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Ukraine SitRep: Ukrainian Army Chief Reveals Lack of Strategy Behind Kursk Incursion
With the help of a CNN interview the Ukrainian Commander in Chief General Syrski is hoping to gain more support from western sources.
Exclusive: Ukraine army chief reveals the strategy behind Kursk incursion – CNN, Sept 5 2024
In his first television interview since becoming military chief in February, the general told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour that he believed the Kursk operation had been a success.
“It reduced the threat of an enemy offensive. We prevented them from acting. We moved the fighting to the enemy’s territory so that [the enemy] could feel what we feel every day,” Syrskyi said, in a rare interview that offered a candid assessment of the war.
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Speaking to Amanpour at an undisclosed location near the frontline, the general, who took over as army chief in February, said Moscow moved tens of thousands of troops to Kursk, including some of its best airborne assault troops.
And while admitting that Ukraine was under immense pressure in the area around Pokrovsk, the strategic city that has for weeks been the epicenter of war in eastern Ukraine, Syrskyi said his troops have now managed to stall the Russian advances there.
“Over the last six days the enemy hasn’t advanced a single meter in the Pokrovsk direction. In other words, our strategy is working.” he said.
Maps as provided by the pro-Ukrainian LiveUAmap:
Pokrovsk region – Aug 30, 2024
biggerPokrovsk region – Sept 6, 2024
bigger
I can identify at least three areas where the maps show differences in favor of the Russian side. Top to bottom:
- North and north-west of Niu York:
Pivnichek east of Toretsk has changed hands. The Russia line has moved in several place there to envelope Toretsk city and, a bit further south, Nelipivka.
- North of Selydove:
Novohrodivka which is no longer partially but now completely in Russian hands.
- East of Ukrainski:
There is a new Russian protrusion developing southward. A zoomed-in view shows that the hamlet of Halytsynivka with the crossing of the COS112 and COS1139 roads has come under Russian control. This cuts a supply route for the Ukrainian troops south-east of the protrusion.
These three+ minor ones are small movements that cover only some the 100 square kilometers Russian forces took last week. The previous three weeks had seen bigger ones. But they demonstrate that the Russian's haven't stopped in Pokrovsk but have – for one reason or another – halted major movements.
The reports of the Russian Ministry of Defense still note severe Ukrainian losses in the Prokrovsk region. There are no reports of any Russian troop movement from the Prokrovsk direction towards Kursk. A rotation of frontline units and local reserve forces is the most likely explanation for the current relative quietness on the frontline.
The Kursk incursion was a costly attempt to gain leverage. It failed to reach its hoped for targets further north and to cause the diversion of Russian troops from other front lines.
Syrski of course has to keep up the morale of his troops. He also has to (re-)gain more support from Ukraine's 'partners'. That explains his otherwise funny talk like this:
“We cannot fight in the same way as they do, so we must use, first of all, the most effective approach, use our forces and means with maximum use of terrain features, engineering structures and also, to use technical superiority,” he said, highlighting Ukraine’s advanced drone program and other home-grown high-tech weaponry.
Can someone point me to one Ukrainian or 'western' equipment item which is technically superior to the Russian produced equivalent? I fail to find one.
Posted by: Arch Bungle | Sep 7 2024 17:55 utc | 423
(re compromising x86, Linux, etc)
Mostly agree, but this is a very complex topic. For example:
Posted by: Boris Badenov | Sep 7 2024 23:18 utc | 465
Agree that this is a very complex topic and I’ve taking the view from a few thousand feet.
However, in practical terms, in terms of what the assessment is in industry, there are some guidelines which provide a high degree of certainty and level the playing fields here:
The approach to security these days is “zero trust”: i.e assuming that fundamental components of your technology stack *are already compromised* and therefore your entire approach to security has to be multi-layered, diversified, compartmentalised. In other words: Security is a holistic outcome of the system design, not the individual technical elements of your system.
Let’s look at each of your (very reasonable) points from the pragmatic lens of how the industry approaches them (in the best case, not the the normal case):
* What does any particular CPU really have in/on its silicon? This is really just unknowable at this point. Even with a world-class forensic setup, you’d have an almost impossible task trying to figure out if there was some backdoor that could be triggered.
– In general and for General Purpose Computing Devies, yes and this applies to both the Americans and the Russians as neither know if the PRCs Taiwanese inflitrators have slipped something in at the TSMC fab.
– However, silicon verification is an actual thing and the Russians (and Chinese) working together on this problem are not without tools for silicon verification (see job posts for pre and post verification engineers in Moscow, for example).
