Ukraine

[LFC]

It looks like Lyman may be about to fall. If it does more and more of Luhansk Oblast are ripe for the taking back.

[andydp]

Sept 28, 2022 3:19:49 GMT LFC said:

It looks like Lyman may be about to fall. If it does more and more of Luhansk Oblast are ripe for the taking back.

We're looking at a double envelopment.  Back to the days of Hannibal vs the Romans and his victory at Cannae during the Second Punic War.

Closer to our own days: the "Falaise Gap"(1) in WWII, the Battle of Cowpens in 1781.  

(1) There are reasons its called the Falaise Gap and not the Falaise Pocket.  My theory is Gen JCH Lee(2) diverted the fuel Patton needed so he could have the Allied Administrative offices moved to Paris.  Result:  Patton ran out of fuel and could not close the gap.

(2) Gen Lee had another moniker: Jesus Christ Himself.  Supposedly a big Bible thumper.  You can see his and his wife's full length portraits in the West Point Officer's Club

[LFC]

The U.S. is helping Ukraine respond to the drone issue.

Ukraine Battle Map
@ukraine_map

USA🇺🇸 has started giving Ukrainian Forces counter drone weapons that can shoot down Iranian🇮🇷 Shahed-136 Kamikaze Drones Said Ukraine’s Ambassador to Israel

USA will announce various new counter drone systems in its $1.1 Billion military aid package to Ukraine🇺🇦 reported Reuters

[LFC]

The results of the riflerendum are in! As expected the numbers Putin picked are just plain silly. Zelensky is unimpressed and said that this destroys an chance of talks.

The Kremlin paved the way Tuesday to annex more of Ukraine and escalate the war by claiming that residents of a large swath overwhelmingly supported joining with Russia in stage-managed referendums the U.S. and its Western allies have dismissed as illegitimate.

Pro-Moscow officials said all four occupied regions of Ukraine voted to join Russia. According to Russia-installed election officials, 93% of the ballots cast in the Zaporizhzhia region supported annexation, as did 87% in the Kherson region, 98% in the Luhansk region and 99% in Donetsk. Possibly explaining the lower favorable vote in Kherson is that Russian authorities there have faced a strong Ukrainian underground resistance movement whose members have killed Moscow-appointed officials and threatened those who considered voting.

In a remark that appeared to rule out negotiations, Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy told the U.N. Security Council by video from Kyiv that Russia’s attempts to annex Ukrainian territory will mean “there is nothing to talk about with this president of Russia.”

He added that “any annexation in the modern world is a crime, a crime against all states that consider the inviolability of border to be vital for themselves.”

[LFC]

This post is a series of updates across Ukraine. Yampil is a city SW of Lyman and taking or bypassing it moves Ukrainian troops closer to full encirclement. I haven't read any estimates on how many troops or how much equipment Russia is at risk of losing if Lyman is cut off.

Russian sources report combat to the southeast of Yampil'.

The Russians are close to being in an operational encirclement. If Ukraine manages to close this pocket this defeat would be recent Kharkhiv level in magnitude. Kup'yans'k-Vuzlovyi was taken by Ukrainian forces today and they are advancing towards Svatove.

The Russians have managed to create a second defensive line in Svatove.

Svatove is 20 miles west of the Oskil River and over 10 miles inside Luhansk Oblast. This would bring the fight further into Putin's recently "annexed" territory.

The cannon fodder is already showing up on the next front.

There are already mobilized Russian soldiers in Ukraine and some have been killed and captured. 3 days after the mobilization there were already 10-20 thousand mobilized troops on the border of Ukraine. Units defending in Kupiansk, Svatove and Lyman have already been reinforced with mobilized soldiers in similar fashion to march battalions in WW2.

Bakhmut is still the primary Russian offensive. They are taking some ground but being beaten back in others. Again it seems to be vicious fighting with no strategic goal.

