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Ukraine SitRep: Kurakhove Cauldron, Broken Deals
Emil Kastehelmi of the Black Bird Group gives a good overview of the current situation in south-east Ukraine.
Since the Ukrainian command had sent its best units to die in the senseless incursion of the Russian Kursk oblast, the Ukrainian frontline in the south-east deteriorated significantly. Russian forces progressed along the whole frontline.
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There are simply too few Ukrainian soldiers to hold the defensive positions. The increased use of Russian FAB bombs destroy Ukrainian positions and let the Russians proceed.
The most recent Russian progress from the south and the east show the formation of another cauldron which could capture Ukrainian units in and around Kurakhove.
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Russian troops from the east and the south will likely aim at the towns of Andrivka and Konstantinopyl where the T-05-15 road joins the H-15 highway.
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This would block the supply lines to Kurakhove and all Ukrainian units positioned around it.
There is a gap in the Ukrainian defense positions left (blue lines) through which such an attack can proceed.
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In this situation the best possible move for the Ukrainian side is an immediate retreat of some 30 kilometers west where forests, another river and the agglomeration around the city of Ivanivka allow for better defenses.
That however is not what the Ukrainian command will order its troops to do. It will rather continue to waste its infantry in another senseless hold-to-the-last-men postion.
There are interesting new details about renewal of a deal to stop attacks on infrastructure in Russia and Ukraine. Previously negotiations about such a deal were stopped when Ukraine had launched its Kursk incursion.
The Financial Times reports today that the talks are being renewed (archived):
Ukraine and Russia are in preliminary discussions about halting strikes on each other’s energy infrastructure, according to people familiar with the matter.
The FT however agrees that any progress is unlikely unless the Ukraine retreats from Kursk.
The real news from the FT is that there had been – which was unknown so far - a previous deal in place:
Four Ukrainian officials told the Financial Times that Kyiv and Moscow had come to a “tacit agreement” last autumn to not strike each other’s energy facilities.
As a result, Russia that winter refrained from the type of large-scale attacks it had conducted on Ukraine’s power infrastructure in 2022-23, according to two Ukrainian officials and a person in Washington with knowledge of the situation.
That agreement was meant to pave the way towards a formal deal, the people said.
However, Kyiv restarted drone attacks on Russia’s oil facilities in February and March this year, as it sought to increase pressure on Moscow after its failed 2023 counteroffensive.
Despite a warning from the White House to stop the strikes, Kyiv pressed ahead, and Moscow viewed the tacit agreement as having been broken, people familiar with the situation said.
Russia then escalated, unleashing barrages of long-range missiles aimed at power plants across Ukraine, including the Trypilska thermal power plant 40km from Kyiv, which was completely destroyed.
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Russia’s response to Kyiv’s attacks plunged much of Ukraine into temporary darkness and cut 9GW of power generation capacity — half of what Ukraine needed last year to get through winter. Kyiv has proved unable to fully restore this capacity.
The fact that Ukraine had broken a previous deal, and that it attacked in Kursk while negotiations on a renewal were ongoing, makes it unlikely that Russia will agree to anything but a surrender of the Ukrainian side.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/10/29/ukraine-is-now-struggling-to-survive-not-to-win
After 970 days of war,” said Lloyd Austin, America’s defence secretary, visiting Kyiv on October 21st, “Putin has not achieved one single strategic objective.” In public, Mr Austin offered certitude, confidence and clarity: “Moscow will never prevail in Ukraine.” In private, his colleagues in the Pentagon, Western officials and many Ukrainian commanders are increasingly concerned about the direction of the war and Ukraine’s ability to hold back Russian advances over the next six months.
Ukrainian forces have managed to hold on to Pokrovsk, an embattled town in the eastern Donbas region, an embarrassment for Mr Putin. But elsewhere along the front, Russia is slicing its way through Ukrainian defences. In Kupiansk in the north, its troops have cut Ukrainian formations in two at the Oskil river. In Chasiv Yar in the east, they have crossed the main Siverskyi Donets canal, after six months of trying. Farther south, Russian troops have taken high ground in and around Vuhledar (pictured), and are moving in on Kurakhove from two directions. In Kursk, inside Russia, Ukraine has lost around half the territory it seized earlier this year.
