Russo-Ukrainian War Thread - Page 294

On October 21 2022 08:39 JimmiC wrote:


My bad I assumed you meant something different since you posted it specifically about Israel. I agree that everyone "cares" only enough to send what they have sent. I'm just not sure what the point of posting it is.

And as for the rest of your post I'm going to stay away from it because it seems unrelated to what I was saying.

edit: I'm kind of surprised considering your reaction to when other posters said similar things about Germany.

10 Iranians who were training Russian soldiers were killed in Ukrainian strikes in the Russia-Ukraine war in the past week, a Ukrainian official told KAN news on Friday.

The report comes as American and Ukrainian officials warn that Iranians are training Russians to use Iranian drones in Crimea.

The Ukrainian National Resistance Center claimed on Wednesday that Iranian instructors are overseeing Russian forces launching kamikaze drones from within annexed Ukrainian territory.

"The Russians took Iranian instructors to the territory of the temporarily occupied Kherson Region and Crimea to launch Shahed-136 kamikaze drones," the government body alleged, citing Ukrainian underground resistance. "They teach the Russians how to use kamikaze drones, and directly monitor the launch of drones on Ukrainian civilian targets, including strikes on Mykolaiv and Odesa."

Pentagon Press Secretary Brig.-Gen. Pat Ryder stated on Thursday that "Iranians have been on the ground in Ukraine to assist Russia with the drone operations there."

US State Department spokesperson Ned Price stated during a press briefing on Thursday that the Iranian trainers were operating in Crimea.

A spokesman for the Air Force of the Ukrainian Armed Forces stated on Friday that Ukraine had succeeded in downing 85% of the Iranian kamikaze drones fired by Russia, according to Ukrinform.

On October 22 2022 11:55 Yurie wrote:
One thing I've been thinking about is that very few nations accept Russian refugees from mobilization. Honestly think that is a mistake, why not offer competitive wages for everybody that comes over the border with a mobilization notice? Hollow out the Russian military effort while gaining taxes and workers. While also allowing for free movement of people, something I am personally in favour of.

The two downsides I've been able to think of are money movement and future examples. The money movement issue is about paying Russians that send money to their family that pays Russian taxes via things such as VAT. The future thinking is about Russia having open borders if Latvia for example needs to mobilize.

Since EU is against wars as a method (on paper at least) the second argument shouldn't hold much weight. Allowing asylum for mobilization in war time would make it harder for nations to run wars, in line with the stated goals.

(The areas Ukrainians used to fill such as Truck drivers have had issues with worker shortages, so there is a lot of people the EU could take in with low education levels even.)

On October 22 2022 19:32 r00ty wrote:
I'm conflicted about Russian mobilisation refugees as the refugee home in my village is now full with 70 Ukrainians, mostly old folks, women and children and they don't want to be here, they want to go home.
To me, Russians who want to sit it out without doing anything to change the situation at home are not welcome.

On October 22 2022 18:08 Gorsameth wrote:
How many of those Russian mobilization refugees support Russia's invasion and the war crimes being committed against the people of Ukraine, only objecting to personally having to lay down their life for the state?

Six weeks after the Ukrainian army launched twin counteroffensives in eastern and southern Ukraine, Russian forces across the country are regrouping, digging in, pulling back. Bracing for Ukrainian attacks and the coming winter.

There’s one exception. Around the town of Bakhmut, just north of the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic in eastern Ukraine, Russian troops, pro-Russian separatists and mercenaries from The Wagner Group are continuing a desperate, bloody operation they began way back in May. An attack that, despite Russian claims to the contrary, has failed to break Bakhmut’s Ukrainian garrison.

“The enemy is trying to hold the temporarily captured territories,” the Ukrainian general staff reported on Friday. “At the same time, it does not stop trying to conduct offensive actions in the Bakhmut and Avdiivka directions.” Avdiivka lies 25 miles south of Bakhmut.

It barely makes sense. Bakhmut has no strategic value. Western analysts observing the Russian operation around the town, and counting Russia’s mounting losses, have concluded that the Bakhmut op … isn’t really about Bakhmut. It’s about creating a narrative.

“Russian forces are likely continuing to falsify claims of advances in the Bakhmut area to portray themselves as making gains in at least one sector amid continuing losses in northeast and southern Ukraine,” the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, D.C. concluded last month.

The Bakhmut operation is a lie. And it’s a lie that contains more lies. The overall narrative the Kremlin hopes to create is that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, its forces still can win in Ukraine. And the forces contributing to the Bakhmut attack—in particular, the separatists and Wagner—all are trying to take credit for the fictional wins.

Wagner, a for-profit company that has sent thousands of its fighters to Ukraine, clearly hopes to grab a bigger share of the Russian war industry while Russia’s conventional forces are weak from eight months of costly warfare. The company’s financier Yevgeny Prigozhin “is jockeying for more prominence,” ISW posited.