The complex part of silicon verification mostly applies to general purpose CPUs provided by Intel and AMD.
RISC and other Non-x86 things not originating from Taiwan or the US are going to be a lot more trustworthy – and verifiable since the Russians would have access to verification information from their Chinese allies (who are the only other people manufacturing chips they’ll use)
Everything else is likely to be an FPGA of some kind or a dedicated SoC which is much, much easier to verify.
So, the general purpose CPUs/GPUs are going to be inherently untrusted and if you’re designing military grade security each server and PC will be running with endpoint security and it’s own perimeter security too. The verifiability of individual CPUs becomes less of a problem.
For network gear – you don’t need General Purpose Devices. You don’t need American gear at all. You could run Huawei all through the network and get Huawei engineers to go through the silicon gate by gate if you so wish – If you’re Russia.
– Finally, remember that this problem is focused “in the box”. Endpoint security (military grade anti-virus) and perimeter security (firewalls, IDS, IPS) can mitigate this to a very large extent on servers and desktops. We’re talking about Western x86 devices here, not Russian Elbrus type x86 clones.
* Many modern CPUs have microcode that gets loaded at boot time (ish). How can you tell if there’s a backdoor there? Again, really hard.
See above. It’s the same set of mitigations for microcode.
You verify what you can and then still treat it as a black box that works within a “zero trust” framework.
* “Linux is not compromised”. Certainly many brilliant people have worked hard to eliminate issues. But it’s simply not possible at this point to prove that there are no compromises present.
Bugs and defects. Zero day exploits. These are things that will always be there – for everyone.
From a balance of forces point of view the Russians, Chinese (anyone else) are on the same effective playing field here.
It’s a race between who can find zero day exploits first and it’s anyone’s game at this point.
So it’s not possible to say if the Linux kernel has been deliberately mined with backdoors by design. It will always look like just another software bug leading to a zero-day ‘sploit.
Incidentally, the same set of mitigations I pointed out earlier apply here.
It could be that the core kernel code (not loadable 3rd party modules! Not user-space!) has been backdoored, but that’s a game that anyone, even the North Koreans could play.
And with so many parties capable of backdooring the Linux kernel base you’d think a million expert eyeballs across dozens of state intelligence agencies (and some commercial ones) would have picked something up right now.
In any case: However compromised the Linux Kernel base may be, it’s not compromised in any way that gives one particular state advantage of the other.
It’s a level playing field.
And there are reasons to think that this is not possible even in theory.
In theory it’s not possible to eliminate all bugs from a program.
But then again – This implies it’s not possible to remove all bugs from the backdoors themselves. Perhaps we should be asking how reliable these hypothetical backdoors the NSA keeps planting in our silicon are to begin with …
* It’s possible to instrument/watch a lot of things, but there’s simply so much going on on a modern system that there’s no way to find your needle in a haystack.
Even without deep instrumentation, there are very good ways to monitor the perimeter of a system:
– Does it “phone home”? Does it reach out of the network to systems that are not on the firewall whitelist?
– Do other systems make unauthorised attempts to access it? “Why is that new driver poking at registers EIP and EIX”?
In the end you apply a mix of security methods to mitigate, negate and neutralise the security vulnerabilities of any single piece of technology.
Again – Zero Trust. Layered Defense. Security by Design.
* Yes, if your datacenter is completely isolated, that should prevent information leakage.
– Information leakages these days generally come from gross incompetence of I.T administrators, rather than deep backdoors in fundamental technologies.
– If this is your proposition then we’re no longer talking about deep backdoors placed at silicon, microcode and kernel level, we’re talking about general risks of Information Systems.
– But also remember that information leakage only really matters when the information can be decrypted and if the Russians are not encrypting their data and not ensure transmission over networks are encrypted then it’s no longer the problem we’re talking about. It’s a people problem.
But no one can really run such a shop these days.
That depends. They can, it’s just not viable for commercial operations. If the Russians or Chinese have secrets they need to protect, they’ll run exactly this kind of shop where necessary (as I’m sure the NSA would).
Also, “air gap” doesn’t mean what it used to.
See above.
When a bunch of government institutions are connected together by a state operated network (often DWDM fibre optic rings) then it becomes easier to air gap the institutions from the greater internet.
The only reason you’d need to connect to the internet from a secured network is updates for MS windows and Linux.
If you’ve thrown out all the MS Windows stuff in your institution (and I certainly hope the Russians have!) then air-gapping can mean exactly what you want it to.
If I only need to get a few bits out, maybe I just arrange for the site’s power usage to fluctuate a bit in a coded pattern. (Did you remember to check for that?)
