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Ukraine SitRep – Catastrophic Losses, Failing Wonder Weapons, NATO Escalation
The Russian military is still integrating most of the mobilized 300,000+ men and volunteers. According to Putin 25% of the mobilized forces are in combat units, 25% in rear positions, while 50% train in Russia. It does not look like an imminent all out attack on the Ukrainian front lines is in the cards. The expected large winter attack may not be coming at all. Instead the new forces will rotate through the frontline and only attack locally whenever they see an opportunity.
The Russian do not need to attack. Their task is to demilitarize Ukraine. As long as the Ukrainians come to the front lines and attack the Russians their is no need to launch a large attack on them.
The map from a months ago versus today shows only a few small changes of the front lines.
November 10 2022
Source: LiveUAmap – bigger
December 10 2022
Source: LiveUAmap – bigger
However, the does not mean that nothing is happening.
December 10 2022
Source: LiveUAmap – bigger
Every day all of the frontline sections are full of artillery/bombing symbols. That is mostly Russian artillery mowing the grass and killing Ukrainian soldiers.
Over the last month it was mostly the Ukrainians who attacked all along the front only to run into walls of steel and explosions. They did not manage to break the Russian lines. They tried again and again but failed with high losses.
Russian offenses were mostly confined to the Bakhmut/Artemovsk front where the Wagner private military contractor group has captured multiple Ukrainian trench lines and villages. This usually comes only after the artillery has cleaned the area and the few surviving Ukrainians moved out. The map from a months ago versus today shows small but important differences in that front line.
November 10 2022
Source: LiveUAmap – biggerDecember 10 2022
Source: LiveUAmap – bigger
There must be a Ukrainian high order to hold onto Bakhmut at any price. The Ukrainian army has again and again moved reserve brigades into the area. Its hold operation is extremely costly:
Tony @Cyberspec1 – 5:46 UTC · Dec 10, 2022
Polish newspaper NDP (Independent Political Journal) believes that without the support of NATO, the fighting in 🇺🇦 would end within a week.
NDP: daily losses of the AFU near Bakhmut reach a battalion (500-800 soldiers), hospitals in the city of Konstantinovka are overcrowded,
The above is not the only source which made that claim.
Big Serge @witte_sergei – 18:32 UTC · Dec 8, 2022
LPR officials claim that Ukraine is transferring up to 500 men *per day* to Bakhmut to replenish losses. Even Arestovych admitted that Russian artillery strength in the sector has a 9 to 1 advantage. Bakhmut is becoming the largest and most costly battle of the war for Ukraine.
Newsweek spoke with a 'former' U.S. Colonel who, together with 'volunteers', trains Ukrainian soldiers. Here is what he says about Ukrainian losses:
"Bakhmut is like Dresden, and the countryside looks like Passchendaele," he said, referring to the German city destroyed by allied bombing in World War II and the infamously muddy and bloody World War I battlefield. "It's just a horrible and miserable place."
Ukraine closely guards its casualty figures, but its forces are believed to be suffering badly around Bakhmut.
"They've been taking extraordinarily high casualties," Milburn said of the units training with Mozart. "The numbers you are reading in the media about 70 percent and above casualties being routine are not exaggerated."
Despite their "tremendous morale," Milburn said the defenders "have an acute 'regeneration problem,' which means getting new recruits into the line as quickly as possible." This means those being thrown into the fight have little beyond basic training.
"Typically about 80 percent of our intake who are coming off of the line have never even fired a weapon before," Milburn said. "We've got our work cut out for us."
A unit that has 50% casualties is usually no longer able to fight and must be replaced. But the Ukrainians leave their units on the frontline until nearly nobody is left in them.
So the number of 500 casualties per day on the Bakhmut front seems realistic. Over the last months the daily report of the Russian ministry of defense listed on average some 300 Ukrainian casualties per day. But the ministry does not report the casualties from Bakhmut as the operations of the private military contractor Wagner are not included in it. So the daily total over the last month, despite little movement of the front lines, must have been some 800 dead Ukrainians. In the 30 days between the two maps at the top at least 24,000 Ukrainian soldiers have left the battle field.
It is no wonder that such high numbers can not be replaced.
The mix of dead or wounded will likely be 1 to 1 as medical evacuation from the frontline trenches is extremely difficult. Most wounded will just die there.
