Just checked again and definitely they UKR is within 8km (in some areas) as of yesterday early. On the wartranslated.com report
Summary of the daily livestream with Aleksey Arestovych, kindly brought to you by Atis: @savaadaak English voice-over video by Privateer Station: Original video in Russian: 🔥 Battlefield update: 🔥 Svatove: 🇷🇺 created 2 defensive lines, even attempting some useless counter-attacks. It’s not...
wartranslated.com
I would call attention to the support from France (often heckled on here) and Germany (also heckled a bit). Europe as a whole really rallying around Ukraine. Just really really impressed ( but for Hungary).
These guys have noted that russia is keeping a large force in Belgorod and that might act as a pinning force a bit.
I also heartily recommend the site in general and his translation of this podcast in particular. The anecdotes in the translated calls add some color to things.
Russia is very paranoid about protecting the motherland. We all know the US has no territorial intentions on Russia, but one Russia's driving forces to keep the former republics inside the Russian sphere of influence is to serve as a buffer from western invasion.
The Ukrainians keep attacking Russian targets around Belgorad, so the Russians keep a force there to prevent a Ukrainian invasion, even though I think that is the remotest of possibilities. Ukraine is very clear they just want their country back and don't want any Russian territory.
I've wondered about other posts where people laughed about old weapons. If the gun made in 1943 works and they have ammunition, what's the problem?
As others pointed out, range and rust. An 80 year old gun used like the Russians do is likely going to have a catastrophic barrel a lot sooner than a newer howitzer.
Another point on whats wrong with old weapons. It's that it indicates the corruption of the armed forces of russia and the lack of modern doctrine that can be implemented- the under investment and corruption permeates everything the russian army does.
@wdolson has gone on and on and on ( teasing you) about the fact that russia will begin to crumble as they gradually lose the few competent modern units and replaced those with just....useless cannon fodder (poor sods sent to die-really a warcrime all in itself).
The new units are supposed to be replacing casualties in more experienced units so they will get training in the field. However they are being trained in a doctrine that has already failed so ...what good is that. Mobiks are old, the cupboards bare of useable modern weapons.
Our
prolific posters point has been proven out. He foresaw a russian military that would implode. You could be seeing that implosion this fall/winter. It looks that bad. Ukraine is benefiting from all the NATO training, forces are coherent, strategy sublime, tactics are workable. They could still improve but overall you'd give Ukraine a sold A. Russia gets a sold FAIL. We could literally be seeing the destruction of the russian army so I thought I would give a shout out today to Mr
@wdolson who posted often and at length with supporting links/data on a view that many didn't share at the time. Thanks!
Trent Telenko has talked about a Lanchester Square collapse. That is a military theory that a modern army taking heavy losses will reach a point where the quality of their troops in the field drops sharply and they become combat ineffective. it usually happens after a battle of attrition.
An example of this is Japanese air power in the Pacific during WW II. At the time of Pearl Harbor, Japanese air crews were better than the USN by a good margin. Their training regime was brutal and long, those who got through it were the equivalent of the Top Gun trained USN pilots today.
The army pilots were not quite as good, but were still better than the Allies.
Then came the Solomons campaign of which Guadalcanal was the first battle. The US chose to stay in the Solomons and expand after Gudalcanal as an extended offensive because US carrier power was almost gone. The US had one operational carrier, the Saratoga and one being rebuilt in Bremerton, WA (the Enterprise). Everything else was sunk. Invasions in the Solomons could be covered with air power from other islands so the carriers weren't needed.
The US borrowed a carrier from the British and it and the Saratoga stood by if needed, but they sat idle for most of 1943.
The air battles over the Solomons were intense with both sides starting out evenly matched. The Japanese had degraded some due to losses, but were still quite potent and the US (and its allies) had improved quite a bit due to incorporating the lessons learned the hard way. Over a year the US chipped away at the Japanese until the quality of their airpower collapsed.
The US had a robust training program stateside with veteran pilots and air crew rotated back from the front to teach the lessons they had learned to new crews. The quality of a green pilot coming out of training by the end of 1943 was much better trained for the war than an experienced pilot in early 1942.
Japanese air power had gone through a Lanchester Square collapse and it would never recover. They were putting air crew into aircraft, but their training was extremely poor and they achieved very little. The battle of the Philippine Sea in September 1944 illustrated this. It was the largest carrier battle in history and the result was very one sided. The Japanese threw their entire carrier force at the US and US fighters shot down everything thrown at them.
The Japanese started the battle with around 450 carrier aircraft and 300 land based aircraft. Estimates of losses run as high as 640.
Germany's pilot decline wasn't quite as sharp, but it was also very bad. US fighter pilots started noting in early 1944 that German fighters they were opposing were starting to do stupid things and getting shot down easily. Again the Germans kept their best pilots on the front lines where some ran up some incredible scores against the enemy. Erik Hartmann shot down 352 aircraft, mostly Russian, but also a few American. The top US ace was Richard Bong with 40. Top Commonwealth ace was James Johnson with 38, though South African Marmaduke Paddle may have had more. His records were lost and he was killed in Greece in 1941.
The Allies would rotate experienced pilots out so they didn't get the combat time the Axis pilots did. But it meant those experienced pilots trained the next generation so there was a large pool of fairly good pilots vs a pool with a few super aces and a lot of cannon fodder.
In any case, the Russian army is reaching the point where Japanese air power was at the end of 1943. The skilled people are mostly dead and they are being replaced with green troops who have no clue what they are doing.
The US military quit taking recruits who didn't have a high school education many years ago because modern systems require some skills to operate. Even infantry these days need some skills to be effective in most situations, though the Ukrainians made excellent use of their volunteers early in the war. Motivated volunteers with the right weapons in more of less stationary defense proved very effective.
The Russians are now on the defense, but their low skill troops have no motivation, poor leadership, and poor weapons. They will not be the kind of force the territorial defense troops were for the Ukrainians.
When Russia stripped their training bases of personnel and sent them to the front, I knew the Lanchester Square collapse was beginning. There are videos of instructors from the Russian officers academy trying to train new recruits, but they only get a day or two of weapons training before being shipped out. And there are only a handful of instructors from the academy. This also means their officers are getting poorer training. Their officer corps was horrible at the start of the war, it's now gone down a notch from there.
The Russians still have more equipment and they have a larger pool of potential recruits to draft into this fight, but they are running out of basics and those recruits are getting ever worsening equipment. People point out that Russia has a larger population than Ukraine, but even if they mobilized all the men they could they could only get about 3X the number of people Ukraine has in the army now. And they don't have uniforms, guns, or anything else for all these new troops. They would be going to war in civilian clothes with little more than sharpened sticks.
And that's before you factor in training and motivation. Ukrainians are getting first class training and the Russians are getting none. Ukrainians are universally motivated to win no matter what while the Russians have zero desire to be there and would rather be anywhere else.
At this point Ukraine has almost all the advantages.
news.yahoo.com
