Posted on 11/09/2022 11:06:54 AM PST by Timber Rattler
Russia’s defense minister and the General in charge of the “special military operation” in Ukraine have jointly announced Russia will be retreating from Kherson.
(snip)
If you’ve been following this story recently, you know that there have recently been several reports that Russia was sending newly mobilized soldiers with no training and no equipment to the front lines in eastern Ukraine. One recent report suggested that a batallian of mobiks (as newly mobilized recruits are called) had been brought to the front lines and abandoned by their commanders the moment the shelling started. As many as 500 were reportedly killed with a handful of stragglers surviving to tell their wives and ultimately the world what happened.
Separately, a group of pro-Kremlin journalists wrote a letter criticizing another offensive which resulted in massive losses. That letter was dismissed at first as fake and then authorities reversed course and said there had been some losses but they weren’t bad. So, at this moment, you get the sense that many people, including people who support Russia’s invasion, are angry that so many Russian troops are being killed in large numbers. I think that’s probably why Gen. Surovikin is spinning the Kherson retreat as necessary to preserve the lives of Russian soldiers.
Indeed the larger context here is that Gen. Surovikin claimed that Russia was successfully resisting every attack launched by the Ukrainians in Kherson. It’s only concern for civilians and its troops that is motivating the retreat.
Of course, every word of this is BS. If Russia cared about its troops it wouldn’t be sending untrained mobiks to the front lines with shoddy equipment. What Russia cares about is winning the domestic PR battle. But whatever spin Russia is putting on this, it’s definitely a huge loss.
(Excerpt) Read more at hotair.com ...
Kremlin-installed leader dies in an accident......................riiiiight...................
Ukraine: military situation update with maps, Nov 8, 2022
(’Orc’ is associated with the various hoards of 13th century Mongol invaders, as well as LOTR evil villains)
War in Ukraine
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP2QApi8G2TKc8NZmeDWSUg/videos
Artillery (key to success in this war), Fuller explanation of Orc military structure, Other Bonus articles - see previous postings in “Attack on Europe” (FR title search).
(Numbered printed material below - Some of the items below may be out of date, and not updated yet)
••Denotes Transcribed Dialogue. The entirety of the analysis is from a Ukrainian guy named War in Ukraine’s daily video - I only transcribe it. Extras are just that - from other sites, or my comments marked (Edit: .... )
-—> Current to date and past MAPS: <——
https://militaryland.net/
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Extras:
Ukraine Situation Report: Russia Traded Captured Weapons To Iran For Drones New Report Claims
Iran will likely try to reverse engineer and attempt to clone the captured shoulder-fired U.S. and U.K missiles.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-russia-traded-captured-weapons-to-iran-for-drones-new-report-claims
Excerpt:
The NLAW, Javelin, and Stinger “had been part of a shipment of UK and US military equipment intended for the Ukrainian military that ‘fell into Russian hands,’” the source told Sky News. Videos of Russians capturing these kinds of weapons, among others, in Ukraine first emerged early on in the all-out invasion, but it is unknown just how many they have seized in the course of the fighting.
The possession of those weapons “could give Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) the ability to study Western technology and potentially copy it,” according to Sky News. The outlet’s source added that “they will probably be reverse-engineered and used in future wars.” In return for the cash and weapons, Iran supplied Russia with more than 160 drones, including 100 Shahed-160 drones, the source claimed.
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Summary:
Ukrainian attack on Kherson bridgehead,
Ukrainian troops liberated either all of Snigurivka or norther part of it.
Key areas:
- Oskil river area:
futile Ukrainian attacks.
- North Donbass area: no changes.
- Central Donbass (Donetsk West): no changes.
- Zaporizhya: no changes.
- Kherson bridgehead:
Ukrainian troops liberated at least norther part of Snigurivka and potentially entire town.
Deep penetration of Ukrainian troops from south of Dudchany towards Mylove.