Kherson can't even use reinforcements because of supplies; "Currently, the Russians need 4000 tonnes of supplies daily, but only 1200-1300 are getting across."

This on Russian medical care. There have been attempts to extrapolate the number of wounded from the reasonably estimated dead. It sounds like those estimates may be too high. It sounds like there's a horrifically high death rate.

Arestovych jokes about tampons being used in the Russian army. Notes that Russian soldiers have to wait 16 hours before being operated on, keeping in mind that even a light injury kills after 3-4 hours if not treated.

Serious injuries kill after 45 minutes. On top of that, this figure is from the professional army, it will be far worse for mobilized personnel. 6/10 wounded Russian soldiers die before being operated on.

Lots of other quick points on different facets of the war itself as well as things home and abroad.

[LFC]

Putin's pussyboy wants to help. He's right that what's going on now wouldn't have happened with him in office. He would have done everything to aid Putin short of (maybe) sending jets to strafe Kyiv.

[LFC]

A conscript surrender hotline? Bloody brilliant.

[LFC]

Over at TPM I half kiddingly suggested that Ukraine offer cash for heavy equipment.

"Have military equipment you’re not planning to use and can use cash fast? Come to Volodymyr’s used tank lot! We want YOUR used equipment and are ready to deal. We’re buying tanks, fighting vehicles, personnel carriers, trucks, self-propelled artillery and missile launchers. If you’re able to drive it, we wanna’ buy it. Bonus cash for towed artillery and communications centers. (A warm place to sleep and 3 meals a day with every purchase.)"

[andydp]

Sept 28, 2022 21:27:56 GMT LFC said:

Over at TPM I half kiddingly suggested that Ukraine offer cash for heavy equipment.

"Have military equipment you’re not planning to use and can use cash fast? Come to Volodymyr’s used tank lot! We want YOUR used equipment and are ready to deal. We’re buying tanks, fighting vehicles, personnel carriers, trucks, self-propelled artillery and missile launchers. If you’re able to drive it, we wanna’ buy it. Bonus cash for towed artillery and communications centers. (A warm place to sleep and 3 meals a day with every purchase.)"

Years ago. There was a joke dealing with equipment exchanges:

Guy gets drafted by Israel, first week of basic, asks sergeant if he can get a pass. Sgt says impossible. Guy asks if there’s anything he can do. Sgt says do something heroic. Friday afternoon guy shows up in a Syrian tank. Gets weekend off. Next weekend same. This goes on for a month. Finally, they pull him aside and ask how he’s doing that.

Soldier says I go to the motor pool, take a tank, drive out until I run into a Syrian tank. I pop the hatch and ask them if they want to get a weekend pass.

[andydp]

Sept 28, 2022 21:12:48 GMT LFC said:

A conscript surrender hotline? Bloody brilliant.

Have you come across a translation of the logo ?

[LFC]

Unfortunately no.

[AnBr]

From Google images translate:

COORDINATING
HEADQUARTERS
FOR
CONDUCT
OF 3 POWs
I want
to live
EXCEPT LIFE

[LFC]

Sept 29, 2022 13:47:38 GMT AnBr said:

From Google images translate:

COORDINATING
HEADQUARTERS
FOR
CONDUCT
OF 3 POWs
I want
to live
EXCEPT LIFE

IIRC the group in charge of this is actually called "I Want To Live."

[goldenvalley]

Sept 28, 2022 16:35:03 GMT LFC said:

The results of the riflerendum are in! As expected the numbers Putin picked are just plain silly. Zelensky is unimpressed and said that this destroys an chance of talks.

The Kremlin paved the way Tuesday to annex more of Ukraine and escalate the war by claiming that residents of a large swath overwhelmingly supported joining with Russia in stage-managed referendums the U.S. and its Western allies have dismissed as illegitimate.