What can you do with a few bits? And how does fluctuating a site’s power levels help especially in the era of redundant generators and backup PSUs?
Sounds like hunting for a needle in a haystack to me.
You’re gonna punch through layers and layers of Chinese and Russian manufactured gear, files written in cyrillic and encrypted with who-knows-what to grab a few bits off an L2 cache or motherboard eeprom on one of hundreds of thousands of CPUs in the Russian Federation?
Good luck with that. No wonder the US is 30 gazillion dollars in debt.
* “Verifiable” is a word that doesn’t go well with computing. If you have a particular, smallish algorithm, you may be able to prove some properties. If you actually need to run it on hardware, forget it. You do your best and cross your fingers.
It goes better with computing than anything else. If it’s mathematical verification then it’s either provable or it ain’t and you don’t need general purpose computers to do that, you can just use a really good calculator.
The Russians are really good at such specialised mathematical computing equipment because that’s all they had for so long.
I’d bet that if it came to verifiability of computing algorithms (encryption, communication, etc …) they’re either on a level playing field or a few steps ahead of the NSA.
Posted by: Arch Bungle | Sep 8 2024 6:23 utc | 534
Don’t act all surprised, there’s mountains of the same creepy shit on these threads and creeps aplenty pedalling it for their promiscuous system pig “curators”.
Anyone who still bothers themselves with such anachronisms will be relieved to learn that these reforms have highest level support so, at least from a purely technical standpoint, it’s no longer wrongthink to ponder or discuss the subject.
https://t.me/mig41/36726
A huge role in the fact that they did not allow people (who are now behind bars) to eat war correspondents was played by:
1. The President
2. The Presidential Administration
3. The Ministry of Digital Development. It was there that PUBLICLY, when everyone was still silent, they wrote on their official resource that they would not let anyone harm those who write the truth in the interests of society and the state.
https://t.me/zhivoff/16822
War correspondent Sladkov writes that the “bloggers’ case” in 2022 turned out to be true. The former leadership of the Russian Defense Ministry really did open cases against the country’s largest war correspondents and bloggers who spoke about the shortcomings of the army and the scarcity of its equipment. Sladkov was also going to be imprisoned. Now a significant part of the old leadership of the Defense Ministry is under investigation.
https://t.me/zhivoff/16824
Recently I had a conversation on KP radio about corruption in the Ministry of Defense and the latest arrests of generals. I told the host that the wave of accusations and insults against war correspondents and bloggers would have grown into something more if not for Vladimir Putin’s position. Today, MiG writes about the same thing, and Sladkov claims that cases have already been opened. It is also worth noting that all this time, a whole network of people from Ukraine has been working against the military volunteer community, who mimic Z-channels, but whose only job is to discredit military bloggers and volunteers at the front. Now it is clear who exactly paid for their activities. This network is still active and recently managed to achieve the dismissal of the mother of five children of war correspondent Svetlana Pikta through threats, blackmail, and constant appeals to law enforcement agencies.
https://t.me/zhivoff22/28329
Forwarded from MIG of Russia
Interesting from war correspondent Alexander Sladkov: it turns out that the story with the “list of sentenced war correspondents”, which Mash and Semyon Pegov wrote about in the fall of 2022 , turned out to be true. And a criminal case was even opened against Sladkov himself.
The reason is the “old team” in the Ministry of Defense and its “deeds”.
Here is what Sladkov himself writes:
“The Main Military Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal case against me for discrediting the Armed Forces. If it weren’t for Oleg Dobrodeyev and the VGTRK team, if it weren’t for the presidential administration, it would have been hard for me personally.
We should have left alone the topic of the failure to provide the army (which even now suffers from a shortage of many necessary things), and suddenly today it turns out for the rest of society: it is precisely those people in uniform who were very unhappy with the bloggers who themselves turned out to be far from angels. I’m telling you, half of the old minister’s team is under investigation for theft.
They taught us how to act morally and in a state-like manner, and look who they turned out to be. And they beat up critical bloggers even despite the fact that the president received them four times and at these receptions the bloggers spoke harshly about the big problems in the Russian Defense Ministry.
As a VGTRK correspondent, I certainly supported and continue to support the State (and for personal reasons, based on from a personal understanding of what is happening), and the Ministry of Defense in particular. I actively and professionally participate in the information support of the activities of the country’s leadership. And there is no deceit in this. This is the right work.