It is not only the men that are lost. The equipment they used is mostly lost with them. 24,000 men are the equivalent of 6 to 7 NATO brigades. The German army has now only 8 of those. When I was it that army it had 36 brigades plus significant reserve units. The same large downgrade happened with the general state of NATO. It is not ready for a war with Russia.
The western wounder weapons have done little for Ukraine. The Russians have update their air defense systems to now detect and shoot down HIMARS missiles. They report some 10 to 20 of such kills per day. The shooting down of small and medium sized Ukrainian drones has dropped from 20-30 per day in the summer to 2-3 per day. Either the Ukrainians have run out of drones or the weather has made theirs unusable. Russian drones continue to fly and they help with artillery targeting. The western artillery systems can not be repaired in the field as the Ukrainians lack the training and tools to do that. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Less than 50% of the self-propelled Panzerhaubitze — a class of mobile, long-barreled battlefield guns officially known as PzH2000 howitzers that are widely considered to be among the best-performing weapons of their kind — are on the battlefield at any given time, because they must be taken to Lithuania for repairs, nearly 900 miles from the Kherson front in southern Ukraine, senior German officials said. Germany has so far delivered 14 such weapons, and the Netherlands another five.
Other allies, such as the U.S. and Britain, service the arms they donated to Ukraine in Poland, near the Ukrainian border. But Warsaw has refused to allow Berlin to set up a servicing center in Poland, requesting instead that the German manufacturers provide confidential technical information in order for a Polish state-controlled company to do the work, according to German officials involved in the talks.
There was also a spat over Patriot air defense missiles. Germany offered to station these in east Poland but with German crews. Poland first accepted the offer, then rejected it and said the missiles should go to Ukraine. It then retracted again and will now accept the offer.
The international relation within Europe are getting worse. The German chancellor Olaf Scholz has declared that he wants Germany to be the leading power in Europe. Germany's neighbors, and most of its own population, are not happy with that.
Over the last five months Latvia has hosted the Russian opposition TV station TVrain. It has now shot it down because TVrain, sending for a Russian audience, also had some positive things to say about Russia. TVrain had survived in Russia for 12 years. In Latvia it lasted only four and a half months.
Alec Luhn @ASLuhn – 19:24 UTC · Dec 9, 2022
.@tvrain journalists have been blacklisted in Latvia & declared a foreign agent in Russia on the same day 🤔
link
What these anecdotes show is that NATO is slowly falling apart. NATO is losing the proxy war in Ukraine and it is losing it badly. The people know it and it will have consequences. An increasingly authoritarian EU will follow the same path.
But there are powers in NATO that want to prevent that downfall. They will try to get NATO directly into the fight:
NATO’s secretary general warned on Friday that Russia’s war in Ukraine could expand into a wider war with the Atlantic alliance.
The official, Jens Stoltenberg, repeatedly cautioned in news media interviews this week against underestimating the situation in Ukraine and emphasized the wider threat President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could pose to Europe.
“If things go wrong, they can go horribly wrong,” Mr. Stoltenberg said in an interview released on Friday with the Norwegian journalist Anne Lindmo, in which he added that there was “no doubt” a full-blown war against NATO was a “real possibility.”
“I understand everyone who is tired of supporting Ukraine. I understand everyone who thinks that food prices and the electricity bills are far too high,” he said. “But we have to pay a much higher price if our freedom and peace are threatened through Putin winning in Ukraine.”
Reread that last sentence:
“But we have to pay a much higher price if our freedom and peace are threatened through Putin winning in Ukraine.”
Putin wining in Ukraine, which he is doing, will threaten our freedom and peace?
Russia has no interest in Europe beyond Ukraine's borders. So how is that suppose to endanger us?
It is bullshit but it is designed to push for NATO entering the war when it becomes obvious to everyone that Russia is wining it.
The Russians see that coming:
NATO countries are increasingly involved in the conflict in Ukraine, with the United States intentionally proceeding with an escalation on this track, Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on the Rossiya-24 TV channel on Thursday.
"NATO members are increasingly and directly involved in this conflict. Their support for Kiev is now much diversified than it was a few months ago. This is a reflection of Washington’s intentional policy, obediently pursued by the Europeans, of escalating the conflict. They are playing with fire. The risks are soaring," Ryabkov said.
Indeed. But Stoltenberg has one thing right:
Mr. Stoltenberg’s comments came two days after he said that Russia was intentionally stalling the war in order to prepare a renewed onslaught against Ukrainian forces next year.
