Russia's War Against Ukraine

[MengJiao]

This quote is from w8minute and I messed it up and he makes some very good points

Fascinating.  So you send in your newbs into a hotzone because:

1. You are saving your crack troops for something even more important or bigger than Ukraine
2. You really don't have a good army anymore and have to rely on inexperienced soldiers
3. You although you know you will easily win the war why waste good troops when you can use cannon fodder

Am I missing anything else that could be added to the list?

  Yeah.  The whole thing is pointless so why not just randomly drive some old tanks vaguely toward the enemy?  And what's the mess in Sumy about? 
  Why go there at all if you are invading the Ukraine?  it's not even on the road to anywhere and it right on the border anyway so why not just by-pass it?
Oh wait.  I forgot.  The whole thing is pointless so why not just have a mess in Sumy?

  And while I'm on the subject...okay, suppose the Russians accomplish their objectives and kill the ex-comedian who is in charge of the Ukraine and substitute
some proper crony...then they just leave?  Kill one old comedy act and get somebody more like Lubochienkov in Belarus to make real jokes for a change?

   There's no way for the Russians to make this look anything other than pointless and pathetic.

  Oh and that reminds me: one US intelligence briefing mentioned that it looks like the Russians were not using their best electronic warfare assets.  Well, why not?
Just too much trouble?  You want to have a war but -- since you are just replacing one comedian with another -- why bother using your best electronic warfare assets?

  I can imagine the scene (as done by some bad comedians i guess) -- hey lets turn on some of our better jamming gear -- nah, too much trouble, let the Ukrainians slaughter
the conscipts and we'll have a real war with some real point to it when we get a real comedian to kill.

  Oh, but things might get serious after all...one video of what looks like a totally obliterated Russian convoy does feature a T-80 tank with its turret blown off.

  And from the Senate Intelligence committee:

  Mr. Warner said it was too soon to draw any firm conclusions about the Russian operation, but Moscow appeared to be seeing a stronger opposition from Ukrainians
than Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, had expected.

"I think the Russians expectation of how quickly they would be militarily successful was both overly ambitious from day one and underestimating the will
of the Ukrainian people," Mr. Warner said.

  Or of course, even Putin thought the whole thing was more trouble than it was worth so why...you know...use your electronic assets?  Just sort of blow up a lot of stuff and
get that Comedian replaced!

  Or maybe just get the series back on Netflix:

  Before being elected president in 2019, the 44-year-old played the role of an abusive school teacher in the political satire Servant of the People, which also streamed on Netflix.

On the show, Volodymyr Zelensky's character becomes the president of Ukraine after a video of his rant against the government, posted online by his students, becomes viral.

The television show, created by a production house founded by Zelensky, was prescient in a way.

In 2018, members of the production company, Kvartal 95, launched a political party named after the series. Later that year, the party declared Zelensky as its candidate for Ukraine's 2019 presidential election.

[GDS_Starfury]

what are the sites that you guys are getting your news and imagery from?

[MengJiao]

what are the sites that you guys are getting your news and imagery from?

  New York Times in my case and CNN

[SirAndrewD]

what are the sites that you guys are getting your news and imagery from?

I've been watching a lot of Youtube feeds that are combing various sites for live updates.  They're mostly sourcing from CNN, verified Twitter, Ukrainian Pravda, RT (with huge grains of salt) among others. 

Twitter's been a hotbed of live imagery.  This is a war against a country with a very high population of people with social media and smartphones.

[SirAndrewD]

Interesting early assessments here.  Weird that the Russians didn't start with a comprehensive air/cyber campaign and decapartite the Ukrainian C&C. 

Long way to go but the analysis here is that outside the thrust from Crimea the Ukrainian defense gave better than it got.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russia-ukraine-warning-update-initial-russian-offensive-campaign-assessment

[MengJiao]

Interesting early assessments here.  Weird that the Russians didn't start with a comprehensive air/cyber campaign and decapartite the Ukrainian C&C. 

Long way to go but the analysis here is that outside the thrust from Crimea the Ukrainian defense gave better than it got.

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russia-ukraine-warning-update-initial-russian-offensive-campaign-assessment

Russian military operations began with a short and incomplete air campaign on February 24

     Why?  Why not actually have a war?  Why start with a short and incomplete air campaign?  Could it be that even the Russians have known all along
that the whole thing is pathetic and pointless?

     And why no decapitation strikes?  Is it just too much trouble to blow up the regime you are supposedly waging a war to remove?  Is there some Slavic taboo against
blowing up comedians?

[bobarossa]

Russia may be witholding its best assets to prevent the west from knowing their complete capabilities.  Especially with regard to electronic warfare.  Why give us a chance to develop countermeasures for a later need?  Hopefully the Ukraine resistance will force them to use their best troops/equipment so we can develop countermeasures against future need.

