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Ukraine SitRep – Avdiivka
Bakhmut is encircled. All roads in and out of it are under Russian artillery fire. Over the last three days fighting has largely stopped there. No one seems to know why the operation was halted.
There are unconfirmed claims that Ukraine is preparing a counterattack to free Bakhmut from its encirclement. That attack is supposed to go off as soon as the muddy ground has dried up a bit.
Meanwhile other encirclement has taken place in Avdiivka:
Avdiivka (Ukrainian: Авдіївка, IPA: [ɐu̯ˈd(j)ijiu̯kɐ]; is a city of regional significance in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine. The city is located in the center of the oblast, just north of the city of Donetsk. The large Avdiivka Coke Plant is located in Avdiivka. The city had a pre-war population of 31,392 (2022 est.); in August 2022, its population was estimated at 2,500.
Avdiivka was within the claimed boundaries of the separatist Donetsk People's Republic, before Russia declared its annexation of the entire region in September 2022. During the war in Donbas, Avdiivka became a frontline city and saw a battle in 2017. During the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, heavy fighting led to Avdiivka being largely destroyed and most of its population having fled.
March 8, 2023
Source: LiveUAmap – bigger
Avdiivka is strongly fortified. Its coke plant is a strong-point. The Ukrainian army used the city to lob artillery into Donetsk city. But attempts to seize it were largely unsuccessful.
Two week ago the situation suddenly changed. The Russian airforce started to bomb Avdiivka with heavy glide bombs. At the same time an operations was launched to envelope the city from two directions.
March 21, 2023
Source: LiveUAmap – bigger
An east to west move north of Avdiivka cut the rail access to the city. Russian forces crossed the railroad and moved further west. Fighting is currently ongoing in Berdychi. South of Berdychi is Orlovka, a road crossing point (O0542, C015801, C015802) that is for now the only real supply route left for Avdiivka.
In the southwest of Avdiivka the Russian forces moved northward. They are currently trying to capture Siverne. The first progress there was stopped when on March 12 the Ukrainian 36th Marine Brigade was placed in the area.
Source: Military Land – bigger
Armed reconnaissance has also taken place into the southwest area of Avdiivka city which is made up of high rises.
The distance between the Russian positions in the southwest and in the northwest of Avdiivka is 8 kilometer (5 miles). That is sufficiently narrow for Russian artillery to interdict road traffic that goes through the area in between.
The landscape around Avdiivka is mostly featureless. There are a few slag hills that rise about 50 meter above their surrounding flatland. But they can be easily covered by artillery and are thus not really helpful for either side.
Source: Ukraine Topographic Map – bigger
This is now the second Ukrainian held area on the Donetsk front that is in operational encirclement. In both areas the Russian follow Sun Tzu's advice to not completely close off an encirclement but to leave a route out. This prevents fanatical defenses by encircled troops or it may even lead the enemy to push more forces into a hopeless position.
If the Ukrainian military had plans to relieve Bakhmut with a counterattack it now has to think of the additional problem that the encirclement of Avdiivka brings. Should it start there? Should it split the forces it had accumulated and planned to use for the counterattack in Bakhmut and start a parallel one in Avdiivka? Should it give up on one or both cities? Those are difficult decisions.
I find it likely that the Russian attacks on Bakhmut were halted after the Avdiivka development succeeded to give the Ukraine military enough time to make an error.
Time is on Russia's side while the Ukrainian military needs to show action and success to keep its 'western' support going.
@shadowbanned | Mar 22 2023 1:41 utc | 202
@R.A. | Mar 22 2023 2:33 utc | 213
@BroncoBilly | Mar 22 2023 3:25 utc | 225
@Down South | Mar 22 2023 7:19 utc | 262
@Vikichka | Mar 22 2023 7:23 utc | 264
“This is standard Club of Rome propaganda. It was being pushed in the 1960’s by Paul Erlich in his book “The Population Bomb”, in which he made all sorts of dire predictions about how the world would be coming to an end by the year 2000 or so because of overpopulation. None of his predictions came true.”
