Thread: Russia launches Ukraine invasion

The billions of dollars in military aid the United States has sent Ukraine includes some of the most advanced and lethal weapons systems in the world. But Ukraine has also scored big successes in the war by employing the weapons and equipment in unexpected ways, and jury-rigging some on the fly, according to military experts.From the sinking of the Moskva, Russia’s Black Sea flagship, in April to the attack on a Russian air base in Crimea this month, Ukrainian troops have used American and other weapons in ways few expected, the experts and Defense Department officials say.

By mounting missiles onto trucks, for instance, Ukrainian forces have moved them more quickly into firing range. By putting rocket systems on speedboats, they have increased their naval warfare ability. And to the astonishment of weapons experts, Ukraine has continued to destroy Russian targets with slow-moving Turkish-made Bayraktar attack drones and inexpensive, plastic aircraft modified to drop grenades and other munitions.

“People are using the MacGyver metaphor,” said Frederick B. Hodges, a former top U.S. Army commander in Europe, in a reference to the 1980s TV show in which the title character uses simple, improvised contraptions to get himself out of sticky situations.

After six months of war, the death toll on both sides is high: While American officials estimate that up to 80,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded, Ukraine’s outgunned military has said it is losing 100 to 200 troops a day. Even so, the engineering ingenuity of the Ukrainians lies in stark contrast to the slow, plodding, doctrinal nature of the Russian advance.

In the attack on the Moskva, for example, the Ukrainians developed their own anti-ship missile, called the Neptune, which they based on the design of an old Soviet anti-ship missile, but with substantially improved range and electronics. They appear to have mounted the Neptune missiles onto one or more trucks, according to one senior American official, and moved them within range of the ship, which was around 75 miles from Odesa. The striking of the Moskva was, in essence, the Neptune’s proof of concept; it was the first time the new Ukrainian weapon was used in an actual war, and it took down Russia’s flagship in the Black Sea.

“With the Moskva, they MacGyvered a very effective anti-ship system that they put on the back of a truck to make it mobile and move it around,” General Hodges, who is now a senior adviser at Human Rights First, said in an interview.

Ukrainian troops have done so well with the Bayraktar drone, in fact, that the company’s chief executive, Haluk Bayraktar, praised their ability to “squeeze as much as possible out of these systems,” in a recent interview with a Ukrainian news program. American military officials remain puzzled by why Russia’s many-layered air defense systems have not been more effective in stopping the drones, which have no self-defense systems, are easily spotted by radar and cruise at only about 80 miles an hour.

A senior Pentagon official said Ukrainian forces had put American-supplied HARM anti-radiation missiles on Soviet-designed MiG-29 fighter jets — something that no air force had ever done. The American HARM missile, designed to seek and destroy Russian air defense radar, is not usually compatible with the MiG-29 or the other fighter jets in Ukraine’s arsenal.

Ukraine managed to rejigger targeting sensors to allow pilots to fire the American missile from their Soviet-era aircraft. “They have actually successfully integrated it,” the senior official told reporters during a Pentagon briefing. He spoke on the condition of anonymity per Biden administration rules.

Officials say the missiles can target Russian air defense systems up to 93 miles away.

The craftiness is now on display in Crimea. In recent weeks, Ukraine has targeted the Black Sea peninsula, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, in a series of attacks.

In the strike on the Russian air base, Ukrainian forces destroyed eight fighter jets. A few days later, clandestine Ukrainian fighters operating behind enemy lines hit several sites in the occupied territory that Russia had thought were safe, including ammunition depots and supply lines.

Then, blasts hit a military airfield outside Sevastopol, the largest city in Crimea and home to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Russia claimed that the booms from the strike were the sound of successful antiaircraft fire.

“The Ukrainians are able to exploit their knowledge in the area,” said Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher with the RAND Corporation.