Pro-Moscow officials said all four occupied regions of Ukraine voted to join Russia. According to Russia-installed election officials, 93% of the ballots cast in the Zaporizhzhia region supported annexation, as did 87% in the Kherson region, 98% in the Luhansk region and 99% in Donetsk. Possibly explaining the lower favorable vote in Kherson is that Russian authorities there have faced a strong Ukrainian underground resistance movement whose members have killed Moscow-appointed officials and threatened those who considered voting.

In a remark that appeared to rule out negotiations, Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelenskyy told the U.N. Security Council by video from Kyiv that Russia’s attempts to annex Ukrainian territory will mean “there is nothing to talk about with this president of Russia.”

He added that “any annexation in the modern world is a crime, a crime against all states that consider the inviolability of border to be vital for themselves.”

Gee all he had to do was hold a riflrendum...why didn't he do that first instead of sending troops in?

[LFC]

Sept 29, 2022 13:47:38 GMT AnBr said:

From Google images translate:

COORDINATING
HEADQUARTERS
FOR
CONDUCT
OF 3 POWs
I want
to live
EXCEPT LIFE

I asked over at the TPM chat board where there are several people who speak Ukrainian (and also people who speak Russian) and can translate. The reply I got was:

Coordination headquarters

for the treatment of prisoners of war

I want to live

Nisi vitas (save lives)

Also:

Underneath, the eagle, it says “and food, and treatment, and high quality conditions.”

Note, I edited it after checking the word. Some of these long words in hard to read semi-circles are easy to mistake. I mean highqualityconditions was one word.

That's a lot of info for one logo. Somebody's pretty good at marketing.

[LFC]

Russia is lashing out at civilian infrastructure. They're incapable of doing little else.

Phil Stewart
@phildstewart

Senior U.S. military official says on 217th day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine: Russians are hitting Ukraine's critical civilian infrastructure at increasing rate.

[LFC]

Frontline stories of already arriving new conscripts are coming out.

Thomas C. Theiner
@noclador

Yesterday the first russian reservist units filmed themselves moving into position in Ukraine and today Ukraine presented the passports taken from the reservists' corpses.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At least they can be identified and are actually assigned to units. It sounds like others are stuffed into unmarked uniforms and jammed onto the front.

Михайло Подоляк
@podolyak_M

Conscription in Russian style... The conscripted are not equipped nor trained, but are sent immediately to the frontline where active hostilities are. They have no badges so they cannot be identified. Putin plans to fight till death by elderly people and office plankton.

[LFC]

More HIMARS allocated for Ukraine. I've read that Raytheon actually has to build them.

Ben Hodges
@general_ben

Wow…well done to @potus
This is real capability that meets the top requirement for UAF. Irreversible momentum for Ukraine. Once they get HIMARS and MLRS in range of Crimea, it’s just a matter of time.

Yehuda Amzallagh
@yamzallagh

UPDATE: The USA will transfer 18 more HIMARS with ammunition to Ukraine. This is in addition to the current 16 HIMARS sent. In other news Russia destroyed 4 X wooden HIMARS models.

[LFC]

Putin is committed ... or ought to be. None of the nations that matter remotely recognize annexation as anything but theater but it will be used to try to play the self defense angle with the domestic population.

Shashank Joshi
@shashj
A point of no return. Largest forcible annexation of European territory since WW2. Commits him to defend it in perpetuity & capture the parts of it he doesn't occupy (lots). Prevents him giving it back to Ukraine as part of a settlement. And increases risk of escalation.

Christopher Miller
@christopherjm

The Kremlin says Putin will sign decrees tomorrow at 3pm local time to “annex” the four regions of partially-occupied southeastern Ukraine where sham “referendums” were held at gun point. Putin will also deliver a speech. via state propaganda agency RIA. t.me/rian_ru/179824

[LFC]

Meanwhile around the Russian held city of Lyman.

Illia Ponomarenko🇺🇦
@iaponomarenko

A Russian collapse in the Lyman-Yampil sector is almost imminent now.
The pocket is about to be closed off if this is not the case yet.
Russians need to leave before it’s too late, but now it would be hard as Ukraine can target their withdrawal route.

