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Kherson ‘Counteroffensive’ – Zelenski Is Going For Broke
After the first Ukrainian attempt to push towards had failed it is now reinforcing that failure. As I describe the move:
The only 'successful' attack was across the Inhulet river near Andriivka in the direction of the dam and river crossing that closes off the Kakhovka Dnieper reservoir.
The troops were cut off and mostly destroyed. On the western side of the salient a Russian unit crossed the Inhulet towards north and attacked the Ukrainians on that side. It soon had to pull back and the Ukrainians used the Russian crossing to reconnect with the cut off units in the salient.
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More Ukrainian reinforcements were pushed into the salient where they have little natural protection from Russian artillery and air force attacks.
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The political leadership of Ukraine is committed to continue this massacre. The Ukrainian Telegram channel 'Resident' reported:
Our source in the OP said that Zelensky holds a meeting every day on the counteroffensive in the South of Ukraine, at the moment the Armed Forces of Ukraine have the opportunity to create a foothold in the Krivoy Rog direction. Zalusky reported on the heavy fighting and losses suffered by the Ukrainian army in the steppes, but the political center of influence insist on continuing the #Battle_for_Kherson operation.
Reserves from the eastern front and Kharkov will be transferred to the Dnepropetrovsk region, in order to achieve the advantage of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, no information will be officially published in the media until the seizure of territories.
Earlier another war observer noted:
Ukrainian channel Legitimny reports Helensky is prepared to sacrifice up to 20K dead and 40k wounded in the Kherson offensive, which would be 6% of his army. Current losses are around 2% so he's going for 2nd offensive wave.
I believe that 60,000 men are more than 10% of the Ukrainian army but that is not the point.
'Resident' and 'Legitimny' are seen as authoritative Ukrainian sources. Unfortunately I have no access to the their Telegram channels so I can not verify the quotes. But it seems clear that Zelenski is going for broke.
Zalusky, the military leader of the Ukrainian army, will not be happy with this decision.
The only Ukrainian hope is that the Russian forces on the western side of the Dnieper can be cut off from the other side to then run out of supplies. The bridges across are damaged or destroyed but Russia has enough ferries to keep the supply line open. Large river crossing are part of every bigger Russian military training event. It has the materials and troops experienced with it. That is why I have my doubt that the Ukrainian hope can be realized.
Meanwhile the Russian military plays its usual defensive game. The frontline along the Kherson regions is currently held by lightly armored airmobile units. Whenever a Ukrainian push gets too strong they pull back from the front line, or leave the town under threat, to let the artillery and airforce do its work. They then pull up mobile reinforcements and push back until they are in their old positions. Rinse and repeat.
While this tactic costs the Russian side some losses the much higher ones are on the Ukrainian side.
The former Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar writes:
Russia’s “domain control” can be put in perspective: the enemy is, on the one hand, caught on the bare steppe and cut down with the overwhelming superiority of Russian artillery and aviation, and, on the other hand, encountering well-fortified, entrenched defence lines.
That said, Zelensky cannot give up, as he is desperately in need of a success story. Kiev still hopes to reverse the situation, but how that is achievable remains to be seen.
Against this sombre backdrop, more and more sceptical voices are being heard in the US about the Biden Administration’s policy trajectory. The latest is an opinion piece in Wall Street Journal by Gen. (Retd) Mark Kimmitt, formerly Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs in the Bush administration. Kimmitt predicts that “a breakthrough is unlikely” and soon, “logistics shortfalls” may force a change in US strategy.
…
In principle, the options are: i) “dig deeper into NATO stockpiles being held back for national defences”; ii) “ramp up critical shortfalls” by invoking Defense Production Act and its European equivalents; iii) escalate the conflict by targeting Crimea and Russia itself; or, iv) forcing Zelensky to face the grim reality that “diminishing resupplies” of weaponry actually contains “the message of declining outside support” for the war itself.
