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2022/25 Russian-Ukrainian War

Full Metal Junkie said:
Some majorly crappy news for the Ukrainian war effort:
www.pravda.com.ua

At least 250 Russians in Pokrovsk, Ukrainian troops walk 10-15 km to reach positions – UP

Ukrainska Pravda has learnt that at least 250 Russian troops are in Pokrovsk – they are engaging in firefights and killing Ukrainian soldiers, particularly drone operators, at their positions. Logistics into the city are fully controlled by Russian drones, forcing Ukrainian soldiers to walk...
www.pravda.com.ua www.pravda.com.ua

Basically, if you read between the lines of the official statements and first-hand accounts, the picture is bleak. Severe manpower shortages on the Ukrainian side have lead to sizeable Russian infiltrations through the porous frontlines. There are hundreds of russian soldiers deep behind enemy lines in the city of Pokrovsk. It is only a matter of time until the city is overrun. Which would be very bad in and of itself, since it is considered to be "gateway to the rest of Donbas" due to its strategic location - a logistics hub that russian forces can use as a staging ground for the push to claim the rest of the Donetsk region.

But on top of that, when Porrovsk falls, a sizeable chunk of Ukrainian forces in Myrnohrad will become operationally encircled since their only supply line is going through Pokrovksk:
View attachment 691390
map source: DeepState

And based on how Ukrainian command has recently handled similar situation in Bakhmut, prepare yourself for the worst case scenario here. Unfortunately commander Syrski is a notable downgrade from Zaluzhny, who oversaw UAF for the first 2 years of the conflict. Zaluzhny valued soldiers' lives over territorial losses. Syrski, on the other hand, has a very Soviet way of thinking about his forces: expendables. Frontline troops never get a retreat order no matter how sh!tty a situation they find themselves in. Instead they inevitably get a "hold your ground to the last man standing" order.

So yeah, instead of recognizing the defense of this pocket as a lost cause and an orderly retreat by UAF right now, what you will read about in the news in the coming weeks is a large encirclement and a miraculous retreat of a few lucky soldiers who managed to survive the ensuing slaughter.
Click to expand...

Update on the situation in Pokrovsk. Russian forces pouring in unopposed in droves under the cover of fog:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1988008108883669266

Unfortunately, the situation unfolded in a very predictable way for UAF under Syrski. Instead of orderly retreats - media bravado that everything is under control and bone-headed decisions to send in the last available reserves into a lost cause. A week ago they even helicopter-dropped 22 of Ukraine finest special force operators from GUR - the closest Ukraine has to Navy SEAL equivalent. Just threw them into the meat grinder like they were expandables.

Now Pokrovsk is getting overrun by hundreds and thousands of Russians. Ukrainian troops in Mirnohrad will be ordered to give a heroic last stand - they now have no way out of there.
 
Michael Korman - one of the leading analysts of the war in Ukraine - recently returned from another trip to the frontlines, where he gathers first-hand accounts of the issues facing UAF to supplement his analysis. He posted a long thread on the findings:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1989384479098679688

Key findings of interest:

- Drones continue to be responsible for most daily casualties

- Russian KIA casualty rate has gone up considerably this year, but WIA decreased as a ratio because survival rates are much lower. Wounded are much harder to recover within the drone kill zone. Russian gains this year came at a steep price of unrecoverable personnel losses.

- Russian unrecoverable casualties (25k+) have been inching up towards their monthly recruitment rate (30-35k) such that in 2025 they had to focus on loss replacement as opposed to force expansion. The quality keeps going down. Desertion has also gone up within Russian ranks.


Now, couple these numbers with Ukraine's new plan for its drone forces:
cepa.org

Ukraine’s New Drone Boss and the Kill Zone

The new commander is giving drone units a new focus and a new target — to kill and wound 35,000 Russian soldiers a month.
cepa.org cepa.org

Magyar's plan discussed in this article is being swiftly put into action. Magyar has recently kicked off a recruitment campaign aimed at doubling the drone forces. If and when he succeeds, Russian unrecoverable losses should get up to that magic 35K per month, making the attrition unsustainable.
 
