The guy who's the Russian puppet running Chechnya looks like an Amish incel.
Apparently yet another Russian general was killed.
It looks like the Russians are going for an amphibious assault on Odessa which is madness. Odds are this is going to go so sideways it's gonna be tits up but we'll see.
Russian generals are like Al-Quaeda #3 guys these days, except maybe real.
I am so puzzled by the Fox News situation. They have people on the ground in Kyiv reporting and apparently getting killed in the process, and then they have Tucker Carlson.
What if Russians love their generals too?
I am so puzzled by the Fox News situation.
Who could have guessed that the company at the heart of the modern conservative movement would have little regard for the lives of its employees?
7: Fox has always differentiated between its news and its entertainment. I did a quick search and came across this column from the Obama days, when he tried to restrict access for Fox reporters.
Fox argues that its news hours -- 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays -- are objective.
The NYT media columnist treated this as a credible claim. And although it's not reported in my link, Obama's effort to defend himself was met with a general media uproar, and Obama had to back down.
All proper journalists understand that you can tell whatever crazy lie you like, as long as you know in your heart that smart people aren't expected to believe you. Fox News reporters themselves are clear on this.
Fuck 'em. Tucker Carlson's contempt for them is entirely deserved.
It's less dramatic, but the nytimes has similar policies where you can lie as much as you want if it's on the op-Ed page. It's morally bankrupt, but they'll never change it.
The NYT has strict standards: Anyone who holds a respectable opinion should be given an equal opportunity to lie.
(One of the Fox arguments in the Stetler piece I linked is that people understand the difference between news and editorializing.)
I also understand the difference between editorializing and Lord Haw Haw cosplay.
This analysis of Russian army logistics from November sure looks prescient now.
14:
It really does look amazingly prescient. And there is something so disconcerting about the way Vershinin blithely brings up Baltic and Polish scenarios. It makes me realize just how important it is that NATO is strong, even as I wish they could do more for Ukraine. A week or so ago, they noticed Russian forces massing in Brest (southwest corner of Belarus) and within 24 hours, they brought in more troops and Patriot missiles. Lots more on the ground support in the Baltics, too.
10: Did not realize Stetler was at NYT before CNN. An utterly infuriating episode for me. Reminds me of how people in the 90s loved to point out WSJ opinion/news divide when the WSJ OpEd page went utterly batshit over Whitewater*. They were right there together, fuckholes; people don't make the distinction. In fact in that case based on my experience casual readers who were generally non-political did not read the OpEd pieces but still picked up headlines. "Lingering questions about Vince Foster" a D-leaning relative offered up in 2016.
And when push really comes to shove, the Fox "news" guys slant it or occasionally outright float disinfo (Bret Baier election week 2016 "reporting" HRC would be indicted). Last big exception I can think of is the 2020 election call, and that team was subsequently all let go.
They used to bring in people like Brit Hume to be a gravitas loss leader** but seem to have dispensed with that. (Hume is now just another sneering bigot--of course he was actually awful at ABC. but someone the big media bros repected.)
*Seriously there is 3 or 4-volume set of op eds published in book form. I have toyed with ordering them. And they are out and out nuts. (Of course some of what was in the NYT was close to as bad--today at the (paper of record if you search for an article on the Pilsbury report which laid out the stupid, sordid, small stakes details of the Whitewater investment you get a Jeff Gerth fantasy headlined "Documents Show Clintons Got Vast Benefit From Their Partner in Whitewater Deal." Hilarious at some level, but NYT proceeded up until this day as if Gerth was credible investigative reporter and not a more important disgrace than Jayson Blair.
I will never ever forgive the NYT for their treatment of Clintons and Gore. Never ever.
There's obviously a market for this kind of trash journalism. No one has to choose to participate in it.
My biggest general complaint with the general media at this point is the "no fly zone" mantra.
16: I think the news reporters are genuinely embarrassed by a lot of the WSJ opinion writing and I observed one in an interview actively distance herself from those editorials.
Also, (at least pre-Murdoch) some people subscribed to the journal for its business and finance coverage, because it helped them make money. The quality of the journalism mattered for that reason. I don't think that most of the investors reading it thought that batshit columnists advocating for a return to the gold standard were right.
