Ukraine

royfellows

Well-known member
They are total rubbish. They have little or no training, poor moral, and no fighting spirit.
Their equipment is WW2, and their logistics, fuel, food, meds etc, non existent.

Anyone who wants to follow what is happening should go to You Tube, stuff is breaking on there before main stream media gets it.
Some good videos of the Ukrainians kicking ass, and good look to them. They come over as very professional.
 

JasonC

Well-known member
Tomferry said:
The Russians Cleary don?t believe in the 4 freedoms that?s their issue .

Freedom of speech
Freedom to workship
Freedom of war
Freedom of FEAR

Personally, I would prefer freedom from war and fear....
I suspect the Russians can have any amount of war and fear they like just now
 

Rob

Well-known member
royfellows said:
They are total rubbish. They have little or no training, poor moral, and no fighting spirit.
Their equipment is WW2, and their logistics, fuel, food, meds etc, non existent.

Anyone who wants to follow what is happening should go to You Tube, stuff is breaking on there before main stream media gets it.
Some good videos of the Ukrainians kicking ass, and good look to them. They come over as very professional.
Whilst i don't necessarily disagree, we in the west really do see a one-sided story. And especially "good news" stuff.

A quick example is I've seen loads of photos of Russian tanks destroyed and/or captured. However i've seen zero photos of the 87(?) Ukrainian tanks that have been lost....
 

royfellows

Well-known member
Fair comment, but its pretty obvious now which way its going. Enough videos of crews abanding equipment, plus of course the shooting down of their own planes, the "Tactical withdrawls" etc
 

andrewmcleod

Well-known member
Rob said:
Whilst i don't necessarily disagree, we in the west really do see a one-sided story. And especially "good news" stuff.

A quick example is I've seen loads of photos of Russian tanks destroyed and/or captured. However i've seen zero photos of the 87(?) Ukrainian tanks that have been lost....

I suspect there is strong pressure on Western media not to report on Ukrainian troop positions/advances/successes/failures etc. in any more than a vague sense, in order to not leak intelligence (or that information is simply being withheld regardless).

Some vaguely interesting, if obviously biased, reads:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/american-volunteer-foreign-fighters-ukraine-russia-war/627604/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/ukraine-is-winning-war-russia/627121/
 

mikem

Well-known member
Russia has always played the numbers game rather than tactics or state of the art equipment
 

AR

Well-known member
Rob said:
royfellows said:
They are total rubbish. They have little or no training, poor moral, and no fighting spirit.
Their equipment is WW2, and their logistics, fuel, food, meds etc, non existent.

Anyone who wants to follow what is happening should go to You Tube, stuff is breaking on there before main stream media gets it.
Some good videos of the Ukrainians kicking ass, and good look to them. They come over as very professional.
Whilst i don't necessarily disagree, we in the west really do see a one-sided story. And especially "good news" stuff.

A quick example is I've seen loads of photos of Russian tanks destroyed and/or captured. However i've seen zero photos of the 87(?) Ukrainian tanks that have been lost....

Nothing new about that - there was an example I recall hearing about from the Yom Kippur war where Israeli troops were directing journalists down a particular route to a load of burning Egyptian tanks. Had they gone the other way they would have seen the burning Israeli tanks, but there was "media management" going on. The Ukranians are fighting a media war too and I have to say, doing it brilliantly, while the Kremlin is trotting out obvious lies that Joseph Goebbels would have been ashamed to speak...

However, Roy is on the mark about the state of the Russian army - poorly led, poorly supplied, poorly motivated and slowly being ground down by a numerically much smaller force who are the complete opposite. It's the winter war of 1940 all over again except this time, the rest of Europe is not preoccupied (or occupied).  Also, by all accounts the average Russian NCO  takes Sergeant Hakeswill as his model, and as anyone who's been in the forces will tell you, NCOs are the ones who actually get stuff done in an army and if they're mostly rotten, your army will fall to bits.

I also find it telling that the Russian army hasn't put any of its latest, supposedly world-leading, tanks into the field - that suggests they know all too well how well they'd fare against Javelins and NLAWs and they don't want the Ukranians passing the remains of one to the Americans for analysis, or for the Chinese to see that they can be taken out with hand-launched missiles.
 

