Dec 10 — Day 290 — Kitty Power, Shocking Odessa, Don’t shoot I’m Swiss!

Hi FB!

Three videos to start out with. The first is a funny cat video with a political subtext. As you can see, the kitty cuts off power and the Ukrainian power grid agency Ukrenergo is blamed. This is a good example of the Ukrainian public reaction to the power cuts and electricity grid damage.

There hasn’t been a Russian missile bombardment for nearly a week, yet pretty much everyone not on a trunk line that supplies power to a hospital or a government building gets the electricity cut off for several hours a couple of times a day. Ukrenergo has a website where one can data entry your address and supposedly find out when the lights are going to be switched off, but it’s not very reliable. The general opinion seems to be that this is Ukrenergo stringing new lines, fixing generators and hopefully armoring substations, but, I would say a lot of Ukrainian city dwellers are getting a bit irritated how unpredictable the cut offs are.

I don’t think anyone is planning to surrender to the Russians, but, delivery of electricity and government clarity and transparency on who gets power and when is going to become a political issue in Ukraine as the winter wears on.

The second video is an interview with Vadym Voroshilov, call sign Karaya. He’s a UAF MiG-29 pilot. Recently he shot down five Iranian Shahed drones and then crashed himself after his jet ran into the wreckage of one of the drones. If you can’t understand the Ukrainian, then the thing that impressed me is how much Voroshilov talks and sounds like a professional, combat pilot. It is very difficult, after watching this guy talk about his war job, to understand the arguments that Ukrainian pilots just don’t have the right stuff to handle fourth generation NATO-type jets. There’s English subtitling.

The third video is a recently-captured Wagner fighter and Russian felon named Vyacheslav Ismailov. I pass it on because there’s English dubbing, and also because Ismailov is, for a Russian felon, a pretty thoughtful and well-spoken guy. The takeaway on the video I would say is that this is probably a pretty good window into what at least some of the Russian troops are like, that are attacking Bakhmut. As noted earlier, the Russian tactic seems to be to send guys like Ismailov first and then follow up with better-skilled infantry. This tactic seems to be having some success, but, you have to wonder how long Russia can keep on finding volunteers like Ismailov. English subtitles.

The fighting

Donbass

Around Bakhmut the Russians appear to be making slow progress. According to some sources (western mainstream) the Ukrainians are taking very heavy and unsustainable personnel losses, while according to others (Ukrainian military-associated blogosphere) the Ukrainians have the manpower to keep fighting and they are bleeding the Russians, led by the Wagner mercenaries, white with losses.

I’ve seen an unconfirmed report that the Russian troops captured the village Vodyane, near Pisky, and advanced nearly a kilometer before being stopped, and an 800 m. Russian advance to the north-east of Bakhmut.

It’s clear international units on the UAF side have been thrown into the Bakhmut fight and that they are taking losses. In this the UAF is playing its cards much the same way it did in Severodonetsk: when the fighting became very tight and house-to-house, and the UAF goal was just to make the Russians pay to advance, the UAF threw in its foreign volunteers. This makes some sense because in city fighting it’s all about squads and sections and close-in infantry fighting, which the foreigner fighters generally are able to manage fairly well, without needing to coordinate (a lot) with artillery or tanks or adjacent major units, or higher command for that matter.

Also, brutally honest, dead and wounded foreigners don’t affect Ukrainian national will to resist that much.

Strike Zone Odessa

One of the more reliable ways to determine where the UAF is at least thinking about pushing sometime in the indefinite future, is to look where the “pick off” long range strikes against Russian bases, munition dumps, command posts and troop centers are taking place now. Ukraine’s Army General Staff hasn’t announced where the next offensive will be, but, on Friday it published a new list of places RF units “took significant losses in personnel and equipment”, and plotted out on a map the south Zaporizhia sector is the place getting the attention: Berdyansk, Tokmak, Melitpopl, Enerhodar, Dniprorudnye, Pololgi and Vasylivka. Map attached.

The Russians made clearer overnight Friday-Saturday what their strategy regarding attacking Ukrainian power infrastructure will be in the short term: another round of Iranian kamikaze drones got launched, ten of them were shot down, and the five that hit did enough damage in south Ukraine to kill the lights in Kherson and (again) Odessa.

According to Kherson authorities the center of the city and a pair of outlying villages lost power, repair crews are on the scene and electricity should be more or less functioning by evening.

In Odessa, “several critical infrastructure objects” were destroyed and the energy situation is “complicated”, a statement from the power company DTEK said. As of midday only “critical objects” — this is hospitals, police stations, government buildings and so on — had continuous power, elsewhere in the city there were rolling blackouts. It was still a problem by evening.

This is a d*ck move by Russia because Odessa was worst hit in the big missile strikes earlier this week; the Kremlin clearly is hoping Odessites — who by history and tradition consider their city a metropolis any country should be grateful to have inside its borders, and consider themselves the most skilled Russian-speakers in the world to boot — will get mad at the Kyiv government for failing to provide sufficient air defenses and electricity repair capacity. But Odessites are (by their own admission) the most urban and sophisticated of Ukrainian city dwellers, and I think the great majority of them are irate mostly at the people in Moscow who fired the missiles.