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••General topics:
China:
We recently focused on China because this is where the center of attention or where the gravity of this whole situation is shifting to.
(Wearing military uniform- image) Chinese President Xi Jinping visiting some military headquarters, the command center, and he was very clear that the Army needs to be prepared for the war. He is clearly sending a signal that things are changing, even in a subconscious level that things are shifting to the military situation. You usually would see him in a business suit, very nicely dressed, he’s always taking care of himself, he’s not like the leader of North Korea, Xi is very polished, Western look, he really understands when he moves he this is very clear gesture that he’s sending to the world, and to China first of all to Chinese military, to Chinese society.
Chinese military showed a new anti-ship hypersonic missile, and this is directed at the US, because the way US may engage or may not, in a potential war using aircraft carriers. These missiles are aircraft carrier killers, that’s their main job, and that’s how the Chinese military will provide cover for its invading forces from the attacks by US forces. US will be attacking from the ships; that’s the only real way for US. The missile are going to be an umbrella for the invading forces, it was clear signal to the US to back off or you’re going to get hurt.
I’m not gonna mention the the Taiwanese president who was saying it might be imminent; as I mentioned yesterday, I don’t think its imminent, based on other indicators, but you never know.
If I have too bad and its always a speculative I would bet for some time in the Spring - could be that things will accelerate because as I mentioned before situation inside of China economically deteriorating significantly, and to control the population they have the Zero Covid policy to control, but eventually there is always limit for everything, and they they will have to pull the trigger, because they won’t be able to control anymore. (Edit: H’s wrong on this as the Chinese use QR codes to control everyone and everything. Zero Covid is just a trigger mechanism.)
There is a negative real negative situation between China and Europe starting to grow. The head of the European Commission or European Council, Charles Michelle gave a recorded the speech on exports in China for the trade Expo in China, where he was criticizing Russia’s war against Ukraine, and was calling on China not to support Russia, and that videotape was removed, censored, and was not presented.
Russia:
Russia sells its crude oil and coal to Turkey, India & main buyers like India and China. Now a problem is starting to develop with India as a buyer of the Russian coal, and its economic problem; it has nothing to do with sanctions, sanctions don’t work, they never worked, and they never will. However, what really works is monetary tithing or increase in interest rates that Federal Reserve is doing in the US, and it really creates difficult situation, at least in the coal space.
Russia has to sell coal to India at a 70% discount - that’s really huge. As a result, they’re losing money on every single metric ton of coal that they ship to India, because the distance to India is huge. You also have need to pay the freight rate, which is also big; they have nothing left as a profit, and Russia is losing money. The sale of coal to India is dead.
Russia may still sell some coal to China, but there is also problem even there. Russia is connected to the Russian Far East by two railroads. Those are two roads, and if you cut them, the country is is cut into halves; there is no connection, there is nothing. When Russia tried to increase exports of coal to China recently, it created huge bottleneck on railroads, and there’s not enough, even close, capacity to increase export of coal to China. It’s all bottlenecked and Russia cannot really increase the export of coal to China.
There is a similar situation with the natural gas pipeline, but again its capacity, is not even close to what Russia is losing in Europe; Russian energy exports are significantly bottlenecked in terms of being able to send them to China; both sides are working on fixing it, but its not going to be quick fix - it takes years to build a pipeline or lay new tracks - its definitely a matter of maybe two years, if everything is done quick, maybe a year and a half, given that China is much faster.
Everything in Russia is absolutely bureaucratic, but Chinese side can do move quick, what this means is that Russia cannot really redirect all of this coal and natural gas export to China in a sufficient amount to offset losses in Europe. The losses in Europe are going to start to hurt more and more, especially after December 5, and even more so in the New Year.
The Russian budget is completely out of balance; Russian State finances were in an extremely pristine order and condition before the war, and at the beginning of the war that no Western country is coming even close to how well Russian State finances were managed. Now things are completely deteriorated, and everything is upside down, there are huge deficits growing, there are even problems with paying money to the conscripts.
