Same. I feel similarly about just about everything we've provided so far. It's a damned shame that Abrams are only just now getting to the theater. And we should have been training their pilots on Falcons starting right when Russia crossed the border.

Frozen Conflict?
 

Even the wisest cannot see all ends, but it looks like the war in Ukraine might be headed towards a strategic stalemate.

Apart from Javelin (and other ATGMs), various MANPADs, and HIMARS, the West has failed to supply Ukraine with the weaponry that could have had decisive effect on the battlefield in a timely fashion (MBTs, ATCMS, modern tactical fighters- the latter the UAF is still waiting on). Instead, it's usually been a case of too little, too late. I wonder if the strategic situation today would be markedly more in favor of Ukraine if those weapon systems had been provided to the UAF much earlier.

Perhaps most alarming is the growing reluctance of USA and a couple of its NATO partners to continue supporting Ukraine materially. It appears that the flow of foreign-supplied weapons and ammunition to the UAF will soon slow.

By the same token, reports of Russia running out of essentially weaponry and ammunition appear to have been somewhat exaggerated. Yes, attrition has been heavy, but Russia still retains enough firepower to prevent a decisive Ukrainian victory on the ground. Furthermore, although recent Russian offensive operations have been very wasteful (see Bakhmut and Avdiivka), the Russian military is still strong enough to simultaneously defend its territorial gains while support continued attacks on multiple fronts.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...-zelensky-says

I was surprised to read that the younger end of the current UAF draft age is 27, and that plans to lower it to 25 have been held up by the congress. IIRC, 27 was the average age of all US servicemen in WW2.

Meanwhile, Russia shows no signs of running out of military manpower (however poor the quality thereof). Unlike the Ukrainian gov't, Putin shows very little reluctance to resort to conscription to backfill the Russian army in Ukraine.

I really hope the West doesn't lose its nerve. Despite years of hardship and loss, Ukraine doesn't have the luxury of doing so.

Slava Ukraini!

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While I agree with some of your points Raellus, I think that ONE point is now painfully clear.

The West is weak.

I went to Wikipedia: Cold War tank formations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War_tank_formations

Germany alone
1.200 M48
2.437 Leopard 1
500 Leopard 2
770 Kanonenjagdpanzer (cannon armed tank destroyer)
350 Raketenjagdpanzer (Missile armed tank destroyer)

We had ammunition for a world war.
We had a food reserve to feed the people of Germany in the event of a war.

And where did it go?

I can still hear the politicians saying after 1990: We are surrounded by friends.

What were they thinking?
Have they learned nothing?
A state has no friends, only shared interests. (Attributed to Bismarck and Charles de Gaulle)
Between states there is no friendship, just alliances. (Attributed to Charles de Gaulle)

We downgraded our armies (Germany from 500.000 West + 200.000 East to less thean 190.000 and about 225 MBT).
We believed McKinsey and Just-in-Time production and got rid of stockpiles.
The Emergency food reserve was shipped to Africa.

The last I heard that Germany has enough ammo for TWO days of fighting (World War style) and then the german manufacturers need SIX months to refill this stockpile.
Can you imagine that? Germany fights two days, then six months of cease fire, two days of fighting, ad infinitum.

What we need is to rebuild our industrial power to produce enough war material, ammo, etc. We have to go back to 1985.
We have to stop outsourcing because if we are dependent on another state (hint China, Taiwan) and they dont like us or go to war, then we are like the fish after the water went away.

Rae: Things have definitely taken a pause for a while, and I think that a "strategic stalemate" is the correct moniker for what's happening right now.

There have been some recent items of note though -

• Ukraine getting ahold of ATACMs has forced Russia to pull helicopters back further away from the front, resulting in longer flight times and less loitering on the battlefield. This should result in fewer losses of Ukrainian heavy equipment (especially with those valuable western tanks).
• On the left bank of the Dnipro, Ukraine is continuing to force Russia into an untenable situation. Russia doesn't have the manpower to force Ukrainians out, and recently some Russian units are flat out refusing orders to engage.
• Recent polling has shown an increase in the number of Russians wanting out of Ukraine. I'd say this would effect the upcoming election, but let's be real, Putin won't allow himself to lose even if the vote is against him.
• The two major rail lines from China being taken out in the last week will slow things domestically for Russia, even when it comes to domestic industry, which will start to have more of an impact on the Russian day to day.
• The ruble, despite clawing back some value in the last month, has been on a downward slide for a year now, increasing pressure on the Russian citizenry.

The longer the war drags on...I'm not sure if it benefits Russia due to Russia's ability to lean on its higher population, or if it benefits Ukraine due to the continuing attrition of Russian heavy equipment. I imagine a lot will hinge on the west continuing to provide more tanks and equipment to Ukraine. And I do think that the upcoming elections in the states will likely have a pretty big impact on American financial and material support for Ukraine, which is a damned shame (we should be supportive no matter which party is in power).