I don't think that most of the investors reading it thought that batshit columnists advocating for a return to the gold standard were right..
No, but they absolutely gave credence to every bit of batshittery that didn't threaten their bottom lines*. The political culture at places like that (not just finance, but also at the decision-making levels of basically every US corporation) ranges from neutral-but-Republican-friendly to held-his-nose-to-vote-for-Goldwater-from-the-right. So basically every conversation that touches on politics is going to include vocal batshittery--largely from the old men in charge--and absolutely nobody challenging it. After awhile, those headlines for columns you skip over make sense, because everyone you work with either repeats them or accepts them.
*and actually, lots of corporate types are goldbugs because macro is above their pay grade and it appeals to their inner reactionary
Speaking of Clinton, Putin included Hillary Clinton in his list of people sanctioned by Russia. Fan service is important.
"Hillary Clinton@HillaryClinton·8h
I want to thank the Russian Academy for this Lifetime Achievement Award."
21-23: I think the best part is how they included Joe Biden Senior.
If JFK and JFK jr are coming back, maybe they just want to have all bases covered?
Speaking of sanctions, I kind of wish I'd gone to see Russia when I had the chance. I'm probably going to be too old to travel before going to Russia as a tourist has low enough odds of making me a hostage that I'd think it a nice vacation.
On the other hand, if things turn out well, Ukraine might be a fun place to visit when the war is over. And you'd be able to feel good about spending tourist money there.
Sec Clinton's tweet is internet winning.
I guess I should wait and see if I start going places regardless.
19: I think that's right. I'll add that longtime editorial page editor Robert Bartley once famously said "My proudest boast is that I've run the only editorial page in the country that actually sells newspapers."
Bartley in some ways pioneered Murdoch's approach, but the WSJ really did keep news coverage separate from its editorial stance.
25: Russia was amazing, and I wish I had gotten to see more of it before we got kicked out. I also made more friends there in three-quarters of a year than I did half a decade in Berlin.
29: I don't know whether it was the editorial pages per se, but once upon a time the Moonie Washington Times was there the conservative movement talked to itself, so if you needed to know what they were up to then you had to buy it.
Back in the day, I always found it embarrassing to read the Washington Times on the subway, but I often did. Nowadays, there are plenty of competing sources for lunacy and the Times doesn't really stand out.
We were going to visit Russia in 2014 when things blew up. Some people suggested that was overconservative, but in retrospect Russia was behaving about as badly then as now, and we had no way of knowing it wouldn't devolve faster like it is now.
(That is, we changed our plans to avoid Russia, and some people suggested that was overconservative.)
I don't really regret not visiting Russia in 2005 when I made tentative plans to go there before deciding to drop out of grad school entirely. I do regret not making time in 2001 to get the travel visa needed to get to Lviv when I traveled north through the central European countries from Slovenia to the Baltics.
30: In the spirit of my having a media grievance about every fucking thing, I recall my ongoing rage during the heyday of the WaTimes at how the fact that it was owned by an extremely wealthy foreigner with explicit political axes to grind was so rarely mentioned by other outlets. If ownership came up at all it was along the lines of "wacky cult religious leader*."
When your editorship for 20+ years goes from racist fuckpig Wesley Pruden to fabulist John Solomon you know you're cooking with gas.
*The number of congress critters who attended various Moonie ceremonies was also astounding**. Many claimed to have been duped when it came to light.
**Including a rare misstep by Elijah Cummings.
I've been finding the daily Campaign Assessments over at the Institute for the Study of War's website useful https://www.understandingwar.org/
Anyone have any opinion on their accuracy?
38: they seem to adapt to events I know happened, with a decent wait for confirmation, which is a good sign compared to either ignoring them and continuing to bang whatever drum you started with, or else hyper-responding to whatever viral killcam content/draconian speech/240mm gluegun is doing the numbers now. That's good. Otoh the 'toot itself was founded by the fucking Kagans so...
36: Share the blame--that's Associated Press and Washington Post investigative reporter/fabulist John Solomon. (Recall also that the NYT's Kenneth Vogel missed the story of Trump extorting Ukraine, which led to the president being honest-to-God impeached, because it didn't produce any actionable Biden dirt he could circulate.)