This exploitation is rooted in Ukraine’s history as the heart of the former Soviet Union’s defense industry. For decades, Ukraine was the place where the Soviet Union — and then Russia — developed turbines for warships, tanks and even aircraft, like the Antonov An-124, which is one of the largest cargo planes in the world and is used by Russia to transport weapons to Ukraine.

American military commanders who have worked with Ukrainian troops say that the Ukrainians are always ready to improvise.

General Hodges said he noticed “on a tactical level how clever Ukrainians were” when he worked with them in 2013 and 2014. He said the adaptation of the American-supplied HARM missiles to work on MiGs demonstrated the depth of technological know-how in Ukraine’s military.

“You can’t just hang any kind of rocket off of any kind of plane — there’s a whole lot of avionics and other aspects of flying and high-performance aircraft that are involved here,” he said. “And they did it.”

The attacks in Crimea underscore Ukraine’s increasingly aggressive military tactics, as the government in Kyiv has relied on special forces and local partisan fighters to strike deep behind the front, disrupt Russian supply lines and counter Russia’s advantages in arms and equipment.

American officials say the United States has provided detailed intelligence to help Ukraine’s forces attack Russian targets throughout the war. But Ukraine conducted the first of the recent strikes in Crimea — a series of blasts at the Saki military airfield on Aug. 9 — without notifying American and other Western allies in advance, officials said.

Indeed, one American official later briefed on the attacks said Ukrainian commandos and partisan fighters had used an improvised array of weapons, explosives and tactics in the strikes.
“It’s all homegrown,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details. “We did not get any advance notice.”

That first strike at the airfield destroyed much of the air power and munitions stores of the Black Sea Fleet’s 43rd naval aviation regiment. It was also intended to have a psychological impact on Russian forces in Crimea, the U.S. official said, calling it the “Doolittle Effect,” a reference to an American attack on Japan in World War II.

The bomber raid led by Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle was a low-level daylight attack in April 1942 that resulted in only light damage to military and industrial targets. But it buoyed an American home front reeling from a string of setbacks in the Pacific, beginning with the Pearl Harbor attack on Dec. 7, 1941. It also shattered the idea that Japan was invulnerable to American air attacks, as its government had claimed.

In a Telegram post after the Saki strike, Andriy Tsaplienko, a Ukrainian military journalist, said the damage suggested that a truck-mounted heavy missile launcher called the Grim, or Sapsan, had been used in the attack. That system was developed by Yuzhmash, a state-owned Ukrainian aerospace manufacturer. The Kremlin, however, rejected the possibility that a Ukrainian-made ballistic missile system had anything to do with it.

“The activities in the Crimean Peninsula likely mark a new phase in the war with the Ukrainians going on the offensive with an irregular warfare campaign designed to push Russia from an area they were sure was secure,” said Mick Mulroy, a former Pentagon official and C.I.A. officer.

nytimes.com

Originally Posted by bsnub

Russia is pulling all its fighter jets out of Crimea

They need them to salvage spare parts for their other planes

The long-awaited counteroffensive by Ukrainian troops appears to have started in the southern region of Kherson, with the president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, saying: “If they want to survive, it is time for the Russian military to flee.”
Ukrainian troops have broken through Russian defences in several areas of the frontline near the city of Kherson, a senior adviser to Zelenskiy claimed on Monday.

Oleksiy Arestovych said in a video interview Ukrainian forces were also shelling the ferries in the Kherson region that Moscow is using to supply Russian-occupied territory on the west bank of the Dnieper river.

Zelenskiy did not address the counteroffensive specifically during his Monday evening address but said: “The occupiers should know: we will oust them to the border. To our border, the line of which has not changed.”

Those who surrendered would be treated under the Geneva conventions, he said, adding: “If they do not listen to me, they will deal with our defenders, who will not stop until they liberate everything that belongs to Ukraine.”

“Ukraine is returning its own. It will return the Kharkiv region, Luhansk region, Donetsk region, Zaporizhzhia region, Kherson region, Crimea … This will happen.”