[GDS_Starfury]

Im watching these 3 KC-35 out of Ramstein shuttle to a point over Krakow and just orbit. 
wonder whats getting the fuel.  8)

[JasonPratt]

Russia may be witholding its best assets to prevent the west from knowing their complete capabilities.  Especially with regard to electronic warfare.  Why give us a chance to develop countermeasures for a later need?  Hopefully the Ukraine resistance will force them to use their best troops/equipment so we can develop countermeasures against future need.

I was thinking the same thing.

As for the decap strikes, someone (was it Jarhead? I haven't scrolled back through the thread) was watching private jets cycle back and forth from Kyiv to some west Atlantic island (Bermuda?): those might have been ferrying the leaders, their staffs, and their families. Has a government been set up outside? -- if so, there's no chance for a decap.

At this point, I'm starting to wonder if Putin meant to aggro NATO into trying direct military force against Russia, by attacking the target which the most Russian people might theoretically want back in the fold (not going directly after NATO allies in the Baltics instead for example), in order to gell his people together against a truly frightening outside threat which he thought he might be able to beat (unlike aggravating China, for example).

Then again, Putin may be playing the Dumbledore Gambit: have so many plots running at once that you can bet at least some of them will work out right and meanwhile no one knows what you're doing. As Chesterton used to say, there are advantages to your enemies misunderstanding you.

Or as a Fox analyst I heard today likes to say, this may only (!) be a clear example of "late-stage despotism": he's old and more ill than he seems and he wants to go out in a blaze of glory or anything like it in order to make a deep mark of some kind in history, and he doesn't think he'll be around to be held accountable for it later so why not?

Or there may be some Russian mafia ploy this is covering attention for.

Any of several dozen things might be true, and most of them aren't mutually exclusive. Thus the advantage of the Dumbledore Gambit. (Oddly, TVTropes doesn't have a category for this form of "Gambit" yet... It resembles a cross between Gambit Pileup and Xanatos Speed Chess. Be aware that links to TVTropes will likely consume hours of your life, so click at your peril...!)

[SirAndrewD]

Twitter noise, some of which is coming from foreign policy sources like Rubio are saying that the Russian plan was for the airborne assaults at both airports at Kyiv to be decisive. 

Once they had control of the airports, with full air supremacy, they were going to try to take Kyiv by airlift and decapitate the Ukrainian C&C there.

The attacks on the airports failed, so now it seems the Russians are going to implement a possibly more direct strategy. 

We'll know soon enough, the rumors are Kyiv will be subject to a massive strike at or around 3am their time, which will be followed by a heavier renewed ground offensive to cut off the city.

[Gusington]

I got a lot of news (by accident really) from Sky News (UK).

Still very hard to believe this is actually happening.

Much like Toonces said above, fascinating and horrifying at the same time.

[MengJiao]

Russia may be witholding its best assets to prevent the west from knowing their complete capabilities.  Especially with regard to electronic warfare.  Why give us a chance to develop countermeasures for a later need?  Hopefully the Ukraine resistance will force them to use their best troops/equipment so we can develop countermeasures against future need.

   That makes sense, but if they seem have a lot of trouble in the Ukraine because they don't use their best stuff, then in effect they are deterring themselves and making themselves look pathetic.
Of course that may be their actual plan -- to show the world Russia is a third-rate power on its way down that really was threatened by something ( its own ineptitude maybe?).

[SirAndrewD]

Live stream of Kyiv is now showing regular explosions.  Looks like the air strikes are starting...

[MengJiao]

Live stream of Kyiv is now showing regular explosions.  Looks like the air strikes are starting...

  What happened to the black-out?

[JasonPratt]

Well, yeah, if the airport captures failed (a very classic airborne assault mission), Putin either has to try a direct push to rescue his gold-level drop-troops, or let them be burned out and wasted behind the lines as the Ukrainians grind them up. The only good news for Putin in that scenario, is that his elite drop-troops do have some proportionately elite ability to fight toward the rescue pushes (albeit in a lightly armed low-supply sort of way).


The refusal to show off their top-line assets so far may be simply a result of Putin painting himself into the corner of a dilemma's horns (so to speak): he hadn't thought he would need to do so, but now he has to choose whether to start playing (and thus revealing) what trump cards he holds, or else cut his losses and walk away from the table.

But then again, he might have been planning to do walk away from the table anyway -- just not so soon. A solid win condition for him might be: a) secure the larger western side of those two rump 'republics'; b.) secure acknowledged cessation of Crimea to his control; and c.) threaten Ukraine with more of the same if they sniff toward NATO again. Then he pulls back his troops out of the areas he can't take (yet) and announces victory to his people.

But such a strategy necessarily requires him to have a solid enough hold on large enough tracts of land (...Monty Python allusion not originally intended but kept for the effect...) that he can trade leaving those areas for what he's willing to keep (for now), plus doing enough damage to the Ukraine military that they don't have a good chance of punching him out without concessions.

So if his lower-class troops can't take that stand, he has to reveal his better cards or walk away with nothing but shame for trying.