39: Good points. The Solomon trajectory is instructive. Not sure if he overlapped with Ron Fournier at AP's Washington bureau. Fournier is someone who actually blocked me on Twitter.
And Vogel could prove me wrong, but I put him as the odds on favorite to be the next NYT reporter to go full Alex Berenson. The levels of his twitter defensiveness when called out for the Ukraine thing were a sight to behold.
*Vogel*. Geeez, that yutz. I remember when the news broke about TFG's extortion of Zelenskiy, Vogel decided that he'd go dig for Biden dirt in Ukraine, instead of the extortion. He gave up the most important news of the moment, perhaps the year, perhaps a Pulitzer, to go chasing putative dirt on Biden.
What a tool. I'm with you, JP: he's gonna go Berenson, or Judy Miller, or something like that. Bent as the day is long, that bozo.
Vogel has a new story today centered on, I shit you not, Hunter Biden's emails.
And this framing from his coauthor is insane for a supposedly objective journalist:
"The big takeaway in the Hunter Biden story is that DOJ has struggled to find evidence to support criminal charges, even after it widened it beyond taxes, putting the department in a tough political bind."
Hmm, should they indict someone despite a lack of evidence? A tough political bind!
This and the following tweet are interesting
https://twitter.com/drfarls/status/1504192858626084873?s=21
44: I think Farley is full of it here, tbh. Man-portable ATGM have improved in almost every respect since their Yom Kippur War - portability, accuracy, lethality, speed, all-weather sights, fire-and-forget, top-attack - but the one area where they haven't improved very much is maximum range. SAGGER has an effective range of at least 2,000m and wasn't actually fully effective at less than 800m because basically they took a while to settle down and stop wobbling. Javelin has an effective range of 2,500m and I suspect there aren't many kills happening at out beyond the 2k mark. Anecdotally the engagement ranges are generally pretty close in Ukraine so it may be that what's made a difference is that Javelin and NLAW have a much smaller minimum range (the Egyptians relied on RPG-7 to cover the SAGGER teams against armour within minimum range but it isn't really effective beyond 2-300m and pretty suicidal because of backblast).
For my money what's making the difference is three things. First, we've not actually seen a serious modern non-Arab army defending against armoured attack for a very long time, and we hadn't really realised just how effective proper anti-armour doctrine can be. Second is the vast numbers of ATGM which the Ukrainians are fielding - they have very high density of these systems, and I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually fielding more per unit than even a Western army is normally scaled for. Third is that we underestimated the degree of incompetence on the Russian side, so we're still thinking of them as a near-peer force - "wow the Russians are struggling against ATGM, this means something serious for all other modern armies" - when they're going in there like it's 1956, buttoned up in their IFVs with no dismounted infantry screen at all.
Thanks ajay, that's why I posted 44. I would guess that Javelins and NLAWs being fire and forget also has something to do with it.
Without a doubt. Hastily developed counter-SAGGER doctrine was to fire back at the source with everything you had and manoeuvre - so the operator would be, at least, distracted while you got out of the way. Not going to work with Javelin.
46, 47: What are we talking about in terms of time between firing and hitting? Like, how far away can the Javelin team get before counter-fire begins?
48: that's classified. But public sources give Javelin's speed as 300 metres per second, more than twice as fast as SAGGER's 120 metres per second. You may think "but that's seven seconds before the Javelin hits, surely that can't make much difference" - but it feels, I am assured, a lot longer. SAGGER would take seventeen seconds to cover the same distance, which would feel like an age.
And SAGGER is literally steered on to target with a wee joystick. Sitting there in the open fiddling with that for seventeen seconds while several highly-motivated and understandably annoyed Israelis fire heavy weapons at you is not a great situation, and it's understandable that under those conditions people tend to lose focus and make errors. Javelin operators would have all seventeen of those seconds to leap into, eg, a nearby hole or something.
42, 43: Yes. saw that crazy tweet and reluctantly read the article (which is a muddled mess, reminding me of how a lot of the Clinton email stories read). I'm not sure I even completely understand what the "political bind" is specifically*. Utter shit from utter shitheads--Michael Schmidt presumably adding his special blend of getting bad faith DOJ folks have him grind their axe in the Times.
