Feb. 8— Day 350 — Red Army hot potato, Video from the front, Hawks and Leopards
Hi FB!
Here’s a starting video of probably a significant portion of the Ukrainian air force flying nap of the earth. Also a red arrows map because we haven’t had one of those for a while.
And now an administrative warning: I try to avoid posting stuff like this, but several images in this report show dead bodies or indirect fire hitting people. We are in a situation where Russia’s command says it is succeeding and that casualties are acceptable. There was a lot of visual evidence — even more than usual — contradicting that.
The fighting
General: My best guess, the Russians are attempting coherent attacks in at least three sectors seriously, and possibly a couple more less intensively, with the overt objectives of gaining ground and killing Ukrainians. To be clear, these are separated, uncoordinated attacks separated by dozens and at times hundreds of kilometers.
I am more inclined than three or four days ago to describe all these attacks collectively as “the Russian winter offensive” or “the major intervention of the Russian reserves”. The fact that “major” in this context is really pretty small, and limited in scope to at best a battalion or so actually assaulting, and usually less, seems to me to be down to lack of Russian capacity to organize anything bigger.
An equally important and I believe even more weighty driver of this “offensive” is that the various attacks are being carried out by competing parts of the Russian military structure, whose leaders’ primary motivation is not battlefield success per se but, because they work for the Kremlin, the perception they are succeeding more than their competitors. I don’t have enough evidence to state this as hard fact, yet, but I am running out of alternative explanations of what otherwise seems to be epically stupid Russian attacks and tactics. Call it “Red Army Hot Potato”.
If the Russians come up with 10–20,000 well-armed troops in the next couple of weeks and intervene somewhere, with major amounts of heavy equipment, then that will be proof positive that this theorizing was wrong, in fact what we are seeing right now was well-planned Russian probing attacks. Conventional wisdom says that’s unlikely, but impossible to rule it out.
According to head of Ukraine’s National Security Council Oleksy Danylov, who has generally proved to be fairly reliable, army intelligence sees possible Russian offensive activity in “either” the Kharkiv and Zaporizhia sectors in the next few days. The UAF should be able to handle it provided it plays its cards right, he said.
Bakhmut — The fighting here has shifted from the approaches to the city to the suburbs of the city itself, and reports from both sides say it’s close-in urban fighting in some places. Multiple Ukrainian sources are reporting limited support and casualties among troops on the line.
There are conflicting reports on which side holds the firepower advantage here: You can read comment from territorial units on the line saying they are abandoned by high command and short ammo, and comment from regular units and army high command effectively saying the Russians keep trying to come up the hill and we keep killing them. A telling video by Madyar reported two days ago that for the first time UAF drones observed proper human waves of Russians — probably Wagner felons — walking across fields in skirmish lines like WWI.
A video by the fighter Kiyan, who has posted daily from Bakhmut for a couple of weeks, said the Russian attacks appear to be probes, but sometimes with lots of men. They have little armor but sometimes they attempt air strikes. RF casualties are heavy and UAF lines are holding, he said.
According to multiple sources that RF air activity has come with a price, including an Su-25 shot down on Monday. An undated video released by the National Guard reported a Russian Mi-24 helicopter gunship shot down in the Bakhmut sector by an Igla-1 hand held. The video isn’t dated but it sure isn’t edited.
It is clear, at least to me, that the UAF strategy in the Bakhmut sector is simply to kill Russians when they walk out in the open. To do this, the UAF needs infantry to man frontline positions, and since the Bakhmut fight has taken so long, a hodge-podge of units probably of company or platoon size seem to be moving in ou out. Clearly, some of the “moving out” units just decided to leave, which theoretically is punishable as desertion in the UAF but it still happens. But other units of otherwise curious origin seem to be willing to fight there including, curiously, border troops. Video from a mortar strike, officially from the Border Troops Command. WARNING: Violence and death!
That the UAF defense is continuing, and that it is urban, seems clear. Here is a fresh video of a BTR-4 laying down fire in Bakhmut’s outskirts. To a certain extent this was predictable: if the Russians are attacking here in large masses of unsupported infantry with the goal of getting footholds in buildings, then a standard counter-tactic would be to roll up armored vehicles to blast them out of the footholds.
