The Russian-Ukrainian War Thread

ngatimozart · Oct 22, 2022

Exonian said:
I would think that every Russian general would be able to see the vulnerability of the Russian position west of the Dneiper once the river crossing points had been destroyed or degraded. The difference appears to be that Surovkin has been able to convince Putin of the fact. Now all they have to do is get out as much equipment as possible, and try to portray the withdrawal in the most positive light.

Maybe but the Generals haven't exactly performed have they? They've been somewhat lacking in general like skills.

One other option to consider is that Surovkin may be planning a Stalingrad in Kherson in order to do unto the Ukrainian Southern Front Forces what Zhukov did unto von Paulus. The Russians are evacuating the city of non combatants and Surovkin is one who will fight to the last bullet. I don't think that he's anywhere as good as what Zhukov was but he's brutal and sometimes you need a commander to make the real hard decisions and stick with them regardless. He's one of those but unfortunately his brutality is more than is what's required for the job. He'd have done well in the NKVD or the SS.

STURM · Oct 22, 2022

ngatimozart said:
I don't think that he's anywhere as good as what Zhukov was but he's brutal and sometimes you need a commander to make the real hard decisions and stick with them regardless

Zhukov made his share of very costly mistakes and he was more than willing to incur high casualties if that was the price to be paid. A major difference with Surovkin is that he was allocated the resources and had strategic reserves he could draw on. Surovkin assumed command when things were really bad and he hasn't much resources he can draw on.

ngatimozart said:
He's one of those but unfortunately his brutality is more than is what's required for the job. He'd have done well in the NKVD or the SS.

It would seem that every newly appointed Russian General gets labeled with being brutal but are they really brutal or are they just a product of the system they belong to? Sure, Russian tactics in Chechnya and Syria were brutal in the sense that mass firepower was leveled on cities with little regard for civilians but that's the way the Russian [and the Soviets before them] do things.

In WW2 almost every Soviet Front or higher level commander could be described as brutal if compared to their Western Allied counterparts. If we go back to the 19th century the way the Russians went about adding the Caucasus and Central Asia to the empire was brutal at times; as were later Soviet attempts to eradicate the Basmachi rebelion

ngatimozart said:
He'd have done well in the NKVD or the SS.

If it's the Waffen SS as opposed to the Allgemeine SS it would depend as there really was no typical Wafen SS commander. There were some who were eager to please Hitler but there were others who were very effective commanders who put their men first; like Hausser at Kharkov who withdrew his Corps against direct orders when it was close to being surrounded.

STURM · Oct 22, 2022

This article is from some time ago and about Syria. In sharp contrast to their approach with the Ukraine the Russians had as very clear understanding about what needed to be done in Syria. They were under no flawed ssumptions; they allocated sufficient resources and military planners came up with a sound plan.

With the Ukraine everything that could go wrong did go wrong; Putin overestimated the capabilities of his armed forces; he was convinced that the enemy would put up spirited but brief and futile resistance and the Russian army found itself fighting a war it was unprepared for.

A Logic All Its Own Russian Operational Art in the Syrian Campaign

The author describes the unique logic of Russian military thought and how Russia successfully implemented operational art during its campaign in Syria.

www.armyupress.army.mil

"To the shock of conventional wisdom, the Russians achieved their strategic objectives at a relatively low cost in just three and a half years. How did the Russians pull this off? The answer lies in the skillful application of operational art. The Russians planned for Syria by using five elements of the Russian military thought process: (1) historic analysis, (2) trends, (3) foresight and forecasting, (4) forms and methods, and (5) correlation of forces and means. This dialectical thought process produced a feasible, realistic plan that achieved their strategic goals of stabilizing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime and boosting its international prestige"

STURM · Oct 22, 2022

Is the targeting of energy and water infrastructure considered a war crime? I personally abhor attacks on infrastructure which leads to hardship for civilians but lest we forget or overlook; such attacks have been done to Serbs, Iraqis, Lebanese and others way before the Ukrainians. Given that energy and water infrastructure also have military utility does that make them legitimate targets?

Ukraine faces widespread outages after wave of Russian attacks

More than a million households left without power following Russian attacks on energy and civilian infrastructure.

www.aljazeera.com

Al Jazeera’s Kimberley Halkett reporting from the White House spoke to the National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby who said Russia’s attack on civilian infrastructure including alleged ones on the dam were “absolutely unacceptable”

Water under siege in Iraq: US/UK military forces risk committing war crimes by depriving civilians of safe water - Iraq

Analysis in English on Iraq about Water Sanitation Hygiene; published on 8 Apr 2003 by CESR

reliefweb.int

"During the first Gulf War, attacks against Iraqi infrastructure by US-led military forces claimed a minimum of 110,000 civilian casualties.24 The vast majority of deaths were caused not by the direct impact of bombs but by the destruction of the electric power grid and the ensuing collapse of the public health, water and sanitation systems, leading to outbreaks of dysentery, cholera, and other water-borne"

FACTBOX: Costs of war and recovery in Lebanon and Israel

The impact of the 34-day war that erupted between Israel and Shi'ite Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon a year ago is still reverberating in both countries.