The problem is not so much the loss of territory, which is limited and has come at enormous cost to Russia—600,000 dead and wounded since the start of the war, on American estimates, and 57,000 dead in this year to October alone, according to Ukrainian intelligence—as the steady erosion in the size and quality of Ukraine’s forces. Ukrainian units are understrength and overstretched, worn thin by heavy casualties. Despite a new mobilisation law that took effect in May, the army, outside a handful of brigades, has struggled to recruit enough replacements, with young men reluctant to sign up to tours of duty that are at best indefinite and, at worst, one-way missions. Western partners are privately urging Ukraine’s leaders to lower the mobilisation age floor from 25 to increase the potential pool of recruits. But political sensitivities and fears over an already alarming demographic crisis stand in the way of any change.
In a recent essay, Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank in London, identifies several reasons for Ukraine’s declining fortunes. One is a shortfall in its air-defence interceptors, allowing Russian reconnaissance drones to establish what he calls “continuous and dense surveillance”. These in turn cue up ballistic-missile and drone strikes against Ukrainian artillery in the rear and glide bombs against troops at the front, allowing Russia to make slow but steady advances in small units, often using motorcycles because tanks are too easy to spot. Ukraine’s limited stock of shells—Russia currently has a two-to-one advantage in shellfire, according to Ivan Havrilyuk, Ukraine’s deputy defence minister—as well as tanks and armoured vehicles compounds that problem. The less firepower and armour are available, the greater the reliance on infantry and the greater the casualties.
Russia is not without its own serious problems. Next year it will spend a third of its national budget on defence, starving the civilian economy in the process. Inflation is perhaps double the official annual rate of more than 8%. In 2025 ordinary Russian families will begin to feel the economic pain for the first time, says a European intelligence official, adding that there are early signs of war fatigue among those closely connected to the conflict, such as mothers and family members.
On the battlefield, Russia remains reliant on crude tactics that result in massive casualties. The decision to borrow thousands of North Korean troops, who are thought to be bound for the Kursk front, shows that Russian units are also stretched. Russia’s general staff and defence ministry have put “heavy pressure” on the Kremlin to mobilise more men, says the European official. “Russia now doesn’t have sufficient forces to mass,” says a senior nato official. “If they achieved a breakthrough they could not exploit it.” There is little short-term risk of Russian troops streaming west to Dnipro or Odessa.
But the crisis in Russia’s war economy is likely to play out over a longer period. Russia’s defence industry is in part dependent on the refurbishment of Soviet-era stocks, which are getting low in critical areas such as armoured vehicles. It is nonetheless far outperforming Western production lines. The European Union claims to be making more than 1m shells per year; Russia is making three times that, and is also boosted by supplies from North Korea and Iran. “I just don’t know we can produce enough, give enough,” says a person familiar with the flow of American aid, though a recent $800m commitment to boost Ukraine’s indigenous drone production is welcome. “We have no more to give them without taking serious risks in other places.” On manpower, too, Russia remains solvent. Its army is recruiting around 30,000 men per month, says the nato official. That is not enough to meet internal targets, says another official, but it is adequate to cover even the gargantuan losses of recent months.
Russia cannot fight for ever. But the worry among America, European and Ukrainian officials is that, on current trends, Ukraine’s breaking point will come first. “Moscow seems to be wagering that it can achieve its objectives in the Donbas next year,” writes Mr Watling, “and impose a rate of casualties and material degradation on the Ukrainian military high enough that it will no longer be capable of preventing further advances.” That, he warns, would give Russia leverage in any negotiations that follow.
The gloomy mood is evident in a shift in America’s language. Senior officials like Mr Austin still strike a confident note, promising that Ukraine will win. Those involved in the guts of planning in the Pentagon say that, in practice, the ambitions of early 2023—a Ukrainian force that could take back its territory or shock Russia into talks through a well-crafted armoured punch—have given way to a narrow focus on preventing defeat. “At this point we are thinking more and more about how Ukraine can survive,” says a person involved in that planning. Others put it more delicately. “The next several months”, noted Jim O’Brien, the State Department’s top Europe official, at a conference in Riga on October 19th, “are an opportunity for us to reaffirm that Ukraine can stay on the battlefield for the next couple of years.”