Bad News
 

I am sorry to be disabused of the notion that Ukraine was achieving success on the left bank of the Dnipro...

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...-river-assault

Everything I'd seen up to today was decidedly more sanguine.

Slava Ukraini!

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Similar reports have been coming in for some time now. I get the impression that this operation was some sort of coup de main, but there was no actual plan in place to exploit the landing, once it had taken place successfully. It seems to me now that there are no follow on forces available, making this a costly stinging attack at best.

Through the course of the war, Ukraine's general pattern seems to be attempting to put Russia into as many untenable positions as possible - the attack across the Dnipro seems to be just another of those attempts.

By inserting forces on the left bank, Russia's has to continue committing forces to that region to guard against a breakout - forces that otherwise would have been fighting likely closer to Robotyne during the counteroffensive. It also makes Russia behave more cautiously with the deployment of reserves. I have a feeling that's all the attack was intended to accomplish, despite the high Ukrainian losses.

Strategically and/or operationally, that makes a lot of sense. What strikes me, though, is that the Ukrainians have never really even threatened a breakout on the left bank. A breakout would require a mechanized spearhead and the logistical infrastructure to support it. They simply haven't been able to amass strong mobile forces in the bridgehead- it doesn't seem like they've really even tried. AFAIK, there's been no attempt to put a pontoon bridge or AFV ferry in place. In all fairness, whether the Ukrainians would have been able to defend said effectively from Russians airstrikes and artillery is quite another matter. The bridgehead was formed and, up to this point, totally supported by small boats. There's no way a modern breakout force can be sustained by small boat.

As a result of the Ukrainians' failure to expand the bridgehead and threaten a breakthrough, the Russians haven't really had to divert strong forces to contain it. My impression is that during the first couple of weeks of the UAF bridgehead, it really freaked the Russians out, and they took heavy losses trying to dislodge it by direct assault. That played right into the Ukrainians' hands. It appears that the Russians have learned that this approach is wasteful and counterproductive. Now, they seem content to cordon off the beachhead and batter it with artillery and airstrikes. Ukrainian troops are stuck on the left bank getting pounded on the daily for little appreciable operational/strategic gains. This was lamented by several of the UAF personnel quoted in the piece.

Why the UAF insists on reinforcing failure with this operation is less clear. Perhaps they have fallen prey to the sunk-cost fallacy?

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Perhaps "breakout" was the wrong word there. More just that there was a risk of Ukraine taking more land unless Russia spent resources trying to defend it, which reduced their capability of doing lateral reinforcements from the Kherson region back over to near Robotyne.

As for why they're continuing to reinforce the area? Your guess is as good as mine - it doesn't make much sense to me either. I heard that domestically, it made a splash in Russian news and upset their milbloggers that Russia couldn't dislodge the Ukrainians...but that doesn't seem like a good enough reason to continue to throw soldiers into the operation.

Sea Change?
 

This is not good news. Here's an abstract:

“Russia will be materially advantaged in 2024 in artillery ammunition, in production of drones and likely long-range drones and cruise missiles, too,” Kofman said. “If the West just assumes that it’s a stalemate and can reduce its commitment to Ukraine, Russian advantages will compound because Russia doesn’t accept the stalemate.”

https://apnews.com/article/russia-wa...2585e626a8b5db

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It's pretty obvious that the biggest mistake Ukraine made wasn't in 2013, or 2014, or at any time during the current hot phase of their conflict with Russia. Ukraine's biggest mistake was in 1994 when it believed that the security assurances given by Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States were worth any more than the paper they were written on.

Giving Ukraine just enough equipment and ordnance to keep the conflict at a stalemate isn't doing anyone any good. Soldiers on both sides keep dying in appalling numbers, the Russians continue to engage in war crimes and crimes against humanity on a daily basis while the western world watches on and makes "tut-tut" noises, and Putin knows with almost total certainty that given time, the rest of the world will stop caring enough and he'll get what he wants.

If the west wasn't going to intervene properly at the start, with a Ukraine-wide no-fly zone and even better, boots on the ground, then we should have given the Ukrainians everything they needed, from day one. What's the point of helping someone fight a war if you know the help isn't sufficient to guarantee they'll win? At this point I genuinely can't judge whether or not Ukraine would be better off capitulating.

Many of us are Cold War kids. Teenaged me would be utterly horrified and totally confused if I was brought forward in time and saw this travesty underway today. It's like testosterone levels dropped by 80% over the last 30 years.

Saw an interesting theory. The airfields in the south west of Ukraine are the best fit for the moment for F-16s. They are also on average the greatest distance from secure Russian and Belorussian territory. So not unsurprisingly the first units deployed are going to go there. Having something in the area to "prod the bear" will lead to greater exposure of forces and logistical elements for potential engagements.