My read of the it from the article is that they have shown yet another DOJ prosecutor on a bad faith partisan fishing expedition ( a la Durham and Ken Starr) but God forbid they even hint at that possibility in their coverage.
My thought on seeing it was "timing." And the tweet really is special.
*I think maybe that if they do not charge the right will go batshit ( a la HRC)**. Of course they do not seem to mean corresponding "political bind" for Rs who have made hay over Hunter's supposed criminality for years.
**Which the MSM will be forced to cover in sadness rather than anger great glee.
NYTimes Pitchbot nails it:
Why Hunter Biden's failure to commit crimes is a big problem for the DOJ
49: OK, got it--it's not that it lets you get away, it's that it lets you get to nearby cover without detracting from accuracy. And at those kinds of ranges, the tank's compatriots have a lot of potential ground to search for you.
It's much worse for the tankers than fire and forget, though. Non line of sight ATGMs (i.e. variants of Spike) allow the attacker to stay in cover, see a picture (from the missile) of the area that likely contains the target, change target after launch, and in the process gain excellent situational awareness for follow up strikes.
So, there's supposedly a Russian oligarch's son with a house in Pittsburgh and the police are looking for the people who stood outside his house being all threatening.
The police aren't giving names but it was apparently easy to figure out.
The Russian, not the elderly people making threats.
Hey, so, this whole situation is still completely fucking awful beyond the power of language to convey. That is my useful and informative update.
(also, there will be consequences of funding the Azov battalion, reports the author of a book chapter about catfishing a Ukrainian fascist. I listened to the audiobook and strictly speaking didn't learn much, but the catfishing chapter was fun.)
(also report, not vetted, that Russian emigres are having an effect on the rental markets in their refuge cities)
I've heard good things about housing in Utah.
I cannot at the moment believe there is a single military unit with a higher ratio of "words written about it" to "number of members" than the bloody Azov Battalion. It's literally a battalion. 800 men if it's lucky. The Ukrainian armed forces have 200,000 people in them. And somehow they're centre stage (well, not somehow, I know exactly how). The Russians are invading with literal fucking Cossacks but... barely a cheep.
Those Cossacks are no joke. (This has taken the form of a shitpost, but I am in fact serious.)
54: Hilariously, I know exactly who's doing it, and he's a super-annoying guy who has more or less bragged on FB that he's doing it. Meanwhile, in his normal life he's a very high-profile architect/gadfly (and basically dorky white guy). Like, absolutely not a rando.
I'm assuming the police couldn't figure it out without help because they stay away from architects for self-preservation reasons.
Christ, so are things about to get worse in Mariupol?
https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1505683840882331650
I was beginning to think everyone but me had given up doom-scrolling. Kyiv has had a particularly bad night, too, but Mariupol is terrifying.
I'm still at it too, but I haven't had much to say lately. Things are looking pretty grim.
I can't keep spending hours and hours a day on the news, but I do check in frequently, and yeah -- watching "Mariupol" become one of these catastrophes where the name alone is enough to evoke horror and blame is nauseating. I'm also very pointlessly mad at Israel.
I'm also very pointlessly mad at Israel.
Bennett has always been terrible, and the fact that his elevation to Prime Minister was (rightly, IMO) treated as a positive development has more to do with the weird personalization of Israeli politics during the Netanyahu era than with him personally. He is, if anything, to Netanyahu's right on most issues. Relatedly, the extremely conservative Russian immigrant community, concentrated in the Ashkelon/Ashdod area, has played an outsized role in Israeli politics in recent decades and it's entirely unsurprising that the current government would have a pro-Russian tilt. Israel is well-positioned to play a mediating role in this conflict, so it's definitely disappointing that they haven't made more of an effort to do that seriously, but it's not really a surprise.
The complete lack of criticism from South Africa is also sad but not entirely unexpected. Politically SA is much closer to Russia than to Ukraine on a fundamental political question, viz. "Should we, the president and his friends and relations, steal literally everything we can which is not nailed down?"