Ukrainian troops have taken back four villages near the city of Kherson after breaking through the frontline in three places, CNN reported, quoting a Ukrainian military source, with the main “target” being Kherson. The operation began with heavy shelling of Russian positions and the rear, forcing them to flee, the source was quoted as saying.

Sergiy Khlan, a local deputy and adviser to Kherson’s regional governor told Ukraine’s Pryamyi TV channel that a “powerful artillery attack on enemy positions in ... the entire territory of the occupied Kherson region” was launched on Monday.

“This is the announcement of what we have been waiting for since the spring - it is the beginning of the end of the occupation of Kherson region,” he added.

“What is happening now is a prepared, well-balanced start of a counteroffensive,” Khlan told Agence France-Presse.

Russia’s defence ministry acknowledged a new Ukrainian offensive had been launched in the Mykolaiv and Kherson regions but said it had failed and the Ukrainians had suffered significant casualties, RIA news agency reported. The “enemy’s offensive attempt failed miserably,” it said.

A Ukrainian barrage of rockets left the Russian-occupied town of Nova Kakhovka just east of the city of Kherson without water or power, officials at the Russian-appointed local authority later told the outlet.

The battlefield reports could not be independently verified.

Earlier on Monday, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s southern command, Nataliya Humenyuk, confirmed the counteroffensive had started in Kherson province after a video circulated online that allegedly showed a soldier from the Russian-run self-proclaimed republic of Donetsk saying Ukrainian forces had broken through the first line of defence.

“Today we started offensive actions in various directions, including in the Kherson region,” Humeniuk told a briefing, adding that Ukraine’s forces had struck more than 10 sites in the past week and “unquestionably weakened the enemy”.

Humenyuk declined to give details, saying Russian forces in the south remained “quite powerful” and that the operation needed “silence” as media attention could affect the results. Her claims could not be independently corroborated.

She urged local residents to either leave urgently or seek shelter.

Humenyuk said Russian forces were strong and that even though morale was low among their ranks, “it was too early to relax”. Western and Ukrainian military intelligence has noted a buildup of Russian troops and equipment this summer, suggesting Russia was preparing its own offensive.

However, Ukraine’s presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, warned politicians, experts and opinion leaders not to speculate about the progress of a military operation before Ukraine’s Ministry of Defence and army issued official statements.

“I understand our wishes and dreams … But war is not ‘content’. Let’s filter information and work professionally out of respect for our defenders,” he wrote on Telegram.

Zelenskiy agreed: “Anyone want to know what our plans are? You won’t hear specifics from any truly responsible person. Because this is war. And this is what it is during the war.”

Zelenskiy tells Russian forces to flee as Ukraine counteroffensive begins in Kherson | Ukraine | The Guardian

Originally Posted by bsnub

Ukraine counteroffensive begins in Kherson

My sympathies are all with Ukraine in this conflict. The truth is though that while their defence has been heroic they'd need an overwhelming force they simply don't have to retake areas where the Russians have had time to dig in and build defences. I hope they can make some progress at not too great a cost.

Originally Posted by Shutree

The truth is though that while their defence has been heroic they'd need an overwhelming force they simply don't have to retake areas where the Russians have had time to dig in and build defences.

You are correct there, but there is one thing that makes Kherson different. There are only three bridges across the Dnieper River, and they are all being constantly hit by HIMARS rockets, rendering them unpassable for heavy tanks and trucks. The Russians are being squeezed on the western side of the Dnieper and as the fighting continues on, resupply will become more and more an issue.

Kyiv will start getting a pounding soon

Originally Posted by bsnub

The Russians are being squeezed on the western side of the Dnieper and as the fighting continues on, resupply will become more and more an issue.

True. I am sure the Ukranians have thought about it and have a plan. I, for one, wish them success.

Originally Posted by malmomike77

Kyiv will start getting a pounding soon

Maybe and maybe not. Russia is running out of cruise missiles but aside from that the US has supplied Ukraine with NASAMS Air Defense systems, these are the same systems that protect Washington DC. What is hard to discern at this point is if they are actually in Ukraine yet. If they are in place, Kyiv has nothing to worry about Russian missile attacks.