Let us assume that Russia waits until March for its all out attack on Ukraine. In the meantime it continues to grind the Ukrainian army down without itself having significant casualties. The Ukrainian army will by then have lost another 72,000 men. That is probably a third of its current strength. By then its acute 'regeneration problem' will have become even more acute. It means that it will then be much weaker.
What plans may Russia have for an all out spring attack?
Dr. Michael Vlahos and Col. Douglas Macgregor are military historians. They have watched the war in Ukraine and recently discussed it. They have come to their own conclusions. Neither believes in the nonsense of a winning Ukraine that the 'western' media are trying to sell us. They have ideas how Russia may want to attack.
Part one of their talk is here:
Is the war in Ukraine entering its decisive phase? Pt.1
Why NATO strategic failure? A war of deceit, denial Pt2
What is to be done? Can a corrupted US military be renewed? Pt.3
Each of those videos is some 30-50 minutes long. But it is content on a higher level than what you will see in other talk shows. I highly recommend these.
The Russian Oil Price Cap is yet another stupid and self-destructive idea that should have been suffocated at birth. It cannot possibly achieve what its supporters claim, and it represents emotional value signalling from the Big Hug Club rather than any semblance of rational thought.
The belief is pure neoliberal globalist war mongering hubris, based upon a category mistake and a complete misunderstanding of how national economies and their currencies work.
The Belief:
The plan is to impose a price cap of $60 on Russian Federation oil and refuse insurance to any ship carrying Russian oil above that price cap, denying Russia the revenue it needs to prosecute its action in Ukraine. The US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, said the oil price cap “will help us achieve our goal of restricting Putin’s primary source of revenue for his illegal war in Ukraine”.
She continued: “Today’s action will also help further constrain Putin’s finances and limit the revenues he’s using to fund his brutal invasion. With Russia’s economy already contracting and its budget increasingly stretched thin, the price cap will immediately cut into Putin’s most important source of revenue.”
This rhetoric is repeated across the ignorant West. However, a moment’s thought should tell you this is all a pack of lies. The price cap is in US dollars. Russia doesn’t use dollars. It uses Roubles. Russian Taxes are paid in Roubles. Putin settles payments for his war using Roubles. Oil and gas in Russia are pulled out of the ground by workers paid in Roubles.
Missiles are not made with dollars. They are made by people working in factories fabricating and assembling them paid in Roubles.
The category mistake is the ongoing belief, instilled by neoliberal, globalist free market thinking, that governments require tax revenue to spend, even though Beardsley Ruml, a former chair of the Federal Reserve, explained back in the 1940s why that does not and cannot bind a nation. Taxes for Revenue is and remains an obsolete concept.
Why it Won’t work:
An individual company will want to export to make a monetary profit. However, the national economy only needs to export to the extent that it can obtain imports in exchange for them. Imports raise a nation’s standard of living. Exports are the cost of obtaining imports. Exporting in excess is, therefore, potentially a waste of national resources. Since Russia is barred from obtaining imports from the West, it has no national interest in exporting anything to the West.
In addition, Russia is banned from dealing in Western currencies, and the West has banned its populations from dealing in roubles. Paradoxically, that makes the exchange analysis very easy indeed: nobody in Russia needs Western currencies as there is nothing to buy with them. However the energy sales to the West need to be exchanged, at least in part, for roubles as the Russian energy firms have bills and taxes to pay.
That imbalance should make it very difficult to get hold of roubles in exchange for Western currencies, and the exchange rate is only being prevented from ascending into the stratosphere by the intervention of the Russian banking system.
In effect, Western currencies are confetti from the Russian point of view – as useless as Reichsmarks. The exchange rate exists to prop up the energy firms in rouble terms, with the Russian Central Bank discounting FX settlement balances into roubles as required.
The Russian banking system ensures that the oil companies get enough Roubles to pay their staff, their suppliers and the government’s tax. This happens whatever the amount of Dollars/Euros/Pounds the energy firms get in the front door, whether that is one or one billion. The exchange rate will buffer the problem if the Russian banking system thinks it needs to.
Moreover, Putin’s government provisions its activities like all governments provision their activities – by commandeering the real resources of the nation via votes in the legislature. The real tax point is when a government takes something for its use and deprives the private sector of access to it, not when money is handed over. Money is just a way of shifting the burden of that confiscation around the nation.