On the other hand, the great Donbass encirclement people were worrying about has turned out not to be a thing, thanks to general operational friction and the Ukrainian 81st and 95th Airmobile fucking their shit up. Russians are doing odd things like bringing one-off technology demonstrator tanks from the museum/the back shed at the R&D centre to the front line and then getting the turret blown off.
I was never entirely convinced about the Donbas encirclement idea. It would have involved, as far as I can see, the following:
1. Russia advances 150km south from around Kharkiv (which they don't have yet)
2. Simultaneously, Russia advances 150km north from around Zaporozhie (which they also don't have yet)
3. The two advances meet up IVO Dnipro to form a Kessel about 250km in diameter
4. The entire perimeter, or at least its western edge (300km) is defended against frantic breakout attempts by the JFO, and also relief efforts from the western side
5. Russia then advances and collapses the Kessel
Now, it is not my impression that Russia is in a position to do either 1 or 2 particularly fast, let alone both of them fast (to prevent a withdrawal of the JFO from the Donbas) and simultaneously, nor is it my impression that it has enough troops full stop to do 4 or 5, which would be an encirclement of truly enormous proportions (like, Barbarossa proportions) containing most of Ukraine's best-equipped and most experienced units.
But this is me here looking at the wrong sort of map (big hands, little maps, that's the way to kill the chaps) and I would welcome any links on this topic.
Quite apart from everything else, if Russia devoted half its entire original force in Ukraine to closing just that edge of the Kessel, ignoring all casualties since the start, it would have a force density of one man every six metres and one tank every 500 metres which is not very much.
Quite apart from everything else, if Russia devoted half its entire original force in Ukraine to closing just that edge of the Kessel, ignoring all casualties since the start, it would have a force density of one man every six metres and one tank every 500 metres which is not very much.
Quite apart from everything else, if Russia devoted half its entire original force in Ukraine to closing just that edge of the Kessel, ignoring all casualties since the start, it would have a force density of one man every six metres and one tank every 500 metres which is not very much.
the extremely conservative Russian immigrant community concentrated in the Ashkelon/Ashdod area, has played an outsized role in Israeli politics in recent decades and it's entirely unsurprising that the current government would have a pro-Russian tilt.
That's interesting to me. I have no knowledge of the politics of this at all, but my first guess would have been that this group would be similar to Florida Cubans -- who, of course, aren't fans of the oppression in their ancestral home. Maybe the difference is that the regime has changed in Russia?
All the fucking Russians here voted for Trump. At least the ones who emigrated recently enough that they sound Russian to me.
They're anti-communist, not anti-Putin. The further from communism the better, even when that's fascism.
70 you forgot steps:
6. Collect underpants
7. ?
8. Victory!
Clearly there must be some underpants gnomes on the Russian General Staff of whom we have been heretofore unaware.
"Our plan has succeeded! Our soldiers are now spread across 300 km of hostile country in a very thin line, between two large and furious armies!"
"Er... good?"
I'd be very interested in reading a long informed piece on how the Ukrainians are pulling this off: https://twitter.com/osinttechnical/status/1506085795643408390?s=21
Maybe they don't want to tell whole bunches of people just yet.
79: I think the answer may be as simple as this: it's actually really difficult to suppress a serious air defence network that's designed to be mobile and survivable. We only think it's easy because we've seen it done very quickly twice, in 1991 and in 2003, but that wasn't a representative example because it was being operated by an Arab army, and Arab armies generally underperform in every environment. (And in 2003 it was pretty degraded anyway.) But a lot of thought has gone into surviving OCA and SEAD, and the result is all the systems that the Ukrainians are now using, and have been training hard to use, with NATO help, for the last eight years.
81 True and the Russians don't really train much for SEAD/DEAD since NATO doesn't rely nearly as heavily on ground based AA as the Russians do. I wonder if that's going to change now that the Russians seem to finally be employing its Orlans for ISR. I hope not.
I would have thought that the Russians would train a bit for SEAD/DEAD because they've had a few recent campaigns against other post-Soviet states - Ukraine, Georgia - who also use ground AA quite a bit.
But then I would have thought that the Russians would train a bit, full stop.
This piece on their fighters contains very little information: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/22/world/europe/ukraine-air-force-russia.html
84: no! Really? An uninformative article from the NY Times?