Speleofish

Active member
royfellows said:
They are total rubbish. They have little or no training, poor moral, and no fighting spirit.
Their equipment is WW2, and their logistics, fuel, food, meds etc, non existent.

Anyone who wants to follow what is happening should go to You Tube, stuff is breaking on there before main stream media gets it.
Some good videos of the Ukrainians kicking ass, and good look to them. They come over as very professional.

A lot of people are underestimating the Russians. I agree they've performed extremely poorly - perhaps in part because this is the first really large campaign they've tried to fight in decades, so they're discovering all the problems common to huge deployments. Their initial pretence (to their own troops) that they were merely going on exercise didn't help. They've also attempted something that is far too ambitious for such a small force - conventional thinking would suggest they would need nearly 1,000,000 troops to take and hold a country the size of Ukraine unless the population were sympathetic (clearly not).

However, much of their equipment is good and many of their troops are probably as effective as ours. If they had confined themselves to limited goals in the east (more compatible with the size of their army) and attacked on one or two fronts rather than four, they might well have been successful.

What does seem to be clear is that modern anti-armour weapons are devastatingly effective.
 

Speleofish

Active member
Sorry, interrupted during writing.

In addition to the effectiveness of anti-armour weapons, this campaign also shows any warfare is extremely difficult for the attacker if the defence are well-led and well-motivated, especially when the fighting takes place in cities.
 

pwhole

Well-known member
It also shows up the sheer absurdity of trying to impose the bankrupt logic of country-takeover, one that's essentially opposite to the overall trend the world population is taking, which is intrinsic co-operation and sharing of resources and technology, fostered by international trade, travel and communication. And having romantic relationships with foreigners, of course. Many of the world's 'leaders' are now totally behind the curve, their governments crippled by internal corruption (including ours), and I would argue this war is as much a smokescreen to cover up their own inadequacies (and maybe allow them to escape justice) as it is about international power-brokerage. They may not even be conscious of it themselves yet.

Putin's essentially a cheap weirdo gangster, like Harry Flowers in the movie Performance ("He's funny, innee?"), who has created a 'sanctified mythology of justification' for his criminal activity, which sadly many people have bought into - or at least agreed to tolerate as long as it it benefited them to do so. But he's still a cheap gangster ultimately, and not that smart either. And his 'henchmen', as they always do, will go along with anything he says as long as they don't get shafted next. As Robert Reich pointed out the other day (and many others have before him), the pyramid structure of most autocracies practically guarantees failure in any large strategic operation that requires accurate communications:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/apr/01/vladimir-putin-ukraine-truth-deniers-bad-decisions

President Xi take note. At least Putin has some flexibility and creativity in his operation - China has none. I suspect some of their latest 'imperial ambitions' are rapidly being reigned in, not least as it's obvious they'll get stuck on the same tar baby that Putin has, and it'll be even worse for them, as they've literally abolished independent thought within their operation. And haven't fought a war in decades. I almost look forward to seeing them try, if it weren't for the fact that it would be another world disaster. Their visiting students can barely negotiate a trolley down an aisle at Aldi without bumping into something or someone, and only speak to local British residents if they absolutely must, not least as the local com party rep, one of their colleagues, will potentially report them if they do.

Seems an awful coincidence that just as the world needs to make the huge leap forward we've always needed, on covid, climate change, cheap energy abundance etc., our leaders are doing everything they can to hold it back - mainly as the nice little nest they've feathered for themselves will probably go up in smoke when they get their collars felt by a 'Citizens Justice Committee', soon, no doubt, to be forming on a street near you ;)
 

Speleofish

Active member
I think the most important thing that should be considered by anyone contemplating a conventional war of conquest is the sheer number of soldiers one actually needs. Against poor opposition, it's possible to win an initial campaign with relatively small numbers - for example, both Gulf Wars and Afghanistan. Against 'peer' opposition, it's more difficult and costly - the current campaign being a good example. However, in all cases, if you win the initial military campaign, you then have to hold onto the country you've conquered. This requires an enormous number of soldiers - historically, it has taken approximately one soldier for every 50 members of the whole population to control a country and up to 20 soldiers per active insurgent to combat an armed insurgency. In none of the wars the West has fought recently have we deployed anything like that number of troops to maintain 'peace', even if one considers the use of local militias and private military contractors. 