The retired general with Republican Party leanings concludes: “Beginning the diplomatic resolution would be distasteful, and perhaps seen as defeatist, but as there is little chance of climbing out of the current morass, it may be better to negotiate now than later… Looking into a future of protracted war, diminishing high-tech systems and mounting casualties, Mr. Zelensky and NATO must face up to tough decisions before those decisions are forced on them.”
Of those four options the first will be rejected by the professional military. The second is, at least in Europe, currently impossible for lack of cheap energy. Metal smelters and forges in Europe are shutting down. The third option, escalation, is the one the neoconservatives will press for, likely with some success. The fourth option is one Joe Biden and other are yet unwilling to take.
I therefore expect that the U.S. will double down, most likely with some new attacks on Crimea and the Kerch bridges.
Report of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation on the progress of the special military operation on the territory of Ukraine – as of September 5, 2022
🔻 The Armed Forces of Ukraine continued to try to gain a foothold in certain sections of the Nikolaev-Krivoy Rog direction.
▪️Russian Aerospace Forces, rocket troops and artillery deliver precision strikes on units and reserves of Ukrainian troops. In total, over the past day, during the hostilities in this operational direction, the enemy lost 11 tanks, 7 infantry fighting vehicles and 8 other armored vehicles, 9 pickup trucks with heavy machine guns and more than 220 military personnel.
▪️In addition, high-precision weapons in the areas of the settlements of BEREZNEGOVATOE and MURAKHOVKA of the Nikolaev region hit the points of temporary deployment of the 57th motorized infantry brigade.
▪️In the area of the village of KOCHUBEEVKA, Kherson region, the Russian Aerospace Forces shot down a Mi-8 helicopter of the Ukrainian Air Force.
▪️In the districts of Voznesensk and OCHAKOVA, Mykolaiv region, two depots of missile and artillery weapons and ammunition of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were destroyed, where over one and a half thousand rockets for multiple rocket launchers were stored, including more than two hundred missiles for US-made HIMARS multiple rocket launchers.
🔻The strikes by operational-tactical and army aviation, missile forces and artillery on military facilities on the territory of Ukraine continue.
▪️The high-precision strike of the Russian Aerospace Forces on the point of temporary deployment of the unit of the nationalist formation “Kraken” near the city of KHARKOV destroyed more than 30 nationalists and 10 vehicles.
▪️In the area of the settlement KRASNOPOLIE of the Donetsk People’s Republic, concentrated fire strikes on the combat positions of the 81st air assault brigade destroyed up to 20 and wounded more than 50 military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
▪️During the day, six command posts of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were hit in the areas of Dachnoye, Velyka Danilovka, Kharkiv region, SLAVIANSK, ARTYOMOVSK, Donetsk People’s Republic, Poltavka, Zaporozhye region, Zelenodolsk, Dnipropetrovsk region, as well as 48 artillery units, manpower and Ukrainian military equipment in 152 areas.
▪️Five depots of rocket and artillery weapons and ammunition were destroyed in the areas of ANDREEVKA, SADY, Kharkiv region, DOBROVOLIE, ZELENOE POLE of the Donetsk People’s Republic and Nikolaevka, Kherson region. A US-made HIMARS multiple launch rocket launcher was destroyed in the vicinity of the TYMCHENKI settlement in the Kharkiv region.
▪️Russian air defense systems shot down five unmanned aerial vehicles in the areas of settlements BIG PASSES of the Kharkov region, NOVOTROITSKOE, EGOROVKA, NOVY SVET and ZELENOE POLES of the Donetsk People’s Republic, including one Bayraktar-TB2.
▪️Four US-made HARM anti-radar missiles were shot down in the areas of CHERNOBAEVKA and NOVAYA KAKHOVKA, Kherson region. In addition, 34 shells of HIMARS, Uragan and Vilkha multiple launch rocket systems were intercepted in the air in the areas of the settlements of KAZATSKOYE and CHERNOBAEVKA of the Kherson region.