At this point this is what the Russians are looking at just one last escape route that's 12km long and in flat, open farm country that's in range of Ukrainian artillery. This is what it looks like.

On top of everything else the terminal point of their escape route may already be under Ukrainian attack.

Russian mil. bloggers (per @thestudyofwar) have also claimed that Ukrainian forces are already fighting at the outskirts of Tors'ke. If this is true, then the cauldron has de-facto been sealed for the remnants of the 🇷🇺144
Motorized Rifle Division thought to be stationed there.

[LFC]

Putin is attacking pipelines and civilian infrastructure while leaving his troops to get slaughtered.

September 28 Assessment Highlight:

The Russian Ministry of Defense has not addressed current Russian losses around #Lyman or prepared for the collapse of this sector of the frontline, which will likely further reduce already-low Russian morale.

How the hell can they not have a plan? They've had at least two weeks to come up with something.

[LFC]

Russia is cannibalizing their defenses along the Baltics, Finland, and even around St. Petersburg for troops and equipment. It doesn't sound like much in the way of either will be coming back.

Since Russia first launched its invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has been peeling military forces away from its bases in Northern Europe to plug gaps in its forces suffering high losses and battlefield setbacks against Ukrainian troops.

Of an original estimated 30,000 Russian troops that once faced the Baltic countries and southern Finland, as many as 80 percent of them have been diverted to Ukraine, according to three senior European defense officials in the region, leaving Russia with only a skeleton crew in what was once its densest concentration of military force facing NATO territory.

“The drawdown we’ve seen from this region in the past seven months is very significant,” said one senior Nordic defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military matters. “Russia had this ground force posture facing us for decades that is now effectively just gone.”

The official stressed that Russia’s air power in the region hadn’t changed and that Russia’s Northern Fleet—the crown jewel of its naval power, which is based in the Kola Peninsula—has remained relatively untouched. But Russia is moving other high-end military hardware, including antiaircraft systems and missiles, away from the region to Ukraine alongside its troops. Russia appeared to remove some S-300 antiaircraft systems from a protective ring around St. Petersburg, one of Russia’s largest cities that is near Finland’s border, according to satellite imagery obtained by Finnish media outlet Yle this month. One missile basing area in the region, manned by Russia’s 500th Antiaircraft Missile Regiment, appeared to be abandoned entirely, according to the satellite imagery.

A significant number of the Russian forces pulled away from the region are in Russia’s 6th Army, which until recently had been responsible for fighting in the Kremlin-occupied Kharkiv Oblast that has been overrun by a lightning Ukrainian counteroffensive in the last month. The 6th Army is typically tasked with defending Russia’s border along with the Baltic States and Finland.

EDIT: I saw a comment that this puts to rest Putin's stated fear of increased NATO aggression. They could run over his borders without hesitation right now.

[LFC]

Interesting map.

[LFC]

Putin's now back to just murdering civilians and bombing cities. He can't achieve success on the battlefield so he's just killing people to salve his ego. The world will be a better place when this sick bastard is dead.

At least 23 people have been killed and dozens more injured in a Russian rocket strike on a civilian convoy in south Ukraine, local officials say.

A huge crater next to a row of vehicles in the city of Zaporizhzhia testifies to the violence of the attack. Windows and windscreens were smashed in.

In a separate development, one person was killed and five injured in overnight Russian strikes by Iskander missiles on the central city of Dnipro, about 70km (43 miles) north of Zaporizhzhia, local officials said.

They said a transport company was targeted, and as many as 52 buses were burnt and another 98 damaged.

Several high-rise buildings, offices and a shop were also hit.

[LFC]

Zelensky formally submitted Ukraine's application to join the NATO. Not that it will happen anytime soon, but it's a sharp dividing line for the future. At every turn Putin has managed to destroy his own stated goals.

And "OUCH!"