The separatists’ motivation is less tangible. ISW cited Bakhmut’s “emotional significance to pro-war residents of the Donetsk People’s Republic,” but noted the town’s “little other importance.”

The Russians first attacked Bakhmut in May during a broader Russian push into eastern Ukraine—a push that culminated in Russian troops capturing the twin cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk in July. The attacks on Severodonetsk and Lysychansk were so costly for Russian forces that they had little choice but to pause.

The Ukrainians took advantage of the pause. They escalated their attacks on Russian supply lines then, in late August and early September, counterattacked.

The eastern counteroffensive quickly liberated a thousand square miles of Kharkiv Oblast, north of Bakhmut. The southern counteroffensive has pushed Russian forces toward the Dnipro River and set the conditions for the Ukrainians possibly to liberate occupied Kherson.

While their comrades retreated or dug in, the Russian and allied troops around Bakhmut kept trying to advance. It didn’t go well. Even as artillery dropped the bridge across the Bakhmutovka River and transformed the landscape into moonscape, Ukrainian troops from the 58th Motorized Brigade held on.

Last week, the Russians claimed they’d captured several settlements around Bakhmut. Ukrainian officials rejected the claim. “Ukrainian forces have held their lines against Russian attacks,” ISW noted.

What’s especially remarkable is that, even if the Russians were telling the truth—even if they were winning the battle for Bakhmut—it wouldn’t really matter except as propaganda. Having lost 100,000 men killed and wounded since late February, the Russian army is fraying. The separatist armies from the Donetsk and Luhansk “republics,” which fight under Russian command, might be in even worse shape.

It’s unclear how many Wagner men have died or been wounded in Ukraine. As early as April, one analyst estimated 3,000 mercenaries had died. Whatever the current figure might be, it’s telling that Wagner this summer began recruiting convicts as a manpower expedient.

Right now Russian forces—regulars, separatists and mercs—possess very little offensive combat power. That they’re all willing to spend it on an operation that has more symbolic value than actual military value says something profound about Russia’s prospects as the wider war’s first full winter sets in.

BAKHMUT, Ukraine — The crash and roar of artillery rarely stops in this east Ukrainian city. In the cold and broken houses, residents huddle by candlelight and pray that they have safety in numbers. On the battlefield, soldiers on both sides are dying in droves.

While Ukrainian advances have redrawn the battlefield map elsewhere, the front line in Bakhmut, some 10 miles from the border of Donetsk and Luhansk, has barely moved in four months of heavy fighting.

Of all the battles in the east, President Volodymyr Zelensky said last week, the “most difficult” is here. Yet in this fight for control of a shattered city, military experts say the ambitions of a Russian oligarch, Yevgeniy Prigozhin, founder of the Wagner mercenary group, may have eclipsed all strategic logic.



After a disorderly Russian retreat from nearby Izyum, the battle for Bakhmut is no longer part of any coordinated military operation. Instead, Prigozhin is pouring waves of mercenaries from Wagner into battle, appearing to see political advantage in capturing Bakhmut as a military trophy while President Vladimir Putin’s regular forces are on the back foot elsewhere.

Outgunned and outnumbered, exhausted Ukrainian troops are relying on nimbler tactics to withstand the brutal battle, monitoring enemy lines with civilian drones as newly recruited engineers experiment with customized weapons from pop-up laboratories in abandoned buildings nearby.

“To be honest, we have to,” said Vlad, who is overseeing the 93rd Brigade’s effort to refit drones, antitank mines and other weapons so that they are more effective. “The Russians have the soldiers, the guns, everything. We need to be smart,” he said.



The salt-mining city of Bakhmut had a population of 70,000 before Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps 15,000 remain, but the streets were almost empty as fighting raged there this week. Weeds smothered the wheat fields. Military vehicles sped down roads gouged by rockets, kicking up clouds of dust as they went.

At the 93rd Brigade’s command post, a drone operator peered at the live feed of Russian positions that it was sending back to him. The soldiers worked fast, slipping mortar rounds down the barrel and loosing them up through the sky. Someone had scrawled “director” on the drone operator’s chair. Squinting down at the screen of his tablet, he waited a second, then he nodded, and a ripple of delight coursed through the men.

They had hit the target.

But these still felt like some of the unit’s worst days, said Dima, their 25-year-old commander. When darkness enveloped their dugout a night earlier, Russian forces fired on them with mortars and cluster munitions. “It’s not the first time we’ve been under fire, but this is different now,” Dima said.

After four years in the Ukrainian army, Dima said the battle for Bakhmut was among the “most dangerous” he had witnessed.

The fighting and its echoes hung heavy through the city on Wednesday. The air throbbed with the sound of shelling. When that fell quiet, clanking metal in the wind was the only sound left.

A 51-year-old entrepreneur, Oleksander, had dried blood on his face from a rocket strike that smashed his home the night before. He did not have clean water to wash up. He said he had invited his neighbors, a young couple and their daughter, to stay with him in the apartment, thinking that they would be safer if they stuck together.