Sometimes conscripts go public and complain that they’re not getting paid, things are really started to deteriorate inside Russia, and economically & financially; the problems will start to gain momentum, and its going to be an exponential rise. As time passes, the problems will magnify much, much, much faster than what we’ve seen so far, its probably a question of 2-5 months as a time horizon.
Ukraine and European Union:
European Union announced that it will not give a promised 3 billion Euros to Ukraine - out of the nine that were promised. There are problems that not only Russia suffering from, but the European Union suffers mightily as well.
That’s probably a reason for withdrawing that promised aid, and in the end its Ukraine’s leadership, its Ukraine society’s fault that its not prepared, and its not doing the right things to be self-sustainable, that without being self-sustainable, Ukraine has no future, and has no ability to self-defend; unfortunately, the current leadership is absolutely incompetent on how to be self-sustainable or that it goes hand in hand incompetent and then corruption, and all they see as a solution is how to ask for more from someone else, and that always and ends.
Elections in the US it remains to be seen if support for Ukraine remains because as I mentioned before there are two parts to the Republican Party - one is completely opposing support, and other one recognizes that support is needed, and its in the best interest of the US; there is a question about who to give the money to in Ukraine, because those people are extremely corrupt, but at the same time, US is itself in somewhat desperate situation, in this situation in general.
It does look that the support will remain, maybe its gonna be less or there will be more requirements about the control of the how money spent, which would be great idea to have control, because otherwise the Ukrainian budget or Ukrainian government is literally a black hole, where the money disappears, and then appears accounts in Swiss banks.
Economic difficulties are pushing Europe to cut its support. There were announcements from from the UK that its gonna cut support as well, because UK is in a very difficult financial situation, where its on the edge in terms of some of the pension funds could be in solvent. That’s gonna can create ripple effects throughout the entire society, economy, and create huge problems - UK government is trying to cut the expenses where they can, and that’s totally understandable - they need to save their own country first and that’s very logical.
Iran:
There was a slow motion uprising or a revolution, and it looks like that movement is gonna turn into civil, and the reason is the Iranian Parliament called for the death penalty for all of the protesters who are already in prisons, and there are at least 14,000, but they’re telling the Islamic Revolution Guards to control the rest of the population - they were calling on them to execute all of the protesters who already were caught and in prisons - that’s 14,000 people.
That’s very clear indication that the country is heading into a civil war; what’s going to happen, how its going to come out is totally unknown. One potential prediction is it may lose significant territories populated by Azerbaijani. Azerbaijan was part of the Soviet Union, and portions - significant portions of Iran are populated by the Azerbaijan ethnic population, and there is high probability that that Iran may lose those territories, and they will go to Azerbaijan which will increase Azerbaijan position as a regional power.
Azerbaijan and Turkish people, its like almost the same; they view themselves as a part of one ethnic group - Turkey will definitely will try to help Azerbaijan; there could be some other tensions as well. As you can see, the tensions are rising pretty much everywhere you look, and the situation is extremely explosive around the world.
Brazil:
Where is Brazil gonna go after elections - you can see there is a clear division of the country into two halves, which also can go down as some civil war there as well, but I’m not expert on Brazil, but it just doesn’t look good there either.
Military Situation:
Ukraine so the energy distribution infrastructure is still functioning, its still providing electricity - as I mentioned before there are uncontrolled blackouts, most of the population does not have electricity for at least eight hours, some don’t have it for nine ten hours. The situation for now stable, but this is will depend more on the on the winter temperatures and what Russia plans to do, but so far, they stopped those attacks before like final blow.
Russia received Kamikaze drones from Iran, and has been using them extremely successfully; they are creating a lot of damage and high quality damage. There were videos today of those drones, but they destroyed a Polish Krab which is excellent self-propelled howitzers, so they’re targeting high value military assets, and they’ve been successful in destroying them. It is not only one unit which was destroyed: there are several, and a few days ago there was quite a bit as well.