Given that Ukraine had a population of 44,000,000 at the start of this war, it implies one would need approximately 880,000 soldiers to hold onto the country after the initial conquest. Even 20 years ago, this would have stretched the resources of any country or alliance. Subsequently, almost all national armies have reduced dramatically in size. No country can deploy so many troops and retain sufficient force to defend its borders/control its own population - not even China.
 
...but the war hasn't even got to the stage where Russia needed to police 44 million people. They have failed to take any really large city. They've taken Kherson which has a population smaller than Doncaster and nothing larger since.

If you're saying that Russia should have invaded Ukraine with at least a million soldiers, then it weakens your earlier arguments. I mean if they can't do the logistics for an invasion of 200k of troops, then they'll suck badly trying it with 5 times that number.
 

royfellows

Well-known member
I had it from some news source that the Russians invaded in the false belief that they would be welcomed as liberators.
If that is what they truly believed then it explains a lot.
 
The Russian backed forces in Donbas and Luhansk have only been fighting Ukrainian forces since 2014. Hardly enough time for Russian military intelligence to figure out that Ukrainians may not like the Russians.  o_O
 

AR

Well-known member
The Russian army is far too reliant on brute force, and in the face of determined resistance, carefully chosen tactics and resupply from NATO, not to mention failure to establish air superiority, they're slowly being pushed back. You would think the Russians of all nations would remember the lessons of WW2 about fighting off an invader from the rubble of the cities they've destroyed, and what lack of supplies does to even the most powerful of armies.
 

Speleofish

Active member
Cosmo Smallpiece said:
If you're saying that Russia should have invaded Ukraine with at least a million soldiers, then it weakens your earlier arguments. I mean if they can't do the logistics for an invasion of 200k of troops, then they'll suck badly trying it with 5 times that number.

I'm not suggesting the Russians should have invaded with a million soldiers. They don't have that number unless they call up all their reserves. This would leave them pretty defenceless against any other conventional threat or domestic unrest (which might well result from mobilising so many people).

The point I'm trying to make is that they have never had the military resources to take and hold Ukraine unless the population was co-operative, and that this should have been predicted by Putin's military planners in advance of the war. To my mind, this is an even greater failure of planning than their disastrous logistics.
 

oldfart

Member
The South China Morning Post, this morning, said two Russian troops were killed and 28 were in intensive care after being given poisoned cakes in the city of Izium. Another 500 Russian troops were taken to hospitals due to heavy alcohol poisoning, according to the post.

Officials said the Russian government is writing off these cases as ?non-combat losses.?
 

pwhole

Well-known member
I wonder how they'll frame the fact that they ordered their soldiers to dig trenches in heavily-contaminated radioactive ground at Chernobyl, then ordered them to leave, whereupon they went on to a variety of subsequent destinations, including Belarus and Russia, now with radiation poisoning and obvious contamination of everything. This is Grade A mass stupidity, on a level normally outgrown by puberty.

Hopefully this level of denseness may at least force Xi to consider whether he really should be setting up future partnerships with Putin. Maybe he should just invade Eastern Russia whilst they're so preoccupied, instead of doing business with them? Now that would be funny - then we'd really get to see who's best of the worst at technical scrapping. With the Benny Hill soundtrack over the top, obviously.

To be honest, I think the waves of videos of massacred civilians will now probably hasten Putin's downfall - that sort of footage isn't normally accessible in 'easy' wars far away in the middle of nowhere, but everyone in the world has a phone now, so even the main news has to show it. Once you attain 'medieval savage' level in the public arena, it's hard to claw your way back up.
 
The war has to end soon as there's some decent caving there and it could well put even the keenest cavers off going. Perhaps this should be explained to Putin.
https://ukraine-kiev-tour.com/ukraine-spelunking-caving-exploring-caves.html
 
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