The above is a lie. The Club of Rome actually said, inter alia, If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years.[b] The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity”, and this was modelled by MIT and affirmed by Rand Corp. in the early 1970s. More recently, Turner, Graham (2008). “A Comparison of ‘The Limits to Growth’ with Thirty Years of Reality”. Socio-Economics and the Environment in Discussion (SEED). CSIRO Working Paper Series. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). 2008–09: 52. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2008.05.001. and again in 2020/2021 in Herrington, Gaya (June 2021). “Update to limits to growth: Comparing the World3 model with empirical data”. Journal of Industrial Ecology. 25 (3): 614–626. doi:10.1111/jiec.13084 which compared the World3 projections for population, fertility rates, mortality rates, industrial output, food production, services, non-renewable resources, persistent pollution, human welfare, and ecological footprint, and concluded that the “Limits to Growth” was and is predictive and that if major changes to the consumption of resources are not undertaken, economic growth will peak and then rapidly decline by around 2040. I think that the authors are extreme optimists.
“We are indeed seeing some problems, but they seem to be mainly self-imposed”
How much food do you think will be grown in the absence of phosphates, nitrates, topsoil, soil bacteria and fresh water, in the midst of what appears to be the worst mass extinction event in this planet’s history (and yes, on a planet where over 96% of terrestrial mammals are humans and their domesticated species, and humans use over 2/3 of all primary annual biomass consumption, while the corals are bleached and dying and the waters of the earth eutrophied sewers, extinction is definitely a thing)? How many do you imagine will be able to afford sustenance, in the midst of an economic collapse and civilizational transition? Particularly as soaring He4 levels suggest that Yellowstone may be a great deal more active in the near future.
“The whole climate change thing is a scam, by the way, which allows large corporations to make money off of transitioning to “green” technologies that don’t actually work”
Climate change and it’s impact on the environment is very real, and getting worse fast. For some real news, try the Arctic-News blog, home to some 100 geophysicists, glaciologists, paleoclimatologists, environmentalists and other highly qualified scientists. e.g. Carena, Sam. 2023-03-11). We are now in the Suicene. .”>https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth. Challenging to explains why some have retired to spend what time is left to us as a species among their loved ones and friends, rather than wasting precious hours trying to warn a world fooled by corporate sponsored anti-environment propaganda if your assertions were accurate.
As China, home to the world’s happiest people, is proving, Green Technologies work very well indeed. The world currently pays about $5 trillion a year in costs, in excess of $5 trillion a year in subsidies in excess of $5 trillion a year in externalities, and far more than that in social and environmental costs. Let’s call it $20 trillion a year. At current Chinese costs for installed photovoltaic solar power, we could replace all other sources of power with the cheapest electricity on earth in about a decade, even without taking continuously falling prices into account. And as PV and batteries are almost completely recyclable, once enough is in use, very limited supplies of materials would be required in future. Especially as populations decline back to the sustainable – which they will do or humans will be extinct.
the idea that all the animals and insects are going away if we don’t panic (ala Thunberg) is not supported by the data.
On a fine June day in 1977 a corn field in Iowa was carefully cataloged by a class from Iowa State University. Over 3,300 species were identified and counted, amassing over 3 tonnes of animal mass ( comprising nematodes, insects, snakes, reptiles, birds, small mammals and even a few amphibians). In 2016 the professor died and his office was cleared. The notebooks and analysis from that 1977 survey were found, and it was decided to repeat the sampling using the same methodologies and sampling locations. The same date and number of students were used. TA total of three insects, all corn borers, and 30 kg of nematodes were identified.
