That has been my read for about a month. Fighting a fight they don’t need to fight any more
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Yes, it is painful to watch from afar. I have certain fears about the Ukrainian Spring Offensive. I have no doubt that it will achive some success, but I question if if would have had greater success had some of these very experienced batallions now destroyed, been injected into it. The last two weeks we have had more and more high profile losses of very experienced and good UA commanders and their troops (Da Vinci and many more slain in and around Bakhmut the last two-three weeks).
Maybe don’t end up like Paulus…
But I am done now. Will try not to talk too much about this. I just hope those experts I rely on are very wrong and that political cheerleaders like general Petreus are right (despite him being wrong several times in the article like noted by Koffman and Lee, when he speaks of a nonsense kill ratio that is only true in the wildest Ukrainian propaganda after the loss of the flanks) and that holding on to Bakhmut is the correct and prudent military decision. Stoltenberg and
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Sweet Jesus, of all the places to launch a strong attack.
According to these rumours they sent their new formerly Polish Leo 2s just delivered to Chasiv Yar.
I think despite the map similarity, the Stalingrad metaphor is probably influencing the Ukrainians more than the Russians. Bakhmut is occupying a similar symbolic value for them, and perhaps making them think they are soaking up enormous Russian capacity to set up their own Operation Jupiter.
I think they are wrong. They have turned what would have been a Pyrrhic victory for Russia into something more mutual.
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I am wondering how much of all this might be Ukrainian disinformation, but the presence of Leopards at Chasiv Yar doesn’t surprise me. Until they have them deployed in significant numbers, I expect they have one role, countering the T-90s.
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I’m actually quite surprised at how much information these channels are sharing about current wartime progress. it’s astonishing how much detail they have available.
This is a very strange war by historical standards - even leaving aside the information about deployments and what the sides are doing, which is unprecedented even if some of it is actually disinformation. Simply the amount of combat footage is staggering. There is probably more direct footage available on Twitter than we have for World War 2 in its entirety.
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in 1945 they didn’t have GoPro
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Nor drones that hover 50 meters above a target with a HD camera. Images of those small drop-bombs falling on small groups have become so common that it is easy to forget that some poor bastard’s life may be coming to an end in that little clip we see.
The GoPro footage is pretty staggering though, my mind was blown by the one involving two Ukrainian soldiers holding a trench position, with the supporting guy capturing the footage.
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it’s easier when it’s clip-mounted to a helmet with superglue. my kid’s RC truck has a GoPro mount from the factory.
That said, I’ve stopped watching a lot of the raw footage. Is doing me no favors.
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Yeah, my youngest has a camera mount on his ski helmet, probably almost identical. In a sense, the camera is not the most revolutionary aspect, it is the sheer amount of data that it coming from the front lines.
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one enables the other. we’re in an age where a whole brigade refuses to mobilize and it’s on the news the next day…
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I would also add to what Arminius said by mentioning that Open Source satelites photos like MAXAR makes true deception of large forces impossible, since think tanks and others orders photos. You can con the enemy a bit, but it requires large feints and a lot of disinfo (like Kherson offensive that became a Kharkiv offensive, but RU did in fact know of the UA build up there but was conned even so).