The parents were now in intensive care, he said, and their 9-year-old child Liza had been evacuated, alone, to another city.

“I thought our place was safer,” he said blankly. “We were just sitting there. We were drinking tea.”

In a recent analysis, the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, described Prigozhin’s Bakhmut effort as “irrelevant operationally” after Russia’s loss of Izyum, 60 miles north.

“The Russian seizure of Bakhmut, which is unlikely to occur considering Russian forces have impaled themselves on tiny surrounding settlements for weeks, would no longer support any larger effort to accomplish the original objectives of this phase of the campaign,” the report concluded, “since it would not be supported by an advance from Izyum in the north.”

Prigozhin, who is nicknamed Putin’s chef because he grew fabulously wealthy off of government catering contracts, has been a loud critic of the regular Russian military’s performance in Ukraine. His involvement in the Ukraine war is seen by analysts as part of his effort to curry favor and potentially additional state contracts. There is also speculation among the Russian elite that he is angling for a government post.

Wagner played a key role in the capture of Popasna in May but reportedly took heavy losses. According to pro-Kremlin military bloggers, Prigozhin was awarded the nation’s highest honor, a Hero of Russia medal, the following month.

After long denying any link to Wagner, which has sent soldiers-for-hire to Syria, Libya, Mali, Mozambique and the Central African Republic, Prigozhin acknowledged last month that he created the group. In a recent self-published interview he claimed that Wagner was carrying out the assault on Bakhmut alone, and called the situation “difficult.”

For the Ukrainians, surrendering Bakhmut would give the Russians a hugely symbolic victory, and undermine the prevailing narrative that Moscow’s forces are steadily losing ground and Putin’s war is failing. In theory, capturing Bakhmut would put the Russians one step closer to bigger urban centers of Kramatorsk and Slovyansk, but there is little evidence that the Russians could make a push for them now.

Across four locations in the Bakhmut area, Ukrainian soldiers described how Wagner troops at times appear to have been used almost as cannon fodder. “They’re treating them like single-use soldiers,” said Volodymyr, 24, the commander of a self-propelled artillery unit, as he waited on spotters to call in a new target. Usually it was infantry, he said.



Another soldier nodded.

“If we are shelling those positions, they keep pushing the men forward again and again,” the second soldier said. “They want to smoke us out, then fire artillery on us.”

From the 93rd Brigade’s position, drone operators have seen the mercenaries stumble over the bodies of fallen comrades as they advance.

A Russian reporter who filmed Wagner’s front-line positions near Bakhmut late last month reported that Prigozhin’s son was fighting there, and interviewed him, without identifying him by name.

“Bakhmut is a road to many directions. It’s a very important point strategically for the Ukrainian forces and for us,” another fighter said in the video. “Their team is ready to fight until the end, no matter what the losses are.”

The scale of the Russian losses are not known, but Ukrainian soldiers interviewed said they estimated them to be significant. “The number is big on their side because they’re not treating them like people,” said Misha, a 25-year-old soldier from the 93rd Brigade.



Ukraine’s casualties are also heavy. Ambulances shuttled back and forth between the Ukrainian firing positions last week, apparently carrying wounded men from the front line.

At a nearby hospital, two soldiers said they had brought four members of their unit to the emergency room after a Russian rocket attack in Bakhmut, and that three were in a critical condition. Their bloodstained jackets were still in the car. In a video taken shortly after the incident, the fourth man was seen howling in pain with his femur snapped at a sickening angle.

The day before, they said, another company had been surrounded by Russian forces, and fired upon. “There weren’t even pieces of them left,” said one of the soldiers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of describing Ukrainian casualties.

For Bakhmut’s residents, there is also little left. Rockets pound the city every day. A civilian doctor tries to patch up the injuries, but the walking wounded often just pull the shrapnel from their bodies on their own.



Standing on the Bakhmutka River’s eastern bank this week, Vitalii Kuzmienko, 52, stared up at a damaged bridge, its deck blown away, leaving a huge gap at mid-span. To stop Russian forces from advancing, the Ukrainians had laid antitank mines on one side, but those mines never detonated.

Kuzmienko said his house had been destroyed in the fighting, and so he was living in the wreckage of an outdoor market. His relatives were buried in Bakhmut, he said, and he didn’t want to leave them.

With alcohol on his breath, Kuzmienko said he feared that shelling might hit the bridge, and detonate the unexploded mines and then damage nearby civilian homes. He said he drank every day now to numb the fear and to help him sleep.

When four rockets slammed into the riverbank moments later, he barely moved.

On October 24 2022 01:17 JimmiC wrote:
Whats thr Russian line on this from the state news? I would think either sabatoge or incompetence are both equally terrible storey lines for them.

Big embarrassment as they are trying to keep the mythos of the all powerful and advanced military, suffering big losses against an "inferior" foe, their big prize bridge blowing up and now a bomber and a fighter just falling out of the sky.

Cant imagine this is good for public opinion for even tge most nationalist pro Russians.