86: it looks like military briefers fed them superficially dramatic but basically vacuous content! how could it happen?
79: Pure speculation, but I think it might be a combo of 2 factors: first, what 81 said, but second, Russia's manifest difficulties with air operations with more than 2 planes. If all you have in a zone is a pair of planes and someone fires a missile at them, they both scramble, maybe one gets hit, but neither is in a great position to do anything about the shooter. If you've got a larger sortie, there's a planenot scrambling that can fire at the missile source. That may not work 100% of the time, but it's enough to tip the balance some.
Going back to 81, it's sort of another version of the discussion we had the other day about anti-tank weapons. The handheld weapons have gotten so good that you need a really well-trained force to counteract, and we now know that's not the Russians. I mean, I suspect that NATO forces would also have a harder time than we'd like against a well-equipped enemy*, but I also suspect such an enemy would be seeing a lot higher attrition rate. I know we don't see on social media as much about Ukrainian losses as we do about Russian, but the thread linked in 79 explicitly says that both sides have taken about 10% casualties. When one side is 3X the other, the casualty rates should not be even.
*setting aside COIN stuff. I'm talking about actual field operations, taking territory, not holding it against a hostile populace.
87* makes me wonder: At the moment there's really only one candidate for a peer military competitor, as Russia has DQ'd itself. We know that China has expended a lot of yen and effort into putting itself in that position. But what they haven't done is put any of it into practice. KDrum noted last week that, for better or worse, the US has put its forces into significant combat every few years since the end of the Cold War, such that both the systems and personnel are literally battle-tested, and that this is a huge advantage, over and above the tremendous resources we pour into the military.
The premise of a lot of China talk is that we'd get an unpleasant surprise in an actual shooting war--carrier killers and cyber warfare and whatever else. But what I'm wondering is whether China's literally untested PLAN would end up underperforming.
87.1 That's what EW is for, among other things. And we also know that Russia has a fuckton of EW assets that they also oddly haven't been using. Relatedly, I think keeping up with Michael Kofman, his twitter feed, interviews, etc, is pretty essential here as a backstop to not jumping to conclusions about just why this has been so shambolic.
87.1 sounds reasonable. SEAD isn't just something you potter out there with a mate and do at will, it needs a lot of coordination and planning, of the kind that earnest pale young men and women deep underground at Air Command do lots of, and Russians apparently don't.
the thread linked in 79 explicitly says that both sides have taken about 10% casualties. When one side is 3X the other, the casualty rates should not be even.
They pretty much should, actually, if one side is attacking and the other defending and they're both of equal quality.
But I don't actually think that the Russians do outnumber Ukrainians three to one. Best estimates for Russian ground forces in Ukraine are around 150,000, of whom between 7,000 (US est) and 15,300 (Ukr est) are now dead. Ukrainian estimated dead is between 2,000 and 4,000 (US est), out of a total army size of 120,000 (not counting reservists, irregulars etc, of whom there are presumably many).
The mathematics is not good here. Caveat for uncertainty, but if Ukraine is right, the Russians have taken a total of 61,200 casualties (dead and wounded) in a month. (Three wounded for each dead.) Even if the US estimate is right, the total is still 28,000. A lot of these will be coming from the three small infantry companies and the one tank company in each BTG - a total of around 200 men per BTG, or 24,000 men in the total invading force of 120 BTGs.
So, even using the US estimates - which are conservative - it seems likely that the average life expectancy of a Russian rifleman in Ukraine right now is in the region of four weeks.
All this of course leans on the assumption that Russian medical services are up to 20th century Western standards and that only one in four casualties is a death. That may not be a safe assumption - and the leak yesterday suggested that it's actually more like 40%, which is pretty shocking. In which case their total casualties are lower and life expectancy before becoming a casualty (dead or wounded) is longer.
For comparison, the worst year of Vietnam for the U.S. had 17,000 American dead. And Russia's population now is smaller than the U.S. was back then.