Originally Posted by Shutree

True. I am sure the Ukranians have thought about it and have a plan. I, for one, wish them success.

That is the both of us. Ukraine has in fact struck all three bridge crossings as of today.

Russia has barely used its airforce.

Originally Posted by malmomike77

Russia has barely used its airforce.

That is total nonsense. It has used everything it has. As I have stated in the other thread, massive corruption rules in Russia. There is no other Russian air force.

It has thrown its airforce in? Really Funny, not heard that and it's not been reported on any reliable UK source.

Eyes on Kherson as Ukraine claims bold move on Russians

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — A surge in fighting on the southern front line and a Ukrainian claim of new attacks on Russian positions fed speculation Tuesday that a long-expected counteroffensive has started to try to turn the tide of the war.


But Ukrainian officials warned against excessive optimism in a war that has seen similar expectations of changing fortunes before, and the Russian defense ministry claimed an attempt by Ukraine’s troops to launch an offensive had failed and caused heavy casualties.


Even though independent verification of battlefield moves has been extremely tough, the British defense ministry said in an intelligence report that, as of early Monday, “several brigades of the Ukrainian Armed Forces increased the weight of artillery fires in front line sectors across southern Ukraine.”


Attention centered on potential damage Ukraine might have inflicted on Russian positions around the port city of Kherson, a major economic hub close to the Black Sea and one of Moscow’s prized possessions since it started the invasion just over half a year ago.

Ukraine’s presidential office reported Tuesday that “powerful explosions continued during the day and night in the Kherson region. Tough battles are ongoing practically across all” of the strategic area. Ukrainian forces, the report said, have destroyed a number of ammunition depots in the region and all large bridges across the Dnieper that are vital to bring supplies to the Russian troops.

Russian state news agency Tass reported five explosions rocking Kherson on Tuesday morning — blasts likely caused by air defense systems at work.


The Ukrainian military’s Operation Command South also reported destroying a pontoon crossing the Dnieper that the Russian forces were setting up and hitting a dozen command posts in several areas of the Kherson region with artillery fire.


“The most important thing is Ukrainian artillery’s work on the bridges, which the Russian military can no longer use,” Ukrainian independent military analyst Oleh Zhdanov told The Associated Press.


“Even the barges have been destroyed. The Russians can’t sustain forces near Kherson — this is the most important.”

On Monday, the southern command center’s Nataliya Gumenyuik told Ukrainian news outlet Liga.Net that Kyiv’s forces have launched offensive operations “in many directions in our area of responsibility and have breached the enemy’s first line of defense.” The statement quickly made headlines after weeks of reports that Ukraine forces were preparing an offensive there and as Ukrainian attacks on the Kherson region intensified.


Zhdanov said that Russia has three lines of defense in the Kherson region, and breaching the first one signals only “isolated offensive actions by the Ukrainian army.”


The war has ground to a stalemate over the past months with casualties rising and the local population bearing the brunt of suffering during relentless shelling in the east and also in the wider area around the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia atomic power plant, which has also been at the heart of fighting in Ukraine.


Amid fears the plant could be damaged, leading to a radioactive leak, a U.N. nuclear watchdog team has arrived in Kyiv and is further preparing a mission to safeguard the Russian-occupied plant from nuclear catastrophe.

The stakes couldn’t be higher for the International Atomic Energy Agency experts, who will visit the plant in a country where the 1986 Chernobyl disaster spewed radiation throughout the region, shocking the world and intensifying a global push away from nuclear energy.

Compounding an already complicated task is the inability of both sides in the war to agree on much beyond allowing the team to go there. Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of shelling the wider region around the nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest, time and again.


Nikopol, which is just across the Dnieper River from the Zaporizhzhia plant, once again came under a barrage of heavy shelling, local authorities said, with a bus station, stores and a children’s library sustaining damage.

