So far no real evidence that any BTGs have been rendered combat ineffective and merged. As they say military intelligence is an oxymoron.
Please note this video showing a BMP-3 with markings from the 102nd Motorized Rifle Regiment paired with T-80BVs - which aren't operated by
any formation of the 8th Guards Combined Arms Army. That strongly suggests composite units are in use - i.e. battle-damaged units being merged to make up for casualties. See also
T-80BVMs and BTR-82As spotted moving together in Donbas; as the commentator says there are no known Russian units with that combination.
Or he's playing the long game. Slow and steady wins the race. Don't go for sudden quick victories that might trigger US or NATO entry into the war, drag it out and wait for the Western publics to get bored of the war, sick of the expense of it,
Y'mean like that eight-year long war waged by a Russian sock-puppet state? One that involved
actual Russian troops on the ground, as admitted by Putin, and since 2015
Russian officers commanding the "separatist" forces directly? Is that not the very definition of a "long game?" And we're supposed to see the full-scale conventional war invasion of 2022, which began with multiple attacks on every front open to the Russians and heavily featured aggressive airborne operations aimed at quickly grabbing forward staging grounds, especially in the attempted decapitation strike on the national capital - as an
extension of the long game?
Oh, as for cost, the United States gave Afghanistan
73 billion dollars over the near twenty years it was involved there. To-date, the aid given to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden administration amounts to...
2 billion dollars. And unlike Afghanistan the taxpayer can see very,
very clearly what the return-on-investment is in the form of lots of expensive things - sometimes
big expensive things like 12,000 ton missile cruisers - getting blown to hell. So I wouldn't bet on the sympathies of the Western public turning against providing aid and assistance - especially now that the "never again" mantra is being put to the test by the literal piles of murdered civilians from Russian-occupied areas.
and be more focused on the accumulating economic problems at home. That is already starting. Stagflation, market collapse, political unrest at home, etc. is all building in the west.
Y'know, we've done this all before. The cloistered, cut-off Soviet economy only working within its own bloc behind the Iron Curtain while predicting the imminent demise of the West as their uncontrolled economy was cratered by greedy capitalists and their internecine political tensions caused unrest and disunity.
You may recall this ended with the complete social and economic collapse of the Soviet Union.
As it is Russia is already making more money from the new economic trade system than they were before the war by exporting less and the Ruble is stronger than it was before the war.
So about that - as explained wonderfully by the youtuber Perun (who actually has an Economics degree) the "strength" of the Ruble is completely artificial, the result of
unsustainable government interventions to prop it up. (
Here is a link to the actual timestamp in the video.)
US international relationships are falling apart, see how the Saudis are basically assisting the Chinese-Russia economic war against the US to the point that the US is starting to turn on them:
The Saudis doing a Saudi and
forcing the Biden administration to cease its concerted efforts to sabotage and destroy the Bush/Trump administration's efforts to strengthen US domestic energy industry is a
good thing for the United States.
Remember when Trump said Germany was Russia's captive due to energy dependence, and
offered to sell Germany American natural gas to provide them an alternate source of supply? Well Germany's come around;
they're currently building a floating LP terminal in record time that should be done by the end of the year (which
matches timeframes advertised by companies that build floating LP terminals, 1-3 years, esp. when considering the national government putting its weight behind it.) That's just
one of two terminals that will be built, by the way. So the Saudis forcing the current clown-car in Washington to cease doing the enemy's work for them is important because US natgas production will be key to combating Russian coercion tactics in the future.
This is siege warfare, militarily, politically, and economically.
Which plays directly against the interests of Russia, now that it has begun a hot war as a direct belligerent. The longer it drags on the worse it goes for Russia, as other nations use Ukraine as a proxy to bleed them dry. The US learned this in Vietnam, then Russia learned it in Afghanistan, then the US learned it in Afghanistan, and now Russia - well, I guess the lesson repeats as needed, doesn't it? I guess it's Russia's turn to wear the dunce cap this time.