Best estimates for Russian ground forces in Ukraine are around 150,000, of whom between 7,000 (US est) and 15,300 (Ukr est) are now dead. Ukrainian estimated dead is between 2,000 and 4,000 (US est), out of a total army size of 120,000
I think I've not actually seen the total numbers laid out, partly because Russia didn't commit all its troops at the start, and it seemed for awhile like nobody knew how many were actually across the border.
Anyway, that leaked/inadvertent Russian reveal yesterday said ~10k dead, so it seems to be pretty much right between the US & UKR estimates/claims. And, as you say, even the US number would be a bad one.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are starting to counterattack--I believe in 2 discrete, confirmed locations--which is a good sign. If, per the thread in 79, the Russians have been bombarding in a vague effort to regain momentum, then being knocked backwards right now would put them even further from being able to assert themselves and achieve any strategic objectives.
Mariupol updates/rumors from Twitter:
- refugees report that Russians control large parts of the city
- and per US DoD are now firing from 7 ships in the Sea of Azov
- but the Ukrainians shot down a plane
- and kids are dying of thirst
- and Dima's mom is buried near the kindergarten
It doesn't sound so good.
For mild levity, "The US has been unable to determine if Russia has designated a top, theatre-wide military commander responsible for leading the war in Ukraine".
The Dima's mom one had real diary of Tanya Savicheva vibes
And NATO is briefing to the WSJ today that Russia's total casualties - killed, wounded, missing and captured - have reached 40,000, which again sounds not that far out of line with earlier estimates. (And it gives a total for troops deployed of 190,000 at the start of the invasion).
No wonder there are reports that they're digging themselves in and laying mines. They can't afford many more days of mobile operations at this rate; they'll run out of riflemen. A BTG is light on combat-arms elements (infantry and armour) anyway compared to its combat support, and most BTGs in Ukraine right now will be even lighter than they were.
And NATO is briefing to the WSJ today that Russia's total casualties - killed, wounded, missing and captured - have reached 40,000, which again sounds not that far out of line with earlier estimates. (And it gives a total for troops deployed of 190,000 at the start of the invasion).
No wonder there are reports that they're digging themselves in and laying mines. They can't afford many more days of mobile operations at this rate; they'll run out of riflemen. A BTG is light on combat-arms elements (infantry and armour) anyway compared to its combat support, and most BTGs in Ukraine right now will be even lighter than they were.
That implies absolutely horrific attrition in whatever fraction of the 190k total are combat arms. If half the 190k are, which would be way high and might explain why it's been such a logistics fiasco, that's (40/95)*100 = 42 per cent. If it's one-third, that's 40/63 = 63 per cent, getting on for losing two in every three guys who crossed the border, in a month.
I think to be honest it's closer to your second figure. Total troops in theatre is 190,000. 120 BTGs would account for about 70-90,000 of those - the rest would be army-level troops (loggies, army engineers, army artillery, aviation and so on). Of the 600-800 men in each BTG, only around 200 are combat arms - infantry and armour. Total of 24,000.
Now, caveats - there may well be other combat arms units in theatre that aren't part of BTGs. There are significant numbers of spetsnaz and desantniki, obviously. And it isn't clear to me what proportion of casualties will actually be falling on combat arms vs combat support and service support; the Russians have been losing a lot of guns and lorries and so on.
I think to be honest it's closer to your second figure. Total troops in theatre is 190,000. 120 BTGs would account for about 70-90,000 of those - the rest would be army-level troops (loggies, army engineers, army artillery, aviation and so on). Of the 600-800 men in each BTG, only around 200 are combat arms - infantry and armour. Total of 24,000.
Now, caveats - there may well be other combat arms units in theatre that aren't part of BTGs. There are significant numbers of spetsnaz and desantniki, obviously. And it isn't clear to me what proportion of casualties will actually be falling on combat arms vs combat support and service support; the Russians have been losing a lot of guns and lorries and so on.
I was about to ask if there was a good guess at how many of the casualties were support troops are such. Because I would think many logistics people are really exposed give the long supply lines.
His talented roommate was obviously a person to be studied and emulated. During the night , his talented roommate died, and Yossarian decided that he had followed him far enough.
' I see everything once!' he cried quickly.
This, from our Alex on Twitter (the other other place) is very good. https://ecfr.eu/article/combined-farces-russias-early-military-failures-in-ukraine/