If this continues, it will cumulatively destroy the advantage that Ukrainian Army has right now in terms of artillery, especially long-range precision artillery, but it will significantly diminish Ukrainian’s Army attacking potential. HIMARS are unreachable for the Russian side: they are too maneuverable - there is no way they can get them, so far they haven’t destroyed a single one and probably they will not be able to, given the equipment they have, but unfortunately, those self-propelled howitzers are being lost to this Iranian Kamikaze drone.
I want to contrast this with the Switchblade-600 which didn’t turn out to be effective at all, and looks like a big l flop and big boondoggle where a lot of money spent for nothing versus the Iranian drone which are cheap or dirt cheap, assembled from whatever whatever commercial grade electronic equipment Iran can buy, and they are destroying expensive high-value targets pretty successfully. That as a strategy its extremely successful.
North Luhansk’:
Ukrainian troops are trying to attack, but they cannot really penetrate Russian defenses. The opportunity was lost over a month ago.
North Donbas:
Mostly Wagner mercenaries are operating here; there are unconfirmed information from the Russian sources that they completely captured a small village, like suburb of Solidar - this is based on this unconfirmed information, which I wouldn’t be surprised it turns out true - they are fully in control of Bakhamutska.
Wagner mercenaries are slowly but surely chip away at Ukrainian defenses, and Ukrainian forces are not able to successfully counter attack against Wagner mercenaries because that organization is built on common sense and the absence of any bureaucracy or red tape, while the Ukrainian Army is completely opposite of that - its a Soviet army with a lot of red red tape, disempowering soldiers on the ground. As a result, you cannot compete against such force, and as a strategic problem, there’s a big question if Ukrainian troops will be able to hold the defensive line overall.
Central Donbas:
It looks like Russian troops captured part of Pavlivka, but paid very heavy, extremely heavy price for a result that’s not worth it.
Kherson Bridgehead:
There are developments here: Ukrainian troops attacked in three areas simultaneously.
The first one is the highway that goes from the Mykolaiv to Kherson was completely unsuccessful;
The second attack was nurse of Sneharivka and it was successful. There are reports that Ukrainian troops completely liberated Sneharivka can truly controlling Sneharivka. Russian sources say definitely Ukrainian troops are controlling the northern part of Sneharivka. There’s clearly a penetration of the Russian defensive line.
The third attack, which is close to the Dnipro River, Ukrainian troops penetrated the first Russian defensive line, but its unclear if they were able to continue their success or just an initial small crack and got stuck; eventually they will be attacked by Russian artillery, even though Russian artillery is feeling shell hunger, so they are rationing. I’m not saying that they don’t have shells, but its not what Russian artillery used to be like - where they don’t even think about shells, they shoot as much as they want. Now they really need to think twice, and that gives a chance that this crack is eventually gonna be expanded in something bigger.
Allegedly, these are photos from the scene of the accident of Kherson collaborator Kirill Stremousov
Still too early to celebrate the liberation of Kherson. Let’s hold until the Ukrainians liberate leg bank Kherson as well
The Retreat Bop
Just curious, do you know who Shawn Ryan is ?? A former Navy Seal and CIA paramilitary operator. He produces a podcast called The Shawn Ryan Show.
Recently he had on Mark Turner who is a former Force Recon Marine, who has non-profit that is training and outfitting as many Ukrainian Soldiers as possible, he’s been to Ukraine 5 times since February. Watch hour 1 thru 2, it’s enlightening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxJJSGN_WCc&t=7406s
I’ve said repeatedly I do not believe any of the propaganda that is being spread by either side.
However, this guy has been there on the ground observing what is actually happening in Ukraine.
He’s highly critical of the Russians and especially the Ukrainians who are not providing basic training to their soldiers. They are lucky to get a rifle to go fight with.