But like the cat video, how much they gripe in Odessa about the power being out, will be something to watch in the future. Along those lines (get it?) Holland announced on Friday it was sending Ukraine six million Eur in power grid materials and equipment: this is the Dutch demonstrating how critically useful aid to Ukraine is not always arms. Similarly, on Saturday Baku announced it was sending Ukraine 45 transformers and 50 generators, and the EU said it was sending (I think) 150 generators. One of the things the Russians have clearly not thought through is that if they attack Ukrainian civilian targets, then the entire world economy — and not just tightly-constrained arms manufacturers — are capable of sending materials and equipment to fix the damage.

If Russia has next to no chance of winning a war of material on the battlefield in Ukraine, in my view, it has a less than zero chance of winning a war of material attacking Ukrainian infrastructure. In that war the limit to Ukrainian material support is the amount of money Europe+North America are willing to send China for generators and power cable. Drops of water on a hot rock.

Count the rockets

Speaking of shooting things down, the Russian Defense Ministry on Friday announced a total count of modern rocket artillery systems its forces have destroyed in Ukraine: 45 total, this including HIMARS, M270, Mars-2; and of these 13 (!) were destroyed in the last three days. This would be a very big deal as these are precisely the weapons systems that shoot the long-range precision-guided rockets the Russians can neither shoot down or attack with their own, shorter-ranged artillery. Image of claim.

When the war started the Kremlin official line was that the West would never send Ukraine long-range weapons like that because it would be escalation and unfriendly to Russia, then the Kremlin official line was that Russia’s world-beating anti-aircraft systems like S-300, S-400 and Pantsyr would just shoot these nasty American rockets down, and when videos of HIMARS rockets whacking S-300 and Pantsyr systems started appearing on the web, the Kremlin official line changed to the Americans are using the Ukrainians as cannon fodder and don’t forget Russia has nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately for that narrative, the Ukrainians and the Americans say since the start of the war Ukraine has fielded 20 HIMARS systems (wheeled version) and 10–12 M270/M2 systems (tracked version) and as of early November exactly zero have been lost. This does not, obviously, jibe well with the Russian Defense Ministry.

Who’s telling the truth? Well, at minimum we can say for sure NATO/Ukraine haven’t changed their story very much on the theme of long-range precision-guided rockets, while the Kremlin seems to come up with a new version of the truth on the issue — how many destroyed, where they did or did not hit, how effective they are or are not — about every other month. Remember the Antonovsky bridge and the Russian officials saying the Ukrainians can’t hit it effectively?

As noted, the AGS said Ukrainian artillery/rocket strikes hit in the last 24 hours at about a dozen locations in south Zaporizhia region, most of which are reachable from Ukrainian lines only by these American precision-guided rockets — whose launchers, according to the Russians, have been all destroyed.

This is a pretty good pretext to post a picture of the Cheshire Cat grin the Ukrainians seem to like to paint on their HIMARS.

In Russia

In another indicator that even if the Kremlin keeps telling us they’re winning, the Russian police are getting more and more sensitive about public information to the contrary, law enforcement yesterday arrested Svetlana Belova, head of the “Council of Mothers and Wives”, a military spouse NGO that has been demanding the government explain to the Russian citizenry why reservists are getting sent to fight without much training and even less decent equipment, and to provide some responsible accounting for all the sons, brothers, husbands and fathers who disappeared into the army and have not contacted their families for weeks and even months.

According to Ms. Belova (image) a prosecutor said she is being investigated on the charge of making public “extremist materials” and that if convicted she could be “arrested”, probably she meant sent to jail, for 15 days. She and two other group members were detained on Dec. 8.

In the 1980s, as I have pointed out before, the first group to demonstrate publicly against Soviet authority was Mothers of men sent to fight in Afghanistan. As to the wisdom of arresting women expressing an unsanctioned opinion in an authoritarian state, the Kremlin might do well to look across the Caspian to its new buddy Iran, where a strict national leadership ran afoul of activist women fed up with overbearing and irresponsible government.

Stuff for Ukraine

- The internet has concluded that the Ukrainians used modified, Soviet-era Tu-141 reconnaissance drones to hit the two Russian bomber airfields last week at ranges of 500+ km. Image attached. This is a 1960s-era system that has been obsolete for decades. Something like 160 of them were produced and Wiki tells me “most of them were deployed in the Soviet Union’s western districts”. If that’s true then it’s quite reasonable that Ukraine probably has 60–80 of these things that were never thrown away, although it’s anyone’s guess as to how many are flyable or could be made flyable. Or left, after having been made flyable: this is yet another answer to our long-running question: “How is Ukraine hitting targets 200+ km. away, time to time for ten months now, when the longest-range weapon they supposedly have shoots about 150–170 km.?”