▪️In total, since the beginning of the special military operation, 287 aircraft, 152 helicopters, 1877 unmanned aerial vehicles, 372 anti-aircraft missile systems, 4822 tanks and other armored combat vehicles, 825 combat vehicles of multiple launch rocket systems, 3368 field artillery guns and mortars, and also 5304 units of special military vehicles.
🔻Despite the presence of representatives of the IAEA at the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, the Kyiv regime continues provocations in order to create a threat of a man-made disaster.
On September 4, Ukrainian troops used an attack unmanned aerial vehicle on the territory of the nuclear power plant. As a result of the actions of Russian electronic warfare equipment, the Ukrainian drone lost control and fell a kilometer from the territory of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant.
▪️During the night, two artillery shelling of the city of ENERGODAR was recorded. In total, six artillery shells were fired from the areas of the settlements of MARGANETS and NIKOPOL in the Dnipropetrovsk region. The units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine were suppressed by the return fire of Russian artillery.
▪️The radiation situation at the Zaporozhye NPP is normal.
Posted by: Summary | Sep 5 2022 13:23 utc | 31
DID FINLAND GIVE UKRAINE LEOPARD 2A4 TANKS?
On Saturday @Rybar reported that the third wave of Ukrainian forces to enter the Andreevka salient was armed with German Leopard 2A4 main battle tanks. The report may be false, so far there is no visual confirmation of this. The report caused speculation as to where the Leopards might have come from. Spain was suggested as the source, but according to public information, Spain decided to not send its tanks to Ukraine after all.
If the report on the Leopard 2s is true, then I suspect the tanks came from Finland.
Here is the original @Rybar report:
The battle for Kherson: the situation in the Andreevsky sector as of 20.00 on September 3 of the year
During the day, the Armed Forces of Ukraine managed to completely occupy the village of Blagodatovka , using the crossing set up by the Russian Armed Forces the day before, and unblock the troops surrounded on the southern bank of the Ingulets.
▪️ The command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine has concentrated all available reserves and forces to expand the bridgehead on the Andreevsky sector of the front: near Posad-Pokrovsky, near Vysokopolie, and near Snigirevka, enemy activity is limited to rare shelling and the activity of small groups.
▪️ Along the route Bereznegovatoe village – Bereznegovatoe station – Ternovka – Blagodatovka – Andreevka the transfer of equipment and personnel to the southern coast continues. German “Leopards” were seen, as well as something similar to the Finnish ZSU ItPsv 90 (Marksman).
▪️ Most likely, at least one pontoon crossing was partially restored in the Andreevka area: until the middle of the day, trucks with crushed stone and soil ran there, which poured an earthen embankment.
▪️ The amount of equipment transferred to the south coast has decreased: eyewitnesses report that the flow is starting to dry up. People are brought in civilian trucks and regular buses, after crossing the Ingulets they are dispersed in groups along the forest plantations along the coast.
…
https://t.me/rybar/38157
@Rybar later continued:
Apparently, the entire company set of Italian Leopard 2A4s has now been transferred to the Andreevsky sector of the front.
Now they are in the bare steppe without the support of air defense systems in Sukhoi Headquarters in the zone of destruction of Russian artillery and aviation.
UPD: The source corrects that we can talk about 2A6.
UPD 2: Understood. Most likely, we are talking about the Spanish 2A4. A month and a half ago, they just lit up while loading in one of the ports of Europe.
https://t.me/rybar/38159
@tacticalnecktie responds by speculating about the Spanish origin of the Leopard 2A4s, but rejects it.
Finland has 200 Leopard 2A4s and 2A6s, bought from Germany in the early 2000s and from the Netherlands in 2014. Finland also has some two dozen auxiliary tanks based on the Leopard 2, including the Leopard 2 Marksman anti-aircraft tank.