And the city of Zaporizhzhia itself, about 50 kilometers (30 miles) away, was targeted by a Russian missile strike, the Ukraine presidential office said.


The dangers of a leak are now so high that officials have begun handing out anti-radiation iodine tablets to nearby residents.


Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reacted to speculation in his nightly video address Monday, about whether his forces had launched a major counteroffensive.


“Anyone want to know what our plans are? You won’t hear specifics from any truly responsible person. Because this is war.”


His adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, cautioned against “super-sensational announcements” about a counteroffensive.


From the other side, the Moscow-appointed regional leader of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, dismissed the Ukrainian assertion of an offensive in the Kherson region as false. He said Ukrainian forces have suffered big losses in the area. And for its part, Russia’s Defense Ministry said its forces had inflicted heavy personnel and military equipment losses on Ukrainian troops.

The Kherson region is just north of the Crimean Peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 to set off a conflict that was largely frozen until the Feb. 24 invasion.


Otherwise. the attacks and shelling in the rest of eastern and southern Ukraine continued with the dull beat of death and destruction.


At least nine civilians were killed in more Russian shelling, Ukrainian officials said, from the Black Sea port of Mykolaiv to the northeastern industrial hub of Kharkiv, where five were killed in the city center.

Eyes on Kherson as Ukraine claims bold move on Russians | AP News

Ukrainian Forces Fool Russians Into Wasting Missiles on Fake U.S. Rocket Systems

Ukraine is tricking Russian forces into wasting its expensive long-range missiles on blowing up dummy replicas of U.S. rocket systems, The Washington Post reports. The decoys are designed to be indistinguishable from real High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) when spotted from the air by Russian drones. It’s thought the dummy targets may partially explain apparently exaggerated Russian claims of damage inflicted on the U.S.-supplied weapons systems in Ukraine. “They’ve claimed to have hit more HIMARS than we have even sent,” one unnamed American diplomat told the Post. The fake rocket trucks are one of asymmetric warfare tactics being used by Ukrainian forces to resist Vladimir Putin’s invasion. In recent weeks, Kyiv loyalists have also assassinated suspected Russian collaborators, destroyed power and transport links in occupied territory, and spectacularly blown up Russian ammunition dumps.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/ukrain...=home?ref=home

Originally Posted by malmomike77

It has thrown its airforce in?

They have lost 220 aircraft over Ukraine, you utter imbecile.

Ukraine claims early success in counteroffensive as Zelensky vows to 'chase' Russians to the border

Kyiv, Ukraine (CNN)As Ukraine ramps up its offensive to retake Russian-occupied territory in the country's south, its forces have regained four villages and broken through Russian defenses at multiple points of the frontline in the Kherson region, according to Ukrainian officials.


Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky also issued a warning to Russian forces during his evening address Monday, saying it was time for them to "run away, go home," and that "the occupiers must know we will chase them to the border."


Yet one of his advisers cautioned that the operation will be a slow one, that would "grind the enemy."

MOREUkraine claims early success in counteroffensive as Zelensky vows to 'chase' Russians to the border - CNN

​Top Pro-Russian Official Shot Dead in Ukraine’s Kherson

A former deputy who switched allegiance from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the occupying Russian forces in the southern region of Kherson has been shot dead, Russian investigators said Monday.


Alexei Kovalev, "the deputy head of the military and civil administration in the Kherson region was killed by bullets," the investigators said on Telegram.


The attack took place in his home on Sunday, they said, adding a young woman who lived with him was also a victim.


They did not give any further details.


In the past months, several Ukrainian officials named by Russian forces in occupied territory have been killed or wounded in attacks.


Kovalev, 33, was elected a deputy in 2019 in Kherson and joined Zelensky's group in the Ukrainian parliament.


After the Russian offensive on Ukraine at the end of February and the occupation of Kherson by Russian troops, Kovalev joined the invading forces and became a senior official.


He survived an assassination attempt in June.


Russian forces seized Kherson, a town of 280,000 inhabitants, on March 3.