This area has seen quite a bit of whittling down of Russian Airforces in the past few weeks (patriots taking out 4 x SU-34s in the past four days alone) so this might be part of that larger plan.

Funny you mention that. I saw somewhere that the average testosterone levels for 18 year old men now is at the same level as 65 year old men 23 years ago, so maybe there is something to that theory.

In grand geopolitical terms, I think we are seeing the death of the Westphalian nation-state. Most countries, especially non-nuclear armed countries, are actually incapable of defending themselves against any serious aggressor. Ukraine almost certainly would have fallen by now without Western aid, even as inept as the Russians have proven to be in military combat and logistics. The nation-state status quo was stabilized by shifting alliances through the end of colonialism, and then through the Cold War by the two-pole geopolitical system, but now all that is dead. So what's to stop Venezuela from invading Guyana if they want to and the United States chooses to do nothing? Brazil? The UK? And let's say the UK does decide to do something - is it a sure thing that the UK will prevail in a conventional conflict half a hemisphere away when their entire army now numbers only 75,000 men and women in active duty?

I remember when NATO decided to support the Libyan rebels, and the combined combat forces of Germany, Italy, and the UK (and maybe France) were completely dependent on the US for munitions to bomb Libya with.

If Ukraine was guilty of something, then most of the world was guilty of it as well, as they demobilized not only their military, but their infrastructure to support a military. When Russia originally invaded the Ukraine in 2014, Ukraine only had around a brigade of active duty soldiers to resist with. A lot of the initial combat against the Russians was by legit citizen militias. I think the mistake a lot of people made (including Biden) was thinking that Russia would be content with a minor land grab. It's apparent that Putin really does bemoan the collapse of the USSR and is looking to rekindle it, or at least rekindle the Russian empire as his legacy.

I'm afraid that's exactly what it's shaping up to be-a terrible bloody stalemate where Putin waits for the West to lose interest or at best a de facto ceasefire and each side adopts a policy of watchful waiting.

Indeed. I wonder if parceling out 50 Abrams, 20 Challengers and so on doesn't make the already chaotic Ukrainian supply/logistics worse while only marginally improving a small portion of their Armed Forces.
I've also wondered if instead of penny packets of Western MBT's and MICV's if instead the West had "acquired" or shipped from dwindling stocks Warsaw Pact/East Bloc equipment AND ratcheted up Polish, Slovak and Romanian repair facilities who would still have older specialists who could repair Ukraine's largely Eastern Bloc/WP equipment?

I know we've looked at Russian tank losses in this thread previously, but does anyone have information about Ukrainian tank losses beyond Oryx's data?

I ask because we know that Russian heavy equipment bases are emptying at an alarming rate, with them emptying entirely being likely in the next 12-18 months (recent attrition rates would indicate closer to 12). And as those bases empty, Russian tank forces are going to be of worse and worse quality.

I'm confident Ukraine is losing tanks as well, albeit likely at nowhere near this pace. Granted, they didn't have anywhere even close to as many to begin with, and the west as noted hasn't really provided many tanks either. But at some point, Russia will run out of tanks, which will "tank" their ability to conduct mechanized assaults, effectively ending their offensive operations further into Ukraine. That is, unless they want to send more waves of infantry and APCs into fortified defenses, which may be the case. At that point, Russia will be someone forced to either operationally pause and reassess their offensive operations, or attempt to broker a treaty by which they'd keep the land they've already taken.

If Ukraine has the tank capacity to outlast the Russian tank supply, that may open up some significant options for them. Or if nothing else, so long as the west continues to provide additional tank forces to them after Russia runs dry, that will impact any possible future negotiations.

*edit: This is also assuming Russia isn't able to begin sourcing tanks from elsewhere - namely Iran and the DPRK.

What if Putins health failed before the end of the war, would whomever ended up in power continue the war or respectfully withdrawer?

From what I've been able to observe, both the Russians and Ukraines have been using tanks more as mobile pill boxes than their traditional role as breakout and maneuver elements. There have been some exceptions, but those ended very poorly for the massed formations. It may be that the current generation of guided and fire and forget anti-tank weapons is just too deadly for Gulf War and earlier tank tactics to be effective against peer / near peer opponents any more, especially without air dominance.

Probably some observation bias at play here, but what we see on a lot of the released videos is squad and platoon sized infantry probes that get wrecked by artillery, and then mopped up by drones, with some occasional close in trench fighting (which is nonetheless probably a lot more common than caught on go-pro).

In one sense, this war reminds me a lot of a WW1 trench style trench warfare with much lower troop densities manning the trenches (partly due to the greater accuracy of artillery and drones, partly due to the fewer numbers of men).

Long term though, an attrition war definitely favors Russia.