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This is good. But I'm not convinced Ukraine can win without serious strategic strikes. And I mean the ability to substantially destroy every Russian refinery, oil depot and pumping station West of the Urals.
 
They are slowly getting to that capability with their domestically produced FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile. There has been a number of documented strikes by Flamingos:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1988940680933060996

The good thing is that the missile seems to actually exist (i.e. not a fictional weapon that only exists for propaganda purposes in news reels, like Russia's fabled T-14 Armata tank, Su-57 Felon stealth fighter jet, the Sarmata ICBM, etc.)

The worrisome things about the Flamingo though:
- The number of suspected Flamingo strikes over the past couple of months has been very low (about a dozen). The missile seems to be nowhere near being mass produced in numbers claimed by the manufacturer and the Ukrainian government.
- All the strikes have been fairly short range (within a couple hundred of kilometers from the frontlines). Most strikes were within the Russian occupied territories of Ukraine. The longer ones going out to the Russian port cities of Novorossiysk and maybe Tuapse on the Black Sea near Ukraine. This brings into question the Flamingo's claimed range of a couple thousand kilometers.
- Russia has successfully intercepted a number of Flamingos already, emphasizing the need for Flamingo's mass production and its use in salvos, with multiple missiles being expanded on one target with the hope that at least one gets through.
- The precision of the missile currently leaves a lot to be desired. While some have struck their targets, others veered off course enough to not even have damaged the target. The strike on a command post in Armyansk (~200km from the frontlines) resulted in one of the missiles leaving a very impressively sized crater 150 meters away from its target. Another suspected Flamingo strike near Tuapse (~500km from the frontlines) left an equally impressive crater on a public beach so far from its intended target, it's hard to say what the intended target might have been.
https://twitter.com/x/status/1987876476813705260


Hopefully, these are just the teething problems this new weapons platform is working through. Hopefully, it turns into a fearsome weapon. Hopefully it gets mass produced. Hopefully, it makes Russia pay.
 
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Ukraine would probably concede some of the territory currently held by Russian in exchange for a peace deal, but there's like a million things in there that they would never agree to, even if the US cut off all military aid.
 
This is not a peace plan. This is akin to full capitulation of Ukraine on Russian terms with all of putin's wettest dreams coming to fruition:
1. Russia gets to say how small the Ukrainian army is.
2. Russia gets to dictate how poorly equipped the Ukrainian army is to fight the future Russian invasion.
3. Russia gets to dictate to NATO who it can accept into the alliance. Obviously, Ukraine doesn't get a chance, none of the other non-aligned nations anywhere near Russia get a chance to secure their sovereignty either.
4. Russia gets to dictate Ukrainian constitutional amendments.
5. Russia gets to dictate when Ukraine runs their elections.
6. Russia gets to dictate what mass media is allowed on Ukrainian airwaves, getting full access to pump unlimited propaganda into Ukrainian public discourse.
7. Russia gets off the hook with a $100B slap on the wrist and all sanctions against them removed. EU picks up the rest of the tab to rebuild Ukraine.
8. Russia is absolved of all the war crimes they commited. Putin gets to walk among the western leaders at the restored G8 as if nothing happened.
9. Russia and the USA are best buds again, American investments flow into Russia as part of common mineral extraction and tech projects.
10. Russia gets to say that Ukraine is not allowed to have any nukes.
11. USA gives Ukraine a pinky promise they will defend Ukraine if Russia attacks again. The same pinky promise US already gave Ukraine with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum when Ukraine gave up their nukes and gave them all away to Russia.
12. The 'peace plan' even spells out that if Ukraine ever send an unprovoked missile the way of Moscow or St. Petersburg, the American pinky-promises go away, leaving Ukraine to fend for itself. Literally spelling out how Russia can perform a false flag operation to legally resume its conquest of Ukraine in the future.