The Finnish “ZSU ItPsv 90 (Marksman)” no longer exist. Only seven were ever made in Finland, using a British turret and a Swiss 35 mm gun (the same as in the German Flakpanzer Gepard), all this placed on a T-55 tank platform of Polish origin. The tanks were retired in 2010, but in 2015 the turrets were transferred to Leopard 2 platforms. The combination is now called the “Leopard 2 Marksman”.
The Russian identification of the tanks as “something similar to the Finnish ZSU ItPsv 90 (Marksman)” is weird. It can be based partly on the signature of the British Marconi radars. Russian naming for odd Western weapons is not always up to NATO standards. Yesterday the Russian MoD called the Dutch YPR-765 a “Bradley”.
If the identification of the Leopard 2 Marksman is correct, and if the Leopard 2 Marksman was fighting in the same unit as other Leopard 2s, then one can assume all came from the same country, namely Finland.
Finland has sent seven batches of weapons to Ukraine. The first batch may have contained 100,000 Chinese Kalashnikov derivatives. No information on the contents of the other batches has been published. Photos published yesterday from the Kherson front show a Soviet-made ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft autocannon with Finnish language markings and boilerplates all over it.
Transporting dozens of Leopard 2s to Ukraine could only happen by railways. If this happened somewhere in Western Europe, it would have been noticed and reported on social media.
A Wasp-class amphibious assault ship of the United States Navy, the USS Kearsarge visited Finland in early August, and after stoping in Helsinki for a few days, held secret “exercises” with Finnish forces in the “Hanko area”. Hanko is a port city with good railway connections. After leaving Finland, the USS Kearsarge docked in Klaipėda, Lithuania on 20 August. The Wasp-class amphibious assault ship have a well-deck sized 81 by 15.2 meters. It can fit 40 Leopard 2s. If the Ukrainian Leopard 2A4s exist, and if they are of Finnish origin, then I believe they were transported aboard the USS Kearsarge to Lithuania, and from there by rail through Poland to the Ukraine.
Posted by: Petri Krohn | Sep 5 2022 15:17 utc | 63
Yes, the US “leadership” has truly decided to “carry the fight to the Russians down to the last Ukrainian.”
The slaughter will continue, regardless of the inevitable destruction of the Ukrainian state–and that is not only regrettable; it is lamentable, and something the USA shall carry as a historical burden for the rest of its likely short historical existence.
Russia has determined that the eradication of the US’s CIA-backed (over 70 years!) Galician Nazis is an existential threat and now Russia is determined to extinguish them. It is clear that the US does not have the resources nor the intellectual cleverness to neither block nor obviate Russia’s onslaught.
I am all on-board with the Russians: the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi. And it is clear: the US has decided to endorse, supply, and train Nazis in its doomed campaign against a Socialist future, where monopolies and 1% elite Oligarchs are eradicated like bacterial slime.
The fact that this will result in a steep decline of quality-of-life for the collective West is, also, something I welcome. The “Collective West” is an entity that has, for too long, been leeching the lifeblood of other civilizations. It is a good thing that the “Collective West” is now faced with the same sort of cold, life-altering calculations that the so-called “3rd world” has been faced with for so long.
For this one thing I am grateful for “Neo-Liberal” policy. For everything else, I despise it.
Unfortunately, what many of us USA- and Canadian-Americans don’t realize is how deeply the Nazi mentality is rooted in our own local cultures.
“Independent” and #Zero-Hedge-Financial voters like to write this off as “#Woke” culture scare-mongering, but it is true: there are concentrated Nazi forces in the US who have been planning a “revolution” against the US government for nearly 100 years, now. They started back when the Nazis were ascendant in Germany, and they have been infiltrating our military for decades.
The “Christian Dominionist” faction are explicitly (and stupidly) racist in their rhetoric, yet they have clearly been infiltrating our police and military forces for two (!) generations, now.