Posted by: ReinhardVonSiegfried | Oct 30 2024 16:56 utc | 53
https://t.me/milinfolive/133945
The first photo of a previously unknown launcher for kamikaze drones “Geran-2”, published by the SBU.
The enemy’s special service claims that it detained a 72-year-old scientist in Kharkov, who, on Russia’s order, developed drawings for improving drones. In particular, he allegedly worked on upgrading engines and catapult installations.
According to the SBU, the detainee transferred the developments via the Internet to his acquaintance, who is the CEO of one of the Russian enterprises that produces units for “Geran”.
▪️The published photos show a new long launcher, previously unseen in the frame, adapted for Geranium- type drones, as well as the Russian E-95M target drone , which was actively used in the first months of the SVO.
▪️It should be noted that small individual launchers were previously used to launch the Geraniums . It was also known that launchers existed for several drones disguised as regular trucks, but they were not seen in the ranks of the Russian Armed Forces .
Now the elderly Kharkiv scientist faces a long prison term in a Ukrainian prison.
https://t.me/milinfolive/133908
Footage of today’s F-16 flight over Dnipropetrovsk region.
https://t.me/infomil_live/11533
Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada deputy Goncharenko, citing the words of the National Security and Defense Council Secretary Litvinenko, said that Kiev has plans to mobilize another 160,000 people in the next 3 months. According to him, this will allow the Ukrainian Armed Forces to reach 85% staffing.
He also added that since the beginning of hostilities, Kiev has already mobilized 1 million 50 thousand people.
https://t.me/milinfolive/133962
In the Kharkiv region, the TCC employees are packing up a valuable cadre – a lame old man with a stick, adding motivation to him with fists to the kidneys.
The planned 160 thousand new soldiers will not recruit themselves.
https://t.me/milinfolive/133905
The need for regular heavy armored personnel carriers and the lack of satisfaction of this need by the military industry leads to such homemade assault armored vehicles, assembled from what was found in the repair battalion.
https://t.me/milinfolive/133964
And again, let’s return to these shots and the problems of Russian artillery.
The use of cluster munitions allows to reduce the required number of shots for a similar known degree of destruction of open targets (especially infantry on the surface) compared to conventional ones by several times, and also to sharply increase the probability of destruction at long firing ranges due to the larger area of destruction by one projectile (an increase of 1.5 times for 122 mm and 3-4 times for 152 mm), compensating for the growing dispersion. This also allows to save the resource of artillery barrels.
It is the obvious shortage of such ammunition that creates a number of problems with ensuring reliable and rapid destruction of a number of targets, since conventional high-explosive fragmentation ammunition (especially old types) is too far from the optimal characteristics for this.
At the same time, at one time the military-industrial complex of the same Egypt, China and India successfully solved the problem of “clusterization” of artillery of Soviet calibers.
The Egyptians, in their promotional materials at the IDEX-2017 exhibition, offered 1 22-mm cluster projectile for the D-30, containing 18 cumulative-fragmentation warheads . Also in their promotional materials, the Egyptian side at the IDEX-2017 exhibition offered a 130-mm cluster projectile, containing 28 cumulative-fragmentation warheads .
Since the 1980s, China also has a 130-mm cluster projectile in its nomenclature. It contains 35 cumulative-fragmentation warheads and has a maximum firing range of 25 km when fully charged . The Chinese defense industry also has a projectile with cumulative-fragmentation warheads in the 152-mm caliber , compatible with the D-20/Type-66, since the 1980s . It has a range and dispersion comparable to a conventional high-explosive fragmentation projectile and contains 63 warheads . By the way, India also has a number of cluster solutions in its collection, including for the Soviet 130 mm (photo). The cluster projectile for the M-46 is sometimes found in lists of ammunition offered for export, as well as in various exhibition catalogs. And it would not be a sin for our army and the military-industrial complex to replenish the range of barrel artillery ammunition with something similar.
Posted by: anon2020 | Oct 30 2024 19:40 utc | 87
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