Happy 4th July![]()
Happy 4th July![]()
Do you understand Russian ?Blyat.....Blyat....
Wagner ain't going anywhere.
Unbelievable. Who believes that shit?
In my opinion.
Damn doghouse.
Assuming there is one, has anyone got a Poll on when the Ukraine 'counter-offensive' is going to be started?
For some symbolism, I'd love the 9th May (Putin's victory day parade)
May the 9th be with Ukraine![]()
^ Next weekend it starts to warm up in Ukraine. A lot will depend on where the offensive starts and how long before it dries out enough for the ground to support heavy armour. Once the armour is gathered in the starting blocks it will need to push quickly before it is picked off by Russian missile strikes.
If they are heading for Crimea then I reckon it will kick-off on 21st May.
David - 9th May
Troy - 21st May
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It is all speculation, of course, as Zaluzhny will start it when he feels the time is right. My guess is it will not start until June after Ukraine has taken delivery of 100 Leopard 1a5's.
Ukraine’s Leopard 1 Tanks Could Arrive Just In Time to Help the Ukrainian National Guard Mop Up Russian Stragglers
Ukraine’s Leopard 1 Tanks Could Arrive Just In Time to Help the Ukrainian National Guard Mop Up Russian StragglersThe weather in Ukraine is warming up. The rain is slackening. The spring mud that for weeks has bogged down large-scale maneuver is drying up.
Every hour of warm, clear weather brings forward that day when Ukraine’s new offensive corps—nine brigades with hundreds of heavy tanks and fighting vehicles—can go on the attack.
All that is to say, Ukraine’s long-anticipated 2023 counteroffensive could be imminent. It’s possible it’ll kick off before the 100 Leopard 1A5 tanks that a German-Danish consortium is preparing arrive in Ukraine.
On Friday, Troels Lund Poulsen, Denmark’s acting defense minister, confirmed the first of the 1980s-vintage Leopard 1s would be ready for deployment by June 1. Potentially weeks after Ukrainian troops attack.
But that doesn’t mean the Leopard 1s will be useless. In fact, there’s an obvious use for the 42-ton, four-crew tanks with their still-effective L7 105-millimeter guns and decent day-night optics.
They could support the mopping-up force.
Anticipating an armored breakthrough by the offensive corps, Kyiv has stood up nine national guard brigades that could follow behind the offensive brigades—and clear out any Russian forces that get bypassed in the initial assault.
The national guard brigades tend to be lighter than their equivalent brigades in the Ukrainian army, air-assault force and marine corps are.
We’ve already seen at least one of the guard brigades in action, in the ruins of Bakhmut in eastern’s Ukraine’s Donbas region. While it seems the Spartan Brigade has a few T-64 tanks, its main vehicle is the wheeled BTR-4.
The 17-ton, three-person BTR-4 packs a stabilized 30-millimeter autocannon that’s devastating against unprotected infantry, especially at close range.
But the BTR-4’s armor is just thick enough to resist heavy machine gun fire. The Spartan Brigade apparently lost several BTR-4s just getting into Bakhmut along roads that were, and still are, well within range of Russian artillery and rockets.
Those 100 Leopard 1s Ukraine should get starting this summer could be just the thing to bulk up the national guard brigades. As far as tanks go, they’re lightly protected with a maximum of 70 millimeters of steel along the frontal arc. That’s a tenth the protection a newer Leopard 2 enjoys.
But compared to a BTR-4, a Leopard 2 is better-protected and much better-armed. And there are obvious ways the infantry-heavy national guard brigades could deploy the tanks—especially in close fights with Russian remnants holding out in urban strongpoints.
Where on open terrain, tanks work best in combined-arms formations with tracked fighting vehicles—the tanks advance while the fighting vehicles protect their flanks—in the chaotic confines of contested cities, tanks work well in mixed units with dismounted infantry.
Consider the U.S. Marine Corps’ experience in the battle for Hue in South Vietnam in January 1968. After a powerful North Vietnamese force captured the city, it took three USMC battalions and 11 South Vietnamese battalions a month to dislodge the North Vietnamese.
Around a dozen M-48A3 tanks supported the Marines. The 45-ton, four-crew M-48—versions of which remain in service with a few armies, including Taiwan’s—has thicker armor than the Leopard 1 does, but a smaller 90-millimeter gun.
In Hue, that 90-millimeter gun was all the firepower the Marines needed. “The positive aspects of the firepower included its ability to destroy enemy strongpoints, provide suppressive fires or create holes in buildings,” Jeremy Zollin, a U.S. Army major, wrote in a 2017 thesis.
“While maneuvering down streets, the Marines would be engaged by enemy machine-gun positions and strongpoints,” Zollin added. “The M-48A3s would pull forward to suppress these positions.”