It was the first major city to fall following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

Top Pro-Russian Official Shot Dead in Ukraine's Kherson - The Moscow Times

There were photographic evidence of the defeat of Ukrainian troops during an attempted counteroffensive in the Kherson and Nikolaev regions



More and more documentary (photo and video) evidence of a major defeat of the enemy, who recently launched a counteroffensive in the southern direction, appears on the network. Recall that, according to the estimates of the Russian Ministry of Defense, the one-time losses of the Ukrainian armed forces during an attack from several directions in the Nikolaev and Kherson regions amounted to about 1200 people. These are the maximum one-time losses of the Armed Forces of Ukraine for several months. Moreover, they are comparable to the losses of the Ukrainian army in the boiler near Ilovaisk in the summer of 2014.

One of the areas where the column of Ukrainian troops was completely destroyed is the area of ​​the settlement of Potemkino. This is the same settlement that the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine constantly mentions in its reports for several days, using the following terminology: “Russian troops attempted an offensive in the Potemkino area, had no success, retreated.” But if the Russian troops, in the terminology of the Ukrainian military department, "withdrew", then the Ukrainian troops could not retreat in the geographical sense of the word. Hundreds of the so-called "XNUMXth" Ukrainian soldiers remained in the burning forest plantations, which were used by the RF Armed Forces from artillery, tanks и aviation after the enemy personnel, who had lost support in the form of armored vehicles, tried to take cover there.

The footage, which was filmed by drones of our troops, as well as military correspondents, included the affected Ukrainian equipment, including trucks, on which personnel and ammunition were brought to the front line “for a breakthrough”.

On the frames presented in this material, you can see Polish-made tanks that were recently delivered to Ukraine, including what was left of these tanks.

The counteroffensive was clearly timed to coincide with the European summit, at which Ukrainian Defense Minister Reznikov spoke remotely. But he could not please his European sponsors with anything. Silence reigns in the Ukrainian political field. The authorities are in no hurry to inform the people of Ukraine about the defeat of the Ukrainian troops in the Nikolaev and Kherson regions.

https://en.topwar.ru/201067-pojavilis-fotosvidetelstva-porazhenija-ukrainskih-vojsk-pri-popytke-kontrnastuplenija-v-hersonskoj-i-nikolaevskoj-oblastjah.html


Someone is telling porkies, or maybe both sides are. We'll see in coming days/ weeks.

Originally Posted by sabang

Someone is telling porkies

Well, starting with your bullshit propaganda, I think it is obvious where the lies are coming from.

Originally Posted by bsnub

Well, starting with your bullshit propaganda, I think it is obvious where the lies are coming from.

Yes, perhaps it was another "just a chip pan fire in the kitchen" like when the Moskva was consigned to Davy Jones' Locker.

Time will be the judge of that, not hyped up boy scouts. You've seen both sides of the story, now we will wait and see which side is right.

Originally Posted by sabang

Time will be the judge of that, not hyped up boy scouts. You've seen both sides of the story, now we will wait and see which side is right.

Can you really imagine anyone but deceitful Russians being allowed anywhere near the wreck?

Three enthusiastic boy scouts, but time will be the Judge. Any expert opinions as to when Kherson will fall to Ukraine?

Originally Posted by sabang

Any expert opinions as to when Kherson will fall to Ukraine?

Like your "expert" opinion that this war would never happen?

So, chickenhawk too chicken to advance an opinion. Hehe.

Originally Posted by sabang

So, chickenhawk too chicken to advance an opinion. Hehe.

The Ukrainians are currently in a media blackout. Your side is trying to exploit that with a massive onslaught of propaganda and fake shit. I am not as foolish as you to make predictions that prove to be utterly false after the fact. You claimed that the US and UK intel about the pending invasion of Ukraine was all false and lies. You were proven wrong when it turned out to be 100% fact and true.

Your house of cards fell the moment the Russians crossed the border. You have been walking it back ever since.