www.reuters.com

"Israeli bombing hit bridges, roads, airport runways, ports, factories, power and water networks, and military installations, as well as Beirut’s southern suburbs and towns and villages in the south and the eastern Bekaa Valley"

"Up to 15,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil spilled onto Lebanon’s coast after Israel bombed a power station south of Beirut, causing a major ecological crisis. U.N. experts said a swift clean-up had limited damage to marine life"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/stories/belgrade052599.htm

"Officials at the Pentagon and at NATO headquarters in Belgium said allied jets deliberately attacked the power grid, aiming to shut it down more completely and for longer periods than at any time previously in the two-month-old air campaign. U.S. officials estimated the attacks had shut off power to about 80 percent of Serbia"

"The attacks also slashed water reserves by damaging pumps and cutting electricity to the few pumps that were still operative. Belgrade's water utility said that reserves of drinking water had been reduced to 8 percent, according to the Beta news agency, and that 60 percent of the city was without water service. The agency said authorities were trying to restore water to most city residents by midnight."

"A NATO spokesman, Peter Daniel, insisted that allied warplanes were not targeting the Yugoslav water system or main power plants. Instead, he said, the attacks were aimed at "the transformers and the edges, so to speak, of the electricity-generating system."

"Still, military officials confirmed that the objective of using conventional explosives against parts of the power grid was to cause longer-lasting disruptions of electrical service. "It's fair to say we made the decision that we're going to attack some elements of it in a way that's going to take it down for longer than it would have been," said a senior officer at the Pentagon"

The Balkan Air War | Air & Space Forces Magazine

The European war that began 10 years ago this month was fought—and won—with airpower alone.

www.airandspaceforces.com

"This was far from ideal. “I’d have gone for the head of the snake on the first night,” said USAF Lt. Gen. Michael C. Short, who ran the air war for NATO. “I’d have turned the lights out” in Belgrade immediately"

jref · Oct 22, 2022

STURM said:
In WW2 almost every Soviet Front or higher level commander could be described as brutal if compared to their Western Allied counterparts.

Given the length of fighting on the eastern front relative to its western counterpart as well as the level German atrocities, it would had been a surprise if they had been anything else but brutal. It was truly a war of annihilation. It's part of their historical DNA and it's only natural we're seeing a continuation of it.

Big Slick · Oct 22, 2022

STURM said:
Is the targeting of energy and water infrastructure considered a war crime? I

Absolutely not a war crime. It’s a matter of will it hasten the end of the war and does the combatant have the means. Of course for propaganda purposes if your side is on the receiving end than it’s a war crime.

STURM · Oct 22, 2022

Big Slick said:
Of course for propaganda purposes if your side is on the receiving end than it’s a war crime.

And if civilians suffer disproportionately or unnecessarily then by right it can be called a war crime.

jref said:
it would had been a surprise if they had been anything else but brutal. It was truly a war of annihilation

War I suppose by the very definition is brutal; whether the U.S. submarine blockade of Japan; German anti partisan tactics; British fire bombing of German cities or the Soviets entering East Prussia. The war in the Soviet Union was truly an ideological war and it was brutal but the way the Soviets [and later the Russians] did things was driven by circumstance and by doctrine.

jref said:
itIt's part of their historical DNA and it's only natural we're seeing a continuation of it.

Part of the reason I think has to do with the need to mitigate certain limitations. In the Ukraine the Russian approach to urban fighting has been to obliterate whole city blocks and then send infantry in; partly to avoid unnecessary friendly casualties but also because most Russian units had not benefited from urban warfare training. From their perspective why send in the infantry and have them fight street by street and cellar by cellar and suffer high casualties when firepower is available to degrade the enemy.

In WW2 the practice of mass artillery bombardments and massing units at breakthrough points was partly to do with the fact that the Soviets understood and acknowledged that at a tactical level the Germans had the edge and that some level of numerical and firepower superiority was essential.

The Soviets were very practical and were realists. Soviet Cold War doctrine called for 2-3 tanks to simultaneously target an enemy tank because they realised that NATO tanks had superior gunnery due to higher levels of crew training and a higher level of baseline protection. Doctrine called for SAMs to be fired in 3-4s to increase the PK due to realisation that some missiles might malfunction or be decoyed.

Big_Zucchini · Oct 22, 2022

STURM said:
Is the targeting of energy and water infrastructure considered a war crime? I personally abhor attacks on infrastructure which leads to hardship for civilians but lest we forget or overlook; such attacks have been done to Serbs, Iraqis, Lebanese and others way before the Ukrainians. Given that energy and water infrastructure also have military utility does that make them legitimate targets?

Certainly not a war crime. But this label is meaningless. There is no mechanism in place to enforce compliance and punish lack of it. Or more precisely, there is a mechanism, but it is almost completely ineffective vs most countries.