The government may give the people some roubles for the resources it commandeers so that they can transact with others. Those others then stand the loss instead when they settle their tax bill. This way of looking at things is not a new idea – Keynes laid it out in depth in How to Pay for the War in 1940.
All governments of sovereign nations settle payments in the same way – an interest-free overdraft at the central bank which is then partially eliminated as taxes are collected, leaving the balance as additional National Savings in the currency of issue. In all cases, the underlying asset the central bank discounts is the state’s power to tax. The ‘missing taxes’, that cause so much wailing and gnashing of teeth, will turn up, automatically, when the National Savings people hold are finally withdrawn and spent.
The ‘power to tax’ asset is disguised by the foreign and real assets the central bank chooses to take onto its books in exchange for issuing its liabilities, whether that is gold, foreign exchange, IMF claims, or anything else. An ‘anything else’ that could easily include barrels of oil.
These masking assets, detectable by not being denominated in the reporting currency, hide the ‘negative equity’, ‘government overdraft’, ‘ways and means provisions’ or other description of the balancing item that would otherwise show up on the balance sheet.
Stripping away these distractions and looking at the underlying processes shows how things actually work. The Russian government can place orders for more missiles, pay for them in roubles, allow the tax system to place the burden of producing those missiles on the Russian people and, where people decide to save in roubles, mask some of those savings in the accounts via a notional tax on energy exports.
That process will continue whatever price the West tries to impose on oil exports and whether Russia decides to send any of its oil abroad or not.
The Blow back :
The impact of the price cap will be felt in the West, not Russia. Increased uncertainty and risk will raise energy prices across the board. The oil cartels may not raise production to maintain oil prices in the usual range. With depleting wells they may not even be able to.
In the meantime, Asia will feast on an energy bounty and further reduce its cost of production. Is the West sure that Eastern appetite for consuming fancy logos, snappy advertising jingles and banal lowbrow entertainment will stay strong enough to allow the West to feed and power its populations?
The West are a bunch of idiots.
Posted by: Orwellian Language | Dec 10 2022 23:58 utc | 117
Posted by: ObseverBG | Dec 10 2022 20:32 utc | 63
On the issue of the West not having enough capability to prop up the war, the US spends 60 billion on Ukraine annually, which is far less than the so called “war on terror”.
– The US has spent $68 Billion in 2022 alone, with a further 37 Billion requested. This is far more than the US has spent on the WoT in 2022. How are you getting to this conclusion?
– This excludes all aid from other NATO Countries, so a truly huge amount is being thrown into Ukraine to little effect.
– This military aid has provided very little capability to the AFU, even the leadership of Ukraine admits this.
– Empirical evidence on the ground indicates this aid hasn’t achieved much, judging by the fact that the Russians are fighting on Ukrainian territory, not the other way around.
– The fact that Russia now possess large chunks of Ukraine (including the Azov sea) shows that this aid really didn’t help much.
If the Western aid had been any good at all:
– The entire Donbas would by now have been in AFU hands,
– Russia would have been driven back to their official borders,
– NATO warships would be patrolling the Sea of Azov
– Crimea would be an AFU base, of course with heavy contingent of NATO and American “advisors”
– The AFU would not be in Bakhmut getting slaughtered en masse by RF artillery
– RF would not be bombarding Kherson daily from just across the Dnieper
– Ukraine would have proper missile defense and the Energy grid would be more or less intact …
– etc. ….
So yeah, they can keep the war for a long time, as Putin himself was recently forced to admit.
Nothing you’ve indicated suggests this. You put forward spurious conclusions derived from spurious numbers that have been removed from context.
On buying stuff, i mean that they can buy lots of weaponry and ammo from non NATO countries around the globe too.
“lots of”? No sir. You’re way off base here.
Which non-NATO countries can meet the military production needs of the kind of war Ukraine is waging? Name them. I can think of:
South Korea
‘israel’
Taiwan ?? (do they even manufacture weapons?)
Japan ?? (do they even manufacture weapons?)
– None of these countries are going to provide anything of significance. Even SK is iffy, despite contracts signed with the US and European countries.
– None of them are geared to provide the kind of weapons required in Ukraine at the volume required. Feel free to prove otherwise.
– All of them are likely to risk major political and financial consequences from the Russians should they try.