I have the feeling the issue comes down more to minefields and drones, with regard to tank operations. Even still, it's hard to beat direct fire support from tank guns. I do wonder how things will progress in this area - if we see tanks start to disappear from the battlefield entirely due to drone usage, or if counter-drone capabilities get advanced to the point where tanks will re-emerge as a dominating force.

The other piece I wanted to call out was regarding platoon and squad sized probes. Outside of major offensives, you're right that the majority of movement seems to be pretty small in nature. I imagine that this is also the result of drones and better battlefield communications. It seems to have gotten significantly more difficult for sides to build up adequate masses of armor for a large push without the other side knowing about it.

In short, drones and artillery have made it so that neither side can properly amass a force large enough to be able to break through the enormous minefields.

With respect to massing forces for pushes/breakouts I think the ratio of forces available to width of the front is playing a major role. The front in huge and just occupying it is difficult. It's challenging to mass armor because it requires pulling armor reinforcements from other parts of the line weakening them. With neither side enjoying air superiority they can't shore up a lack of armor with air support or make air assaults.

Dodging the Draft
 

Is Ukraine losing its will to fight? I am troubled more by this development in the war than any other over the past two years. Russia's main advantage is in military manpower. The Ukrainian parliament's refusal to expand the draft plays right into Putin's hands. He's already shown that he's willing to bleed his own country dry to win the long game.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zon...-by-parliament

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Any thought on the double downing over Azov Sea (Edit 3)
 

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GD1REsZX...jpg&name=small

https://twitter.com/albafella1/statu...41376660406730

This rumor seems to have solidified, but even taking into account longer range assets (Patriot, AMRAAM) getting two hits this deep behind the front lines > (150km) is puzzling.


EDIT 1 & 2
From analyzing satellite images of contrails it looks Like something was tracking much further north than the above image and within patriot range.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GD1vp6pX...jpg&name=small

Also the IL-22 looks like it made it back to base
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GD5ChZzX...jpg&name=small

Source for both here.
https://twitter.com/HamWa07


Edit 3 Added Patriot Range that covers the circuit tracks.

Here is a preliminary analysis by author David Axe on how that could have went down on the Ukrainian side. Of course details on such an operation are scarce and likely will remain so for the time being, but he sounds reasonable and in the past has written other well received articles.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidax...h=601256603566

If accurate (even partially) that's a great operation by Ukraine. Russia has lots of old AFVs and mobiks but precious few high tech force multipliers like AWACS. Taking those out is a huge benefit to their operations, especially at a time of year where ground forces have limited mobility.

Now breaking a hole in ground based radar means they can conduct long cruise missile and drone attacks on locked down ground assets.

It doesn't elude me that the AWACS targeting happened almost directly after the first F-16s were allegedly delivered into Ukraine's hands. I have to imagine that delivery was one of the reasons behind the operation.

Excellent point.

Ukraine has introduced a new UGV, the Ironclad. It's surprisingly small for the name, at 1,800 kilograms dry with a 400 kilogram payload capacity. Standard armament so far seems to be an M2 machine gun in a rotating mount with a thermal optic. The mount (Shablya/Sabre) has also been fitted with PKT and M240 machine guns in other uses. Back in 2018 there was talk of mounting a 40mm grenade launcher instead of the machine gun and a pair of Karl Gustav tubes in addition to the machine gun, but I don't know if those have been developed to the point of entering service.

The optic allegedly has a maximum viewing range of 5 kilometers and will pick up a human at 1800 meters. Control range is supposed to be 5 kilometers as well, with the vehicle having a maximum road speed of 20 km/h, a rough terrain speed of 10-15 km/h, a range of 130 kilometers, and protection from 7.62mm rifle fire.

It looks a lot like an ATV, but with an articulated center joint so that the front and rear can pivot independently (both sections have electric motors powered by a diesel engine), reducing the turn radius. It appears that it can be directly driven in non-combat situations, as the rear section has a seat with controls.

Speaking of unmanned vehicles, UAF "drone boats" sank a Russian Tarantul III Class corvette (it's sometimes classified as a missile FAB, instead).

https://www.twz.com/news-features/uk...ne-boat-attack

On the ground, Ukrainian forces are really feeling Russia's marked advantage in artillery ammunition.

I really hope the US Congress gets its act together and authorizes another aid package for Ukraine. ATM, it's not looking good.

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I'm not sure on the status of that, but personally I haven't seen any videos about Ukrainian F-16s in action. So, I remain hesitant to draw conclusions.

That's entirely fair. I tend to be a bit of an optimist regarding the war, but I understand the hesitancy to want to speculate about what's actually happening.

I will say that the situation in Avdiivka unfortunately seems to be deteriorating at a poor rate at the moment, but what can be expected when Russia seems comfortable with the current insane attrition rates.