Sadly, the Intertubes do not distinguish among nor edit the historically-addled and scientifically-gulled “Social Media” posts that are now, as we speak, currently recruiting untold thousands of followers to their shared cause as-we-type. The problem is not “Social Media”; the problem is the core of the United States, which is built around a mentality of “Kill the local people who lived here before because that will increase my profit.”
In the US, “local” used to mean “indigenous.” Now, it means “the poor”.
“Race” used to mean “Italian, French, German, English, Scottish, Welsh, Occitan, Saxon, Napolitan, Russian, Slav, etc”.
Now, “Race” means “White”–unless you’re Russian, or Black, or “Red”–which means the indigenous peoples of Latin America, which the Western-backed Oligarchs of Latin America routinely slaughter.
The slaughter will continue, just as it always has, right up until the rest of us–by which i mean, the part of apolitical humanity that decides to declare an end to all this nonsense–rises up to end the lives of these self-serving, greedy Oligarchs.
The Oligarchs are the problem. Eliminating them is the solution.
Posted by: Pacifica_Advocate | Sep 5 2022 17:37 utc | 84
Oops.
>>(correction)
Yes, the US “leadership” has truly decided to “carry the fight to the Russians down to the last Ukrainian.”
The slaughter will continue, regardless of the inevitable destruction of the Ukrainian state–and that is not only regrettable; it is lamentable, and something the USA shall carry as a historical burden for the rest of its likely short historical existence.
Russia has determined that the eradication of the US’s CIA-backed (over 70 years!) Galician Nazis is an existential threat and now Russia is determined to extinguish them. It is clear that the US does not have the resources nor the intellectual cleverness to neither block nor obviate Russia’s onslaught.
I am all on-board with the Russians: the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi. And it is clear: the US has decided to endorse, supply, and train Nazis in its doomed campaign against a Socialist future, where monopolies and 1% elite Oligarchs are
***elevated, and all else eradicated like bacterial slime.
The fact that this will result in a steep decline of quality-of-life for the collective West is, also, something I welcome. The “Collective West” is an entity that has, for too long, been leeching the lifeblood of other civilizations. It is a good thing that the “Collective West” is now faced with the same sort of cold, life-altering calculations that the so-called “3rd world” has been faced with for so long.
For this one thing I am grateful for “Neo-Liberal” policy. For everything else, I despise it.
Unfortunately, what many of us USA- and Canadian-Americans don’t realize is how deeply the Nazi mentality is rooted in our own local cultures.
“Independent” and #Zero-Hedge-Financial voters like to write this off as “#Woke” culture scare-mongering, but it is true: there are concentrated Nazi forces in the US who have been planning a “revolution” against the US government for nearly 100 years, now. They started back when the Nazis were ascendant in Germany, and they have been infiltrating our military for decades.
The “Christian Dominionist” faction are explicitly (and stupidly) racist in their rhetoric, yet they have clearly been infiltrating our police and military forces for two (!) generations, now.
Sadly, the Intertubes do not distinguish among nor edit the historically-addled and scientifically-gulled “Social Media” posts that are now, as we speak, currently recruiting untold thousands of followers to their shared cause as-we-type. The problem is not “Social Media”; the problem is the core of the United States, which is built around a mentality of “Kill the local people who lived here before because that will increase my profit.”
In the US, “local” used to mean “indigenous.” Now, it means “the poor”.
“Race” used to mean “Italian, French, German, English, Scottish, Welsh, Occitan, Saxon, Napolitan, Russian, Slav, etc”.
Now, “Race” means “White”–unless you’re Russian, or Black, or “Red”–which means the indigenous peoples of Latin America, which the Western-backed Oligarchs of Latin America routinely slaughter.
The slaughter will continue, just as it always has, right up until the rest of us–by which i mean, the part of apolitical humanity that decides to declare an end to all this nonsense–rises up to end the lives of these self-serving, greedy Oligarchs.
The Oligarchs are the problem. Eliminating them is the solution.
Posted by: Pacifica_Advocate | Sep 5 2022 17:41 utc | 86
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