy, how come they got their asses kicked trying to take Kyiv and Kharkiv?

If you had the sense to watch the battlefield assessment I posted above, you would realize that things are not going well for the Russians despite the fact they took a couple of small towns.

He's not going to watch anything that states actual facts. Remember, Puffy made that illegal.

[harrybarracuda]

The way a lot of People saw it, who believed in rational Diplomacy.

So your propagandists told you what to think. Yes we know.

[harrybarracuda]

Vlad won't give up the Donbass, neither Kerson I reckon Norts. I just hope he leaves it at that. This debacle could have been avoided with Diplomacy....

This debacle could have been avoided with Puffy not invading Ukraine you simpleton.

[sabang]

I sure know who looks like the simpletons right now.