If this is not the absolute worst 'peace plan' in the history of peace plans, I don't know what is. It is a literal guarantee of war in a not too distant future once Ukraine disarms itself and Russia licks its wounds and goes for the final kill. That is, if Russia doesn't manage to put in place a puppet government in Ukraine before the need to go to war again, now that they control Ukrainian elections and information space.
 
Full Metal Junkie said:
You'd think that. But I don't like the sound of chatter coming out of the Ukrainian news sources. It sounds like it's being discussed by the Ukrainian officials a lot more seriously than it deserves to be.
Click to expand...
Can the US impose on the rest of the West pretending Russia did nothing wrong? Admitting Russia to G7 and normalizing relations is, frankly, insane. Maybe in a few decades after Putin leaves office (and his mortal coil).
 
This was always the inevitable outcome once Trump took power.

Ukraine getting the Palestine peace deal treatment
 
It disgusts me that anybody is even attempting to negotiate with Russia, who have not shown the slightest bit of willingness to compromise at all. DO NOT TALK TO THEM. You arm Ukraine to the teeth and let them relentlessly strike Russian assets anywhere until their war effort becomes utterly untenable. No discussions should take place with them before that happens.

Ukraine should not even engage with a US led by Trump. He will not do anything to benefit them at all. They need to ignore this buffoon and strictly deal with the Europeans.
 
Towered said:
It disgusts me that anybody is even attempting to negotiate with Russia, who have not shown the slightest bit of willingness to compromise at all. DO NOT TALK TO THEM. You arm Ukraine to the teeth and let them relentlessly strike Russian assets anywhere until their war effort becomes utterly untenable. No discussions should take place with them before that happens.

Ukraine should not even engage with a US led by Trump. He will not do anything to benefit them at all. They need to ignore this buffoon and strictly deal with the Europeans.
Click to expand...

Sadly, it's more complicated than that from Ukraine's perspective. They attempted to take this exact stance with the Trump administration in its early days. The result was the televised spanking Zelensky got from Trump and Vance at the White House back in February. If you manage to hear what Zelensky was trying to convey through the barrage of insults from Vance, he was saying that Russia had time and again broke every agreement that was made and that Putin cannot be negotiated with. And what Zelensky was told to do in response: "kneel and lick the boot, you ungrateful pleb"

But that wasn't the worst of it. The worst happened a couple of weeks later - US halted the supply of weapon deliveries that were already paid for, including Patriot air defense missiles. And US has stopped all intelligence sharing with Ukraine - intelligence UAF is heavily reliant upon. As the direct result, within just a couple of weeks, UAF were pushed out of the Kursk salient - a large swath of the Russia-proper territory that Ukraine had captured half a year prior and had successfully held prior to the US cutting off all aid. Without the intelligence, UAF got overrun and pushed out past the Ukraine-Russia border, turning the only "good card" Ukraine had for negotiations into another patch of Ukrainian land occupied by Russia:
1763742087412.png

source: DeepState map

Since then, Zelensky changed his tune. He had to. He now pretends to play ball with even the most ridiculous demands from the Trump administration. Luckily, putin is so devoid of reason and so detached from reality, even when he was presented with the most reasonable proposals, he still refused all of them. And he refused to even talk to Zelensky, unless it was to discuss Ukraine's surrender.

This played out well for Ukraine as it allowed them to mend ties with Trump administration, resume intelligence sharing and resume weapons deliveries (now paid for by the EU).

But US still hold too much leverage. They can still cut off the aid at any point. It doesn't matter who pays for it, US can refuse to deliver the weapons and share intelligence. And Zelensky now knows all too well what that would entail for the war effort. And surpise-surprise:

US threatens to cut intel, weapons to press Ukraine into peace deal, sources say​

Click to expand...
They want to stop the war and want Ukraine to pay the price
Click to expand...

Hence why today Zelensky addressed his nation describing difficult decisions ahead of them, given the sh!t sandwich they've been served:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1991887141090054644

As much as we would all love to see Zelensky give a big fat middle finger to the Trump administration, it is simply not something Ukraine can afford to do. EU cannot replace all the capabilities US is currently providing to Ukraine. And without these capabilities, Russia will overrun Ukraine.
 
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