Thanks Feanor for the update.
But this slight a misquote. 666000 is the amount of all asylum applications from all countries to EU area. The EOSA May 2015 report (I don't think I can link yet?) states 1984 Ukrainian applications in April (up from essentially zero before crisis).
Meanwhile, any news on how the draft and training the draftees at the ukrainian side is going?
Whoops. My apologies. Sleep deprivation is getting to me. Thank you for catching that. The numbers does look a little high.
The draft is going badly. Besides the obvious bribery, in many cases local government and even private companies are helping people dodge it. In many areas, according to one of Poroshenko's advisers, people are renting buses, and leaving the country or the province, when the Military Commissar shows up to hand out draft notices. In another instance, in Kramatorsk, the locals chased him out of town, after an angry confrontation with the parents of the would-be draftees. Unsurprising given that the Ukrainian military only took Kramatorsk after some fighting, before the fall of Slavyansk.
Training is going better, between veterans from the front, and foreign instructors, the Ukrainian military is much more capable now then it was this time last year. The problem remains that Ukrainian units are still not operating effectively above the battalion level. Mismatched equipment and gear also don't help. Although at least individual units are now often better standardized then before. Overall a big step forward over the past year, for which Ukraine should primarily thank their western allies.
Any idea what units are involved in the fighting around Maryinka? Probably not that clear from the Russian/Seperatist side but from the UAF?
Casualites on the UAF side are 5 dead 39 wounded over the last 24 hours.
Strategically speaking this isn't that significant - although larger than the average over the last 2 months particularly the wounded. Has the feeling of artillery/mortars type casualites.
UAF says 100 seperatists/Russians killed, that number seems very high.
Feanor do you have any pics/vids or articles of Ukraine deploying Rapira AT guns I haven't seen them in action . Thanks!
I don't have reliable casualty figures but it's safe to assume that Ukraine will understate their own and overstate the enemy. Often quite badly.
As for the rapira, they're quite common from both sides.
lostarmour.info has plenty of photos of captured and destroyed vehicles and arty, among them the MT-12 Rapira AT gun. Be careful the letters are all cyrillic, so using Ctrl+F will only work if you have a Russian keyboard. But you can just look through the list and find them.
In my view, there is not a slightest chance Ukrainian government will manage to meet these marks.
I think this is a political move made by IMF on behalf of Ukraine.
As long as the war continues, and Poroshenko isn't eating babies on live TV, the west will continue to fund Ukraine. All Ukraine has to do is make occasional token gestures towards reforms. Hell they've got army units posing with Nazi flags, the government demonstrating corruption at the highest level, and western loan money is bleeding out of every crack and hole in the Ukrainian government, and yet the money keeps coming. So yes, the Ukrainian government will not meet these marks, nor does it matter whether it does. As it stands Ukraine can't pay off its loans. And I doubt they have any plans to try. They know full well that the west can't afford to let Russia "win", so as long as they have a war or "war", they're safe.