The tanks themselves could function as mobile strongpoints. “When trying to prevent the enemy from repositioning, the Marines placed an M-48 in an intersection,” Zollin explained. “The tank could cover two avenues of approach by placing the main gun on one street and the cupola-mounted 12.7-millimeter machine gun on another.”
The M-48s shrugged off North Vietnamese machine gun fire but were vulnerable to the enemy’s rocket-propelled grenades—especially from the back, sides and top. Rocket hits tended to wound or kill the tanks’ crews without actually destroying the tanks, however. Over the course of the battle, many of the tanks went through several crews.
“In spite of the high casualty rate among the crew, the tanks were still able to absorb a significant amount of fire and continue to fight,” Zollin wrote. After a few days of hard combat, the infantry learned to screen the tanks from rocket fire so the tanks in turn could protect the infantry from machine-gun fire. Classic infantry-tank combined arms.
The Ukrainian national guard could borrow the Marines’ tactics from 55 years ago—and send dismounted guardsmen and Leopard 1s in mixed teams into Russian-held towns and cities.
Urban clearing operations could leverage the Leopard 1s’ firepower and barely adequate protection while mitigating their vulnerability to enemy tanks, artillery and missiles—especially on open terrain.
Moreover, there should be plenty of Leopard 1s to go around—enough, perhaps, to assign a 10-strong company to each guard brigade. “They are very large in number,” Poulsen said of the Leopard 1s, “and the Ukrainians need a very large number of tanks."
Cui bono certainly not the Russian conscripts and ordinary Ukrainians
However arms dealers have a vested interest in long drawn out conflicts as in Horn of Africa, more sales , advertise their products over a long span
Aside from weather the key moderator will Ukraine run out of fit able soldiers before Russia runs out of money and oile to bribe the other intolerant regimes.
I imagine those western volunteers mercenaries who wanted to join have already done so, been paid off crippled or cashed up.
Few young Germans will be queueing up to fight the Chechens and Wagnerians until Gotterdamerung and even should teh war go nuclear cannot foresee a NATO or German flag over Moscow any time soon. Minsk may fall ,but a regime change will have to decide if they want NATO on the border of China now or later for the finale of the Twilight of the Sods.
The behaviour of Brazil India and China will not be forgotton.
Those clowns have been getting smoked from day one. The laughable TikTok warriors.
https://twitter.com/infussambas/stat...15880629313536
^ Why is Gonzalo Lira living in Ukraine with the “Neo-Nazis” anyway? He is a really stupid guy to be posting pro Russian crap on the internet as a foreigner living in Ukraine. He should have moved on to Russia.
A moot point , they will need guys with 2 track minds
Before ohbo explains the great patriotic war again let us not forget the Russian treatment of Finns Kulacks , Ukrainians and Katyn of course,
Karelians and Estonaians, Letts Latvians Courlanders, m]Memelland Tramscarpathia, Bessarabia, Rhyz the same brutal litany.
Russian parliament admits guilt over Polish massacre In a symbolic admission of guilt, Russia's parliament has declared that
Joseph Stalin ordered his secret police to execute 22,000 Polish army officers and civilians in 1940, in one of the greatest mass murders of the 20th century.
Today's acknowledgment of Stalin's personal culpability over the Katyn massacre comes amid a cautious thaw between Moscow and Warsaw, whose recent relations have been thorny at best. It was also seen as a sign that Russia may finally be ready for muted self-scrutiny over its totalitarian past.
Mikhail Gorbachev admitted in 1990 that the NKVD was to blame for the massacre, after a half-century of the Soviets blaming it on Nazi troops. However, there has never been a formal statement which implicates the Soviet leadership in such explicit terms.
Officials in Warsaw greeted the declaration positively. "It is a good step, an important sign," Poland's speaker of parliament, Grzegorz Schetyna, told reporters. It would ensure a "better atmosphere" for Russian president Dmitry Medvedev's visit to Warsaw next week, he added.
The 21,768 officers, doctors, policemen and other public servants – captured by the Red Army when it swept into Poland after the outbreak of the second world war in 1939 – were mainly shot in Katyn forest near Smolensk in western Russia and in several other places
One wonders what the european cities locals, stuffed with "jungle immigrants", will feel like when they start mimicking their victorious "jungle" brothers", after acquiring the discarded weapons.
Allegedly he has/had family members there.
One might ask those foreigners living in Thailand, who despise the locals, the same question.
5 weeks training produces competent tank crews?
A tray full of GOLD is not worth a moment in time.
Job Duties of a 19K, M1 Armor Crewman
"Training and Qualifications:
Job training for an M1 armor crewman requires 15 weeks of One Station Unit Training.
Part of this time is spent in the classroom and in the field under simulated combat."
Army Job Description: 19K, M1 Armor Crewman
There's a war on. Training will be at wartime level not peacetime level so much more intense.
I doubt they'll be able to train 100 tank crews by the beginning of June. More likely less than half that number, but they will have enough crews to carry out mopping up operations.
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