No signs Russia is actually losing other than US propagand in the media:
If you ignore the retreat from two axes of attack after almost six weeks of high-intensity warfare to take the capital (aka a """feint""") which littered the landscape with damaged and destroyed vehicles, the absolutely glacial rate of advance in Donbas, which makes any "encirclement" impossible to effect (you have to actually get behind the enemy
before they can withdraw, and in sufficient force to actually prevent them from just steamrolling over your blocking forces,) and the heavy attrition of combat vehicles (as documented by an absolute glut of Ukrainian drone videos of Russian AFVs eating artillery fire) which provides Russia its military edge given its paucity of personnel compared to Ukraine (which is fully mobilized, unlike Russia.)
The loss of the Moskva changes what exactly?
The
Moskva was one of only seven warships in the entire Russian Navy with a theater-range anti-air capability, (tenatively eight depending on when
Nakhimov emerges from her never-ending refit.) Even the Royal Navy operates six Type 45 AAW destroyers armed with the theater-range Aster 30 missile, for comparison. Moreover with Turkey closing the Bosphorus the
Moskva was the only theater-range equipped AAW naval asset Russia
had in the Black Sea. Given her age, close-in anti-missile defense would have best been handled by one of the
Admiral Gorshkov class ships anyway, who's navalized SA-11 system is roughly comparable - er,
very roughly comparable to an ESSM (RIM-7P pK% but with early RIM-162 range.) The S-300 in any incarnation is still an effective system, as Ukraine has demonstrated - hell,
Russia still uses them. Sure, it's dated but fighting NATO is what the S-400 is for; and plenty of NATO members - including the ones closest to Russia - have dated equipment themselves.
Losing the
Moskva removes a mobile radar outpost and high-altitude aerial denial. This matters because to target ships with cruise missiles you need to know
where they are, and aircraft typically used for this (Maritime Patrol Craft) tend to be big, obvious targets (twin-engined planes with very loud radars.) Not that Ukraine
even has MPA aircraft with surface-search radar; they notionally have some Soviet SU-24MR hand-me-downs but given they're credited with all of twelve operational SU-24s total I very much doubt those MR's are among the operable fleet. That leaves you with visual searches, and while optics can see a long way from up high (as TB-2s demonstrated by filming the bombing of Snake Island from over 100km recently) they can't
search at those ranges; it's like trying to search a football field by peering through a straw. Which means effective eyeball search, even with FLIR, is range-limited, bringing such birds into missile range. Without the
Moskva the Russian Black Sea fleet's ships can defend themselves (to varying degrees of capability) but can't deny the airspace to long-range Ukrainian operations. Given Russian SA-11s have consistently demonstrated an inability to hit TB-2s dropping bombs on them from overhead, this means a TB-2 observing Crimea from >100km is not likely to be engaged by an S-400 battery there. This is just one example of what loss of airspace denial over the Black Sea means for Russia; a greater amount of Ukrainian intelligence gathering ability that's not dependent on US sources, who edit it to conceal means and methods, which not only degrades the intel but adds a time delay to it as well.
The sortie rate is unnecessary given the artillery that the Russians have, as they planned for NATO air superiority.
Please explain the heavy Soviet (and Russian Federation) emphasis on tactical CAS/strike aircraft such as the SU-25, SU-24 and the MI-8/17/24/28 and KA-52.
As it stands their artillery is crushing the Ukrainians or have you not noticed their advancing through several fortified belts that were built up over 8 years?
Where, exactly?