All populations other than humans and their domesticated animals are in a state of collapse. As a unique, global keystone species, humans are reliant on the health of the entire underlying ecosystem, which we have and are devastating. This is not a matter of opinion. Forty years ago, there were some 4,458,003,514 humans, using just over 40% of global terrestrial primary bioproduction and together with our livestock, made up 92% of extant terrestrial mammals, and everything else had to fit into the remaining 8%. Today there are over 8 billion humans, using over 76% of global terrestrial primary bioproduction and together with our livestock, making up over 96% of extant terrestrial mammals, and everything else had to fit into the remaining 4%. At the current rate of loss, and in the unlikely event that we are not already extinct, and no tripping points are discovered, in less than 20 years, the remaining mammals will make up less than 2% and the vast majority of aquifers will be depleted, salinated, poisoned or some combination. Do you really imagine that this is a surmountable problem?
“What then? You going to forcibly sterilise them?”
It is probably too late for that. We are in a very tight race between AI being able to help us solve our problems, and our problems, or our oligarchs who understand this but think that they can survive if they wipe the rest of us out, making us extinct, before that can happen. A pity we did not act when we first understood the problem in the 1970s. Had we all instituted a one child per family policy like China, we would not be collectively against the wall today. It is not as if events in the Ukraine, Taiwan and other hotspots are unconnected to these pressures. Aquifers, fertilizer and topsoil are under pressure, monetized and failing, and until we deal with the underlying issues, things are likely to get worse, not better.
“It just funny, that the ideology that promotes redistribution and equality for all, also promotes depopulation.”
As the HANDY Model (Safa Motesharrei, Jorge Rivas, Eugenia Kalnay , (2014-02-14). Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies, Ecological Economics, Volume 101, 2014, Pages 90-102, ISSN 0921-8009, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2014.02.014.) Shows, it’s not funny, but a simple matter of mathematical competence. Let’s take phosphate as an example. All plants and animals require phosphate to grow. Unfortunately, all the phosphate on earth arrived here on extrasolar comets and meteors. As it is water soluble, most of it ended up in the waters of the world. Over hundreds of millions of years, plankton slowly concentrated phosphate, were eaten by other organisms and eventually the phosphates were concentrated by birds eating the other organisms and pooping on land. Millions of later, humans started mining these concentrations and applying them as fertilizers. We started doing this in the late 1700s. We scrapped, mined and fought over this rare earth metal. Unfortunately, it takes high dosage rates to make enough available for plants to grow well, and being water soluble, it is washed out of the soil, into the streams, rivers lakes and seas, where it causes eutrophication and the extinction of life. More importantly, at current usage levels, even if we could extract all the reserves, all proven reserves will be exhausted within the next 60 years. This has raised levels in sea water globally from approximately 2.1 pmol kg 1 in 1900 to 2.2 pmol kg today. This is bad news for humans (even if we only had to pump sea water up by 1m in order to extract the phosphates contained in it, it would take 200 times the energy currently used from all sources to extract sufficient phosphate for a single Iowa corn crop) and worse for the oceans, because high ocean phosphate levels result in long term ocean aoxia effects (Refer e.g. Watson, Andrew J.; Lenton, Timothy M.; Mills, Benjamin J. W. (2017-08-07). Ocean deoxygenation, the global phosphorus cycle and the possibility of human-caused large-scale ocean anoxia. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2016.0318.
).”>https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2016.0318).
Think of it this way. If every pair of parents has one child, for just 4 generations (about 25 years), most of us will have living descendents, but the population will be completely sustainable. Modern technology and science will ensure abundance, allowing current overall economic activity or better, with a population some 16 times smaller. So if your income is $109,000 a year your descendants income would be $1,600,000 a year, in 2023 dollar equivalent. Far from, “misanthropic nature”, this would allow every person on earth to live a better life than the wealthiest of emperors. Don’t yo wish that your ancestors had been smart enough to reduce their breeding rate as we conquered the childhood and maternal diseases, and endemic poverty that limited reproduction into the nineteenth century.
Posted by: Hermit | Mar 22 2023 10:56 utc | 292
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