But it is very interesting that as an additional point of view, we have blogger opportunities, and you know, not once, not a single leader told me: “Close your telegram, you are a state reporter, so do this.” On the contrary, I and people like me were protected as best they could. And now I can say openly – they did not let me eat you.”
https://t.me/dva_majors/51850
Forwarded from Roman Saponkov
Alexey Zhivov writes about corrupt officials in the Ministry of Defense (of whom today you could almost gather a meeting of the General Staff in a pretrial detention center, literally a couple of people are missing), who tried to physically eliminate the channels of war correspondents and war bloggers. Namely the channels, not the authors, by initiating criminal cases against the authors.
It is also worth noting that all this time, a whole network of people from Ukraine has been working against the military-volunteer community, who mimic Z-channels, but whose only job is to discredit military bloggers and volunteers at the front. Now it is clear who exactly paid for their activities. This network is still active and recently managed to achieve the dismissal of the mother of five children of war correspondent Svetlana Pikta through threats, blackmail, and constant appeals to law enforcement agencies.
It should be noted that the enemy psychological operations centers have spent a lot of effort and resources this year to discredit and intimidate domestic opinion leaders. Remember how they sent biorobots to the places where journalists lived, foamed at the doors, put pig heads under them (Kots, Steshin, me, colleagues from Izvestia and RT). How they threw in provocations against Kolyasnikov , Mayorov .
The goal is one – to discredit the largest opinion leaders who are trusted by the people or force them to write less, so that the audience would flow to the enemy. This is a long-term job. Some of their created channels, mimicking “Z-channels”, have exceeded the audience of 100,000 people. The work on discrediting and intimidation continues, as well as the pumping up of their channels.
But the most surprising thing is not this, but that people from the former Ukraine, who still have Ukrainian passports, who left for the Ruins in 2017-2019, took part in the massacre of domestic channels. This is not 14-15, the times of the Russian Spring, when the passionate ones fled from reprisals and terms, but the well-fed years, when everyone had already passed the filtration and lived there peacefully, after which they decided to change their place of residence and left for the Russian Federation. And in the SVO they suddenly began to simultaneously kill our LOMs.
Posted by: anon2020 | Sep 8 2024 10:24 utc | 550
Posted by: Newbie | Sep 8 2024 12:41 utc | 559
Any time there’s a contraction of the line benefits both defender and attacker due to an increase in relative force densities, hence both sides achieve their immediate objectives, but the attackers comes out top having advanced.
1. In the the Kursk direction the Russians might very well accept a slip westward, if it means they can carry out more aggressive recces in force eastwards. If those yield results then expect a bite and hold operation towards Sudzha, already the West is crafting the narrative to shield the inevitable (which suggests they know what’s coming). Once Sudzha or the local environs are secured the Ukrainians will have to react, either aggressively or start a phased withdrawal earlier than expected (again, a focus on the recovery of damaged vehicles suggests a pullout is being planned, at least).
The danger is that the Russians follow on the heels of the Ukrainians, harassing their rearguard and threatening the main body, all the way to Sumy. This may be uncharacteristically aggressive, but transitions in expected behaviour, largely driven by new capabilities and leadership, often characterise successful offensives. Achieving operational surprise is apparently the equivalent of a division suddenly gaining an additional 1-2 brigades, though this shock bonus rarely lasts long, which explains the Ukrainian disaster of their failure in securing their initial Kursk objectives, the ‘23 debacle and Russia’s small hops from new directions approach.
2. Russia wants territory not a high body count, a drive on Kherson would force major redeployments and use of whatever strategic reinforcements, because Odessa would be in play again. Then again, any breakthrough in that direction spells danger, perhaps a Dnieper dash.
3. That’s why I’d be nervous if I was a Western planner, in ‘44 German war diaries and those of the GI’s stationed in the Ardennes, were very similar, pre-Bagration, Wacht am Rhine, quiet.
4. Belorussian military units are fitting organic cages and exercising with new tactical symbols, feint, rush, death blow, who knows, warfare is, after all, about misdirection.
Before the usual voices are raised a caveat, these are simply options the Russians might develop, they are not suggestive of any actual capability being prepared, but another thing war is about is seeking to overwhelm your opponents ability to respond to multiple perceived, not actual, threats.
I think I’ve answered your Kursk question, but to be clear, just as the original battle foundered on the inability to take Ponyri, on the Northern shoulder, this operation failed due to it inability to secure Sudzha quickly and no new axis of attack opened. The westward slide seems more an act of tactical muscle-memory, rather than any operational intent and most units in the salient are only fit for defence or limited aggressive actions.
As for numbers I’ll ping you my response a week ago, on another thread. I estimate 100k+ totals in the salient to Sumy area.
Posted by: Milites | Sep 8 2024 13:41 utc | 560
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