My instinct is the UAF strategy to oppose RF attacks in built-up areas with light infantry backed with some heavy weapons. We saw the same process in Severodonetsk — once the Russians got fixated on the city the UAF responded by feeding in foreigners and territorials to oppose them. We’ve already identified the International Legion, the Chechens, the Georgians all in the Bakhmut area — add to that the Belarusian Kastusya Kalinovsky unit. Again, official video, violence and death contained.
Also on the line is 3rd Assault Brigade — the former Azov guys from Kyiv. Figuring out what’s going on at Bakhmut is a lot like the fable about the elephant. According to those guys, the lines are holding and the Russians are losing. Two videos from them, first an old Cold War-era 85mm AT gun repurposed for close in fire support, and second some views from a front line position and an later Cold War-era M577. I have multiple outside confirmation these images are real, in Bakhmut sector, and last 48 hours.
Uhledar — Reports are continuing to trickle in about an absolute pasting taken by Russian Marine Infantry and Arctic Troop units in this sector, but it’s not clear whether that was new attacks in the last day or two, or old attacks echoing through the Telegram channels not so fast with the news. It appears the biggest killing took place on the 6th.
Video has surfaced of ten prisoners, most from the Far East or south-central Siberia, captured by the UAF in the fighting. The terrain is wide open here and as noted earlier he who holds Uhledar’s tall apartment buildings doesn’t even need drones, he can call accurate artillery fires from a wide choice of roofs.
A possible explanation of what amounted to an unsupported armored attack built on reconstituted naval/shoreside infantry brigades with a total strength probably roughly equivalent to a single battalion, but in any case no more than two, is that the general in this sector had the mission to demonstrate success of regular forces in a conventional attack.
If that was the plan, it didn’t work, obviously. Most recent reports confirm UAF is following up the failed RF attack here with grenades dropped by drones into shell holes where survivors were hiding. Video is out there but too apalling to put in his review. I will put in two stills photos from an over flight of the battlefield from last weekend to point out that what you are looking at is the outcome of a failed RF marine infantry attack over a minefield, and the Marines had a tank with rollers to deal with the mines. But I am sure there are still readers out there that see the Russian army as awesome and unstoppable and the Ukrainian army as incompetent and terrified of their opponent.
Kreminne — Serhy Haidai, head of the regional defense command, yesterday told media that RF troops had shifted from a passive to attacking stance and that some kind of big offensive might be in the offing in coming days. The UAF has strong defensive positions and thus far the RF attacks are being repelled. According to Igor Girkin the RF is in fact attacking and attempting to expand control of woods to the south and west of the city, but it’s not clear who’s winning.
It would be possible to read this activity as another attack, in another sector, by another Russian general determined not to become the general doing worst against the Ukrainians, even if it kills his guys.
Karma goes where it goes
According to reports from the front, or more exactly slightly to the rear of the Russian side of it, showman and high-profile Russian DJ Igor Mangushev died today of injuries received during service in the war.
The information is conflicting, but apparently, he was in the Bakhmut-Soledar sector, was driving back from a front visit, and ran afoul of a road checkpoint operated by Wagner troops over the weekend. It’s very unclear how it all went down, but he wound up with a gunshot to the back of the head and was evacuated. According to some reports bouncing around the Russian internet, the Wagner guys tried to shake him down, according to others he was a coward running from combat.
Mangushev became notorious earlier in the war, in summer, by appearing at a public rock concert with the skull of a former Azov fighter, whose remains Russian troops found and pretty clearly violated in Mariupol. The Ukrainian internet thinks that his death by a gunshot to the skull was fate. One thing is for sure — you can’t make this stuff up.
Bosporus Exception or, gunship diplomacy 21st century style
While nobody was looking — OK, anyone could have seen it but these days who cares about a single ship — a US destroyer sailed into the Black Sea yesterday. She is USS Nitze and although the mission isn’t clear, if anyone asks the Turks and the Americans can always say it’s part of America’s humanitarian earthquake response.
