Invasion of Ukraine • Page 38

These numbers are really starting to climb fast

 

Did anyone see the Piers Morgan interview with Donald Trump? Trump said he handed a white flag (napkin) to Angela Merkel back when he was the president saying she was too dependent on Russian energy.

 

do I believe him? no
is that a 100% correct assessment? yes

 

Agreed, haha.

Before today, Germany's government was acting really shitty in their support (or lack thereof) towards Ukraine. But they're now finally sending some heavy equipment over

 

He's on record telling the Germans this at the U.N. and they laughed at him. Oops.

 

This guy does a video a day, providing clear and concise updates on what's happening on the ground in Ukraine - good to bookmark

 

British media seem to hyping up 9th of may for Russias military parade. Do we really think Russia are going to do something drastic for it?

 

Hard to tell; I’m guessing just more intense missile strikes around Ukraine. We could see a formal call for mobilization in Russia, but it won’t change Russia’s fortunes much on the ground

 

"DMing Russian families pictures of their dead sons/fathers/husbands on social media" was not a part of the drastically changing landscape of warfare i saw coming TBH. Psywar in the modern digital age is some wild shit man.

 

I haven't been keeping up too much lately. So this as essentially become a war of attrition in the east and south? If so Russia is done for in the long term. They don't have the equipment or manpower to hold the line for months longer.

 

Yeah the gains by both sides are coming along much slower, as Russia is learning from its mistakes and making their munitions more effective, along with going into a more defensive posture, which is harder for Ukraine to attack and penetrate. So now like you said it’s turning more to a war of attrition, so it’ll come down to who can replenish their men and arms faster than their rate of losses. At the moment Ukraine hasn’t received all the promised weapons yet from the West, so Ukraine is inflicting losses in certain areas along the front. But a few weeks ago Zelensky said it wouldn’t be until mid to late June that most of the weapons would come, so serious UA offensives probably won’t happen until July at the earliest. But Russia doesn’t have the luxury of bottomless weapons supplies like Ukraine currently has, which is why they’re attacking the Donbas ferociously at the moment, to try and overwhelm Ukraine so hard in order to force a ceasefire of some kind. But I think/guess that in a few months, if Western arms supplies keep up their pace, Russia’s power should really begin to diminish. So yeah, it’ll be several months yet before anything substantive happens for either side

 

I do think it is likely that Russia exhausts the ability of the force they currently have in Ukraine to push any further into the country, but I worry that they are capable of holding the line so-to-speak somewhat along where it is now for the foreseeable future. I do hope I'm wrong on that. I don't see any sign that Russia has any problem at all just feeding 'cannon meat' into the grinder endlessly for the time being until something changes on one side or the other. Putin potentially could decide to fully mobilize Russia for war.

I know we've all found out that Russia's arms and equipment are largely old and in a terrible state of repair, but I still think they just plain have a lot of them. Similar to how their soldiers are not performing terribly well on the battlefield by any objective measure but they still have a lot of them and have no qualms about sending them to their deaths in insanely large numbers.

I also worry a lot about the losses on the Ukrainian side, because I don't think we have any clear picture at all from where we are looking in as to what they may actually realistically be and how long they can keep this pace up, so to speak. I completely understand why that is the case, and actually commend Ukraine for it, but it still worries me.

 

They do have just more units of everything, but most of Ukraine’s stuff is higher tech, so it’s a quality vs quantity battle right now. Although I did read recently that Ukraine will have 1 million troops mobilized soon, so once they can employ those at the front effectively (July or August perhaps), that might slowly/eventually overwhelm the numbers Russia currently have in Ukraine.

In an on-field battle Ukraine is good enough to overwhelm Russian forces, but the main issue right now is the Russian artillery keeping the UA troops at bay away from their lines. Once those can be taking out in effective numbers (via drones and UA artillery), then UA forces will be able to battle more closely to the front line. Fairly certain Ukraine now has more tanks in the country than Russia has (they just received over 200 from Poland). I’ve been keeping track of the daily Russian losses and it seems they’re really targeting the troop carrying vehicles in large numbers, meaning they’re degrading the ability of Russia to simply move their troops around quickly. By doing so, they greatly slow down the ability of Russia to shift their forces to different fronts, allowing a greater chance for a weak point to emerge somewhere on the Russian line

 

A lot of this is really good to know. I follow it fairly closely every day, but you have a much better operational understanding of how things are on the ground. I had no idea about that 1 million soldier mobilization figure coming into play soon, for example. I'd been really starting to worry about Ukrainian manpower, partly because it's one place where the US for example has flatly said we won't put boots on the ground in Ukraine, even if we are willing to keep providing them with the arms and equipment that they need.