- A partial answer is in the news from late Thursday that the UAF has taken into field use two home-produced drones, both manufactured by a private company. The bigger one is called an E-300 Enterprise (payload 300 kg) and the smaller is called a D-80 Discovery (payload 80 kg.) The really interesting thing about these systems is that the national defense manufacturing monopoly Ukroboronprom, which has been widely accused of inefficiency and corruption — had nothing to do with the development of these two drones, it was all private Ukrainian industry. This break in monopoly control, usually linked to oligarchs and single bidder state manufacturing long entrenched in Ukraine, is arguably more important than the drones themselves. This is a clear case of wartime need displacing crony capitalism. Images of the drones attached.

- Details of the latest round of US support to Ukraine (you know, the arms and supply deliveries the Americans could never, ever sustain because they are weak and unfocused and divided and they vote too much, unlike mighty unified Russia which is shot through with unique and unconquerable Russian spiritual strength, and loves Vladimir Putin to a fault) hit the news on Friday: Value of $275 million, 80,000 155mm artillery rounds, 120mm mortar rounds (don’t know the count) anti-drone tech, more HIMARS rockets, air defense systems (no details), 150 generators, and HUMMV-based ambulances. Image of palletized ammo and some 155mm shells attached.

Also, the British Times newspaper reported the Americans have decided to “allow” Ukraine to strike targets in Russia, which is a little redundant, because Ukraine started doing that on the second day of the war. The paper says this means Ukraine could get green-lighted for longer-range American-made weapons systems like ATACMS missiles. I assume the White House will comment in the next 48 hours.

- Mykola Podolak, a presidential advisor who usually winds up saying things that reflect the Zelensky administration policy positions, on Friday said that delivery to the UAF of US-made Abrams tanks, German-made Leopard tanks, and US-made Patriot anti-aircraft missiles are coming “in two weeks, a month, or two months”. This followed an announcement in Washington that the Biden administration does not opposed delivery of German tanks to Ukraine, which declaration was reported as received and understood in Berlin. As some of you may recall, the German government has dragged its feet on sending Ukraine German-made Leopard tanks, because Germany “doesn’t want to be the first to send Ukraine tanks.”

Taken together with what Podalyak and the White House said, I think — and this is pure speculation — this means talks are moving along for announcement of another heavy weapons delivery package to Ukraine probably in January or February. I bet it will be complicated and involve “ring toss” weapons transfers. Maybe Poland will give Ukraine its Leopard tanks. I’ve read the Poles don’t like them, and this week the Poles took first delivery of initial vehicles of a huge batch of South Korean tanks, and we know Poland is buying US-made tanks, so there is some logic to Poland’s punting its Leopard tanks over to Ukraine in 2023, just as Poland punted its T-72 tanks to Ukraine in 2022.

- Germany’s Rheinmettal according to the newspaper Handelsblatt just accepted an order from Ukraine to buy two Skynex anti-aircraft systems for 182 million Eur. Delivery in 2024, image attached. This is another one of those deals where I think there’s more going on that what meets the eye initially.

Skynex is supposedly an excellent anti-aircraft cannon system pretty much ideal for shooting down low-level drones, and as we have seen the German Gepard anti-aircraft system, basically the precursor to Skynex, has proved itself to be pretty effective against Russian drones and cruise missiles already. The fly in that ointment of course is well known and would be funny if lives weren’t hanging in the balance: the 35mm cannon shells for the Gepard are made not in Germany but Switzerland, and Switzerland is strictly neutral so although they will sell Germany 35mm cannon shells for a Gepard, they will not sell the ammo to Ukraine. On the battlefield in Ukraine the plan seems to be to tell crews to use short bursts and hope German stocks hold out, because Swiss neutrality trumps taking a side in European wars of aggression.

So why, one might ask, would the Ukrainians buy a German weapons system that uses Swiss 35mm ammunition they can’t buy?

Again speculation, but my guess is this is, in part, German and Ukrainian arms manufacturers dealing with a crappy monopolist supplier (Switzerland) by setting up an alternate logistics chain. I am willing to bet my household battery pack that somehow, a 35mm ammunition manufacturing chain will get set up somewhere outside Switzerland, it will make cannon shells for the Gepards, and with the Swiss lawyers object that violates the contract that forces Rheinmettal to sell Gepards only with Swiss ammunition, the Ukrainians will say no, actually, this is 35mm ammo for the Skynex, which we Ukrainians maybe haven’t received, but we just want to stockpile it, you know, because Russia is our neighbor.

Pretty funny if that’s what’s going on, but the key bit is, the 35mm that Gepard shoots needs to be compatible with the 35mm Skynex shoots.

UPDATE: Several readers have pointed me to 35mm sourcing from Spain or possibly Norway. So the theory is weaker than I thought.

- Morocco is the first African state to donate military support to Ukraine, according to the Le Journal de l’Afrique they will be sending T-72 parts. The report says the Americans were instrumental in making the deal work, which pretty much always translates to, it was the American taxpayers that shelled out to finance the deal. Image. Also, it’s worth noting Morocco started using US-made M1 tanks in 2016. According to UNIAN there are around 40 T-72 tanks in the Moroccan army, so I’d say it’s a reasonable bet that if they could be made battle-worthy they will be heading to Ukraine. Or, maybe they ARE heading to Ukraine, but they’re in such poor condition they’re being listed as parts. Or maybe it was politically-expedient for Rabat to send parts not tanks, etc. etc.