It is also, the first US Navy warship to enter the Black Sea since I think February 2022, and it is a very interesting “exception” to the Montreaux Convention rules, which Turkey enforces, banning the passage of warships of Black Sea littoral nations via the straits if they are involved in a war, which Ukraine and Russia obviously are. Turkey has very rigorously blocked movement of Russian warships under those terms, for almost a year.
The US Navy exited the Black Sea in Feb. 22 because Washington knew Ukraine was going to lose and no one wanted a confrontation with the Russians. Fast-forward to now, and funnily enough, the most serious non-NATO naval threat to the Nitze theoretically is Ukraine, not Russia, because Ukrainian (and American and Norwegian) anti-ship missiles now in Ukraine’s hands, have chased Russia’s Black Sea fleet far away from the west end of the Black Sea.
The Nitze, we are informed, is a surface element of the Gerald R. Ford carrier strike group which remained in the Mediterranean. Wiki tells me that the firepower of this single warship, in Harpoon and Tomahawk and anti-aircraft missiles and so forth is now, probably, superior to the entire Russian Black Sea fleet.
This is what it looks like when a superpower has had enough. In the Kremlin mindset, this is a gross American provocation and a dare by Washington to do something about sailing the Nitze into what Russian propaganda considers a Russian lake. The unspoken part of the pressure tactic is, that if the Russians do nothing, the next time the Americans come there will be more than one destroyer, and both sides know it.
Since Turkey owns the Straits it will be fascinating to watch Ankara position itself as a neutral party. US destroyer image attached.
Stuff for Ukraine
Ukrainian pilots — Here is an interesting item via the RF rah rah media via the British media: Some of the Ukrainians currently in training in Britain are pilots who will do time on Royal Air Force Typhoon simulators, not to learn to fly the aircraft, but rather to “learn NATO tactics”. Apparently there will be access to F-16 simulators as well. If this is an accurate report, then it would be consistent with NATO’s highly bureaucratic and regulated approach to supplying arms to Ukraine, which basically stops deliveries at any point the Ukrainians cannot demonstrate they are capable up to the bureaucracy’s standards.
LATE NOTE: I am informed by a Britain-based reader that also, the Ukrainians will get crossover training on British T2 trainers, a/k/a the Hawk. There are two obvious next-steps to that training, first the pilots deploy back to Ukraine and fly something like a Hawk — which absolutely is capable of delivering for instance a JDAMS strike or tossing a missile at a Tu-22 bomber — in combat. Second option, once they’re trained up on the pre-combat fighter jet, they shift to training on a real combat jet, probably the F-16.
This looks very much like a US/British first-step decision to give Ukraine a modern air force, with a timeline in years. So deffo an image of a T2.
Und noch mehr Panzer
Most of you will have seen the news reports that Germany has pulled out the stops and appears to be trying hard to get its older Leopard 1 tank to Ukraine in reasonable numbers. The reasons for this seem to be first because it will give orders to Germany’s arms industry that can be filled quickly, and second because there are more than a few rusting Leopard 1 tanks elsewhere in Europe that the manufacturer, Rheinmettal, can overhaul and upgrade to more or less conventional combat standards, and get to Ukraine in coming months.
For refreshment, an upgraded Leopard 1, usually called the 1A5, would probably be able to hold its own in the Ukraine war due to excellent optics, good mobility, relatively high mobility, and a more than capable gun. Its armor by modern standards is thin so it would be at a disadvantage in a tank-to-tank slugging match against the latest Russian tanks, but, in this war tank vs. tank fights are a rarity, and also, the West is sending top-end tanks, a mix of German, British and US manufacture, that are a generation ahead of anything the Russians have.
According to news reports, which seem not to be fully consistent, Germany and other Leopard 1 operators will make available 188 tanks available to Ukraine in a first batch becoming available probably starting in May and with deliveries running for the rest of the year. I have the feeling that number could go up if Rheimettal overhaul capacity is increased.