For the Russian lackeys haunting FR lately who seem to think political corruption is a valid reason to invade, I’d like them to consider that the new Russian constitution forbids the use of drafted Russian defense forces outside Russia. So Russia just declares wherever it wants to send its forces to be part of Russia.
There was a reasonable case to be made in Crimea, where Crimea actually insisted Ukraine sign a treaty before it agreed to leave Russia, and which treaty was completely violated.
But herein, Russia is basically arguing the right to militarily annex at the very least any former Soviet territory, possibly including any formerly Russian terriotory, such as Finland, and really, why stop at formerly Russian lands?
And to be clear: this is not some treaty with NATO Russia broke. This was the Russian people writing the Russian Constitution to forbid Russia from using the persistant threat of invasion to keep the world destabilized.
“Seems that Russia occupying Kherson “forever” was really not forever.”
They forgot to say “forever within a timeframe”.
Yes, let’s be prudent. I hope it’s not Russian trap here...
If indeed the Russians are retreating from Kherson, it would be an epic PR and political defeat for the Kremlin neo-soviets. Militarily speaking they would be forced to abandon all their heavy equipment - since the Ukrainians have bombed all the bridges...
Ever driven in Russia? Or tried to cross a street?
Germany, Sweden and Denmark, but not Russia..................
Putin’s Military Suffers Over 700 Deaths in One Day of War: Ukraine
BY AILA SLISCO ON 11/9/22
https://www.newsweek.com/vladimir-putin-russian-military-suffers-700-deaths-one-day-ukraine-says-1758082
We Americans take a lot for granted.
There might be excellent soldiers in the armies of other nations, but our logistics and training are so far beyond anyone else it is pathetic. Sure, China can build carriers, and Russia hypersonic missiles. We can build as many as we need and have as mane people as we need trained to use them.
Logistics always wins the day.
The point I was trying to make by posting about the Shawn Ryan Show Podcast, his guest is a very experienced US Marine who has been on to the front lines in Ukraine multiple times.
We have people all day on FR posting one article after another that Russia is losing, and Ukraine is about to drive them out of the country and Putin is about to die.
I have said countless times that both sides in the war are spreading massive propaganda, unless you have been on the frontlines there is no way of knowing what is happening in Ukraine.
In the podcast, the marine veteran readily admits that Russia is terrible at warfighting, he also admits that Ukraine is no better and, in many ways, worse.
A couple of other things he mentions is any areas taken back by Ukraine are because Russia has withdrawn and wasn’t contesting the area.
The entire war has settled into stalemated lines with both sides launching artillery back and forth against each other.
Ukraine is showing no desire to directly attack Russian Positions and force them out of the country.
I could go on, but if you watch from the 1-hour mark to the 2nd hour mark, it might give people another view of the war from someone who has actually been to the frontlines.
That's simply not true. There are tens of thousands of people at or near the front lines. Many of them are fighting, either for the Russians or to defend Ukraine. Some are civilian aid volunteers, some are journalists, and some are just citizens who happen to be there.
Nearly all of them, except some of the elderly pensioners out in the villages have cell phones. Many of the people post videos, pictures, and descriptions of what is happening.
As a result you can read, watch, and listen to the reports of thousands of people direct from the conflict areas. Other people, often locals, geo locate interesting images and videos to help viewers understand the context. You can validate the images and the locations if you want to make the effort.
Collectively the images, descriptions, and videos are like have having tens of thousands of front line observers. In some cases the video is from a helmet-cam and you can watch combat teams in action. A lot of video is from civilians showing what the saw.
This may be the most documented war so far.
I doubt the Russians getting killed think that.
A lot of the video is painful to watch, but if you want to you can watch a drone's eye view of Russian soldiers in close quarters combat with Ukrainians who charged right into a Russian trench and bunker complex. You can also watch the Russians trying to do the same thing.
There is plenty of fighting going on at any point in time.
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