Ukraine apparently even has no problems with getting chinese drones, later being militarised.
To no effect whatsoever!
Chinese drones aren’t even a factor on the battlefield.
What else could China provide Ukraine other than DJI toys?
You are aware of the political, economic and military allegiances between Russia and China, right?
There is no danger of China providing Ukraine with anything that might actually threaten Russia forces significantly.
Call me when China starts supplying tanks, millions of artillery rounds, MLRS systems, cruise missiles etc. to the AFU.
Furthermore:
If you’re now telling us that the AFU is making good use of Chinese drones then we must ask: What happened to all those super-duper high tech drones provided by the USA, Britain, israel? The western media was abuzz about these wonder weapons for months only for you to inform us they need to resort to cheap Chinese substitutes now ?
If that is not an indication of production incapacity, I don’t know what is …
On military production, i heard that many times before, how the West could not supply Ukraine, only to see more and more Ukrainian armies formed and offensives launched.
You are putting forward an apple and concluding an orange from it. You can’t make these random leaps without properly connecting the dots.
– It’s a fact that the AFU is outgunned by the RF by almost an order of magnitude – because the West cannot provide the AFU with the same level of ammunition. The conclusion is clear: The West cannot deliver the goods.
– You say “more Ukrainian armies formed and offensives launched.” but what is more accurate is:
“more and more rounds of mobilization required to replace destroyed Ukrainian armies”
and
“more and more failed offensives launched and destroyed by the RF.”
So, if you’re somehow using this as evidence of sufficient supplies from the West I’m afraid neither logic nor fact support you. This is evidence of something else: The inability of the AFU to prevent a Russian invasion and the inability of the West to arm its allies.
So, no: Throwing poorly armed bodies into the meat grinder is no metric of Western military productive capacity.
Probably it was hopes like that that led to the debacles in Kharkov and Kherson.
“Probably?” Neither Kharkov nor Kherson had anything to do with being overwhelmed by Western arms. Not in the least.
If it were so, why would the RF decamp across the river from Kherson and be bombarding it for months straight, without the AFU being able to dislodge them?
I heard something else as well. That the US is using a salami tactic approach towards Russia, gradually increasing support for Ukraine, but not making too much noise about it so that it does not provoke it.
Judging by the current state of Ukraine this “salami slicing” is not working very well.
Just look at the current state of the AFU, Ukrainian infrastructure and economy and future prospects. Winning, right? /s
Besides, if we can make the “salami slicing” argument for the West, why can’t we claim Putin is also using a “salami slicing” strategy? After all, at least Putin has actual salami slices to show for it …
If you want to see “salami slicing” done right, take a look at how Putin has been shaving off regions from Ukraine on a steady basis throughout 2022.
I mean, show me a single country on this planet (this century) that has managed to lop off the amount of land from a neighbour that Russia has in just 10 months?
The situation before the joke called SMO (or maybe the “strange war” ala 1940?) was not the same.
“Joke” you say?
The Ukrainians are not laughing.
Not with their energy grid and economy almost gone.
Not with the next 50 years prospect of Ukrainians in “debt slavery” to Uncle Sam paying off the “Lend Lease” (an Economic Hit Job if I ever saw one) …
Not even the comedian who rules them is cracking a smile here.
There were no 40k russians getting killed anually (military plus civilian),
There still aren’t. You are making things up. Please stop lying.
… there was no war on the border regions,
Wakey wakey, Rip van Winkle. There has been a war on the border for the last 8 years.
there were no things burning or blowing up all over Russia (pretty sure many of those are sabotage).
More people die in Russia from natural disasters in an average year than have died from Ukrainian retaliation in Russia.
This has been dramatized by hysterical types like Zanon, rk, Biswapriya and the usual troop of screamers supporting them.
As a retaliation between two states at war the Ukrainian counter attack on Russia proper has been truly pathetic.
You’d expect more from a state facing an existential crisis, and backed by great Western powers to boot.
In fact, russian military casualties (maybe 25k per year) are far higher than US military casualties per year in Vietnam.
Seriously? You can’t see the logical fallacy you’re making here?
So overall i rate many of these as poor performances for Putin.
I think I’ve shown your reasoning is spurious at best, your facts shady.
You’ll need to do better I’m afraid.
Posted by: Arch Bungle | Dec 11 2022 4:02 utc | 169
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