Here's a link to the Ukraine Livemap showing the front-line situation on January 1st, 2022; this shows the frontline of the Donbas war. You'll note it's nowhere near Izyum. The southern end of the line, east of Mariupol, was never broken through, but rather abandoned as the defenders were outflanked from the Russian drive out of Crimea from the west. Russian forces are still stalled along the pre-war Donbas line of contact from Donetsk clear up to north of Pervomaisk,
as you can see on the Finnish scribblemap. The
only actual breakthrough of that pre-war line has been at Popansa - as the livemap shows the frontline was just west of the village of Molodizhne. From the forests west of Molodizhne to the furthest western edge of Popansa is...
nine kilometers. Here,
measure it yourself. Russia has been fighting for
nine fucking weeks here and have finally managed to gain a total of...
nine kilometers.
Air support is expensive per sortie, much more so than artillery, so why use that when they can save it for precision attacks?
Because it has an effective range of hundreds if not thousands of kilometers, unlike artillery, which maxes out around 70-80km for 300mm-class guided rocket artillery (aka miniature SRBMs.) Which is really useful if you want to, say, comprehensively destroy transport networks in the western half of Ukraine to prevent the flow of Western aid, supplies and munitions flowing over the Polish border. Russia's been trying to do that with cruise and ballistic missiles but the problem with those are, they're hideously expensive, making it prohibitively expensive to stockpile enough of them to actually
comprehensively devastate something as massive and distributed as an entire region's rail network - which is why Russia's most recent round of attempts to do just that
have had very limited effect. Cruise and ballistic missiles are for very high-priority targets or to kick in the door for airpower - if you want to
conclusively destroy your enemies warmaking capability you need to conduct
sustained strategic bombing, like the Allies did to Germany in WWII or the US to Iraq in Desert Storm. Aircraft are the only option because a weapon system where you re-use literally everything but the warhead (which is just plastic explosive in a cast-iron casing) is
orders of magnitude cheaper for the destructive effect than a missile, which is a miniature aircraft, jet engine included, and can only be used once. Which is
precisely why Russia has all those Tupolev strategic bombers in their arsenal... that they've only used for long-range cruise missile attacks. 🤔
As it stands they've ruined Ukraine's war industry to the point that Zelensky says it will take at least $600 billion to repair.
Given how many nations have relied upon Ukraine for repair services for Soviet/Russian based equipment (including the US, which operates various Sukhois and MiGs for aggressor squadron training,) and how many nations across the world (including NATO members and massive nations with massive armed forces, like India,) have TO&E highly reliant on Soviet/Russian legacy designs, I don't think Ukraine will have a hard time raising those funds. Dealing directly with Russia while courting the west has been a source of unavoidable tension for India for a long while now (again, with their TO&E they haven't much choice) but that problem just increased by an order of magnitude. Plus, India is bracing for war with China -
China's been investing heavily in military infrastructure along their disputed border for years now. Given the decoupling of Russia with the West, Russia will be even
more beholden to China now - in fact given the comparative sizes of their economies Russia runs the risk of becoming a client state. Which means India runs the risk of losing vendor support for
most of their fucking military if China starts a war and leans on Russia to cut them off. And on top of all
that, Ukraine no longer has to give a
fuck about "antagonizing Russia" by undercutting Russian arms sales. It's a match made in heaven. There's already a blueprint for successful defense co-operation with Ukraine in the form of
Turkey's defense industry collaboration with them.
Also, a defense industry is much,
much more about brains over factories. You can rebuild a factory
far faster than you can train a new generation of engineers across many varied applied engineering disciplines. And given Russia was still relying on Ukraine for military electronics until Russia attacked them in 2014 and shut down their own supply, I'd say Ukraine had the brains advantage to begin with. And it's always faster to rebuild a factory than build an entirely new one, unless it's been
comprehensively reduced to rubble by sustained bombing. Just look at how much of the Azovstal plant is still standing despite months of shelling.
The Russians voluntarily gave up ground in the north because it didn't matter to their objectives, meanwhile they've only gained territory where it matters, on the south coast and in the Donbass.
Then why did they take that terrain in the first place? 🤔
Sounds like you've got western media brain rot.
Sounds like you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
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