What matters more is how others view this targeting policy. The more Russia does such things, whether legally war crimes or not, the more skeptical the west will be of it, and more demanding it will be, when Russia eventually decides to negotiate something. And in the short term, it definitely motivates the west to accelerate arms shipments and add defensive equipment.

tonnyc · Oct 22, 2022

Regarding water infrastructure, attacks against dams has a specific provision in Article 56 of the Geneva Convention, in which Russia is a signatory.

Works or installations containing dangerous forces, namely dams, dykes and nuclear electrical generating stations, shall not be made the object of attack, even where these objects are military objectives, if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population. Other military objectives located at or in the vicinity of these works or installations shall not be made the object of attack if such attack may cause the release of dangerous forces from the works or installations and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.

Although Russia evacuating Kherson may allow them to argue that there won't be any severe losses among the civilian population.

Other water infrastructure such as piping, municipal water tanks, water treatment plants, etc., is covered by article 52, General Protection of Civilian Objects.

1 Civilian objects shall not be the object of attack or of reprisals. Civilian objects are all objects which are not military objectives as defined in paragraph 2.

2 Attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives. In so far as objects are concerned, military objectives are limited to those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.

3 In case of doubt whether an object which is normally dedicated to civilian purposes, such as a place of worship, a house or other dwelling or a school, is being used to make an effective contribution to military action, it shall be presumed not to be so used.

Others have noted though that there is no effective enforcement mechanism.

Ananda · Oct 22, 2022

This is why sometimes ago in this thread, I post any accusation of war crimes from either sides is moot argument. Only work for 'propaganda' accusation from either side. Only ways to execute the accusation if one of the sides lost and capitulated.

War Crimes only work for the looser, period. That's the fact thoughout human history. Oo someone will argue the victors sometimes put trials of their individual soldiers doing war crime during operation. However it is very selected, cause face it the victors have luxury to choose whose going to be indicted base on their agenda.

So unless this war progressing in to WW3, then there's no way indictment of war crimes toward the policy makers on either sides can happen (if there's still victors left after WW3). Only toward individual POW this potentialy still can happen.

wsb05 · Oct 23, 2022

Feanor said:
That is a very interesting possibility that I did not consider at all. Except for one small detail. Russia can't hold the Oskol river. If they can't correct the lack of troops on the front they won't be able to hold the Dnepr either. If they can hold that line, there's no reason they can't hold the current defense line. Russia doesn't appear to have a shortage of artillery or munitions. The shortage, as far as I can tell, is in front line infantry, and C4ISR. If this is Russia's plan, it's a fundamentally mistaken one.

I agree on the weaknesses of the Russian military. I would add there is a shortage of precision munitions. If the attacking Ukrainians were met with guided artillery and guided missiles from helicopters in numbers consequences for the Ukrainian would have been disastrous.

On the other hand Dnieper is not the Oskol river. It is not know how many Ukrainian soldiers are on the West Bank and the logistics needed to support a big enough Russian contingent on that side to hold them off. Ukrainian breakthroughs In critical areas could encircle thousands of troops and cause routs due to limited ability to maneuver from the west to the east side.

Evacuating civilians could reduce the logistical burden on the river crossing.

Reducing the front line on the west bank would also reduce the need for personnel, supplies and would be a smaller area to monitor.

Russians could gradually move artillery, AA, EW to the east side of the river. Barricade the west bank an

Once and if Russian reserves and personnel reach sufficient numbers, they could expand the bridge head and launch a counter offensive.
If not, personnel could be withdrawn fairly more easily than equipments.

If the news of Russian military retreat in the area is true, this is telling that Mykolaiv and Odessa are no longer immediate war aims.The land corridor to Crimea would be strengthened before moving anywhere else.

seaspear · Oct 23, 2022

With regard to Russia's artillery usage and barrel wear ,is it known if Russia has maintenance facilities in occupied regions for their artillery systems ?
Are Russian Artillery barrels at end-of-life? (ryanmcbeth.com)

Big_Zucchini · Oct 23, 2022

seaspear said:
With regard to Russia's artillery usage and barrel wear ,is it known if Russia has maintenance facilities in occupied regions for their artillery systems ?
Are Russian Artillery barrels at end-of-life? (ryanmcbeth.com)

No information that I could gather. What Russia is not lacking is metalworks, and if simply supplying steel tubes is necessary, they can fix it fairly quickly. As far as replacing them in the field, for that you don't need an organized center. Not necessarily at least. With a crane rated for the barrel's weight and the proper tools, you can attempt that on the field. At least in the IDF there are tech units that go out to the field and make complex repairs and maintenance that are beyond the crew's capabilities, and they do it then and there where the force is parked.
Russians are using improvised centers in the field, I don't know if they're equipped to handle that kind of work though.
Worn out barrels don't have to be dumped - they can be reconditioned in a proper facility, in mainland Russia.

Steinmetz · Oct 23, 2022

Insane first person footage of a pilot ejecting out of a SU-25 that got hit and promptly crashed.

Feanor · Oct 23, 2022

Update Oct 12th-15th

Kherson-Nikolaev-Odessa.

Russian infantry firing, Kherson region. Circumstances unclear.

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Novaya Kahovka, a Ukrainian strike, Russian air defenses firing.

The Russian-Ukrainian War Thread

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