Dec 4
Dec 2 — Day 282 — Bakhmut meatgrinder, UAF training, Luxembourg speaks
Hi FB!
Starting image is more mud and trenches and Ukrainian infantry. And from 100th Territorial Defense Battalion, a soldier and a war cat.
The lead video is a Ukrainian artillery piece driving across a very narrow bridge. Respect to the driver.
I would say the main news is that the big wave of missiles everyone is expecting the Russians to shoot at us didn’t get launched, at least, by later afternoon on Friday. Officials from Zelensky down to city bosses said it’s coming soon, just not this second, so get ready.
The fighting
Svatove-Kreminne
No major shifts in the ground situation here. The Russians claimed the UAF made pushes at Ploshanka, Chervonpopovka, and Zhytlovka and were pushed back with losses. However, the UAF reported its troops are working their way into Kreminne’s suburbs. At Makeevka, according to Russian sources, the UAF launched a UAV that was supposed to work like a jammer and the Russians shot it down. No outside confirmation of that.
Donbass
The Washington-based Institute for the Study of War yesterday made public an analysis of what’s going on at Bakhmut that essentially agrees with what this review has concluded: the Russians are more or less attacking out of inertia and the Ukrainians are fighting because it’s a good way to inflict casualties.
According to RF sources, the Russians have gained as much as 5 km. of ground to the north and south of Bakhmut, and have captured the village Belohorodivka, to the north of Artemovsk, and Pershe Travnia to the south. This supposedly, according to the RF sources, is another important step towards the “encirclement” of Bakhmut.
The Ukrainian view is that at the pace the Russians are advancing, they will complete the encirclement only by the middle of the century, after suffering crippling casualties. According to the Ukrainians the Russians tried to advance at Novomykhaylovka, Novodonetsk and Novoselka and were repelled with losses. No confirmation of any of that.
Attached is a video via the journalist Yury Butusov of 155mm strikes by elements of 93rd Mech Brigade, 44th Artillery Brigade, and 3rd Separate Assault Brigade on Wagner infantry attacks. Beware, if this video is real it’s video of people dying. The point with the video is to show you how well human bodies show up, at night, to thermal sights aboard a drone. This is exactly why Ukraine is asking America to send advanced drones: not so much because they carry missiles, but because they see so well in the dark.
However, what is clear is that there have been repeated UAF reports that the situation in this sector is “difficult”, which is usually code for the Ukrainians’ (and Russians for that matter) getting to the point where they have to feed more force into a fight or give up on it. I have multiple anecdotal reports of pieces of UAF units being fed into the fight, some regulars, some not.
Kherson
There are more hints that the Russians are pulling back from the Dnipro River line. According to the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, the Russians have started pulling out of the village Oleshki, Kherson region, and they’re trying to dig in in wood lines in the vicinity. Probable reasons would be to make it so it’s harder for civilians to rat them out to the UAF.
Zaporizhia
Also according to the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the Russians are planning to reduce perimeter/retreat in Zaporizhia region, and that they’re packing up from buildings they occupied in the village Mykhailivka (schools) as well in the villages Pology and Inzhenerne (homes), in all cases taking stolen civilian property. Allegedly, in the the village of Burchak, the occupation authorities are conducting a census for the so-called “voluntary evacuation” of the population.
Next Ukrainian offensive?
I can’t say where but I am pretty sure not for a week or two, and probably not until after the New Year. One reason is the weather and the need for the ground to dry out/freeze, otherwise fighting is absolutely gross and unpleasant and it’s hard to get soldiers to leave their holes. Another reason is the standard Ukrainian/Russian reason that people and institutions simply feel it’s natural and a human right to reduce work and activity in the last two weeks of December and first two weeks of January. It’s possible to overcome this cultural bias with motivation and discipline, but it ain’t easy.
Then there is this, Ukraine’s parliament on Thursday passed legislation that military personnel are allowed to go on paid vacation during martial law for a period of up to 10 days, plus two days’ travelling either way. In other words, once Zelensky signs the law, the UAF can send people on leave for two weeks. So I would call that a possible indicator UAF units are planning rest and recuperation for the next several weeks.
Plus, content is building up that units that you might predict to be part of an offensive, are actually training. The UAF more by need than anything else has separated itself into several types of infantry, of which only some are really trusted to carry out conventional attacks.
By and large, this is the mechanized infantry, the special operations infantry, a very few territorial units that for one reason or another effectively function as special operations infantry, and of course the airborne assault infantry, the last of which never flies anywhere, but since they’re “airborne” they’re expected not just to hold ground.
Attached are two videos, one of a mech unit equipped with Dutch M-113s, and one of the Azov SSO, both going through their paces.
My thinking is that if we are seeing video of two brigades training certainly more are doing so, so again, that inclines me to suspect UAF offensive not for the next couple of weeks anyway. We’ll see.
Strike Zone:
We now have an answer to the question of why at the start of the week everyone was thinking “missiles now”, as it turns out Maxar did another overflight over Engels airfield and found a bunch of Russian bombers that weren’t there before. Attached are a couple of images, according to reports the squints (look it up) found almost two dozen Tu-95 and Tu-160 long-range bombers, with fuel tanks, ammunition boxes, vehicles and repair materials. Later in the week Ukrainian officials stood up and said the strikes won’t necessarily come immediately, but they’ll come, and likely a lot of the missiles will be relatively obsolete X-55 cruise missiles.
According to Ukrainian military intelligence, the Russians are evacuating Su-25 aircraft from the Crimean airfield Dzhankoi, in the north of Crimea peninsula, to the Gvardeyske airfield in the south. This is the HIMARS effect, to wit, somehow the Ukrainians have developed reach to hit north Crimean targets.
The editorial observation would be, then, that whether or not Russia’s Crimea supply line to defending forces north, is now directly dependent on how many and what kind of precision-guided munitions the Ukrainians can bring to bear on the Taurida steppe (roughly, the flatlands south of the Dnipro River and north of Crimea). The fact the Ukrainians are not advancing here could be down to a lot of reasons, but, certainly one of them really seems to be they don’t have the firepower to attack Russian ammo dumps and command centers in south Kherson region, like they did in September, when they used long-range guided rockets to break the back of Russian logistics on the right/north bank of the Dnipro River.
Of course, maybe the Ukrainians are keeping their HIMARS rockets in reserve, but that certainly isn’t characteristic for them. The Ukrainian approach seems to be the moment they see a target they can usefully damage, they try to hit it as soon as they can.
Keeping current with shocking news
Although not directly war-related I thought it would be interesting to record that the national energy company Yasno announced that, in future, power grid managers will if necessary switch off individual buildings in accordance with rolling power grid cuts. This will, they said, reduce unpleasant situations where an apartment building next to say a government institution or a hospital never gets its power shut off, while across the street neighbors freeze in the dark.
This is a small indicator of first the Ukrainian government’s understanding that the populace is willing to suffer a good deal of inconvenience and unpleasantness for the goal of kicking the Russians out of the country, but it better be fair, and second that if officials don’t get in front of angry citizens then that will undermine the war effort and you really don’t want to be the official citizens are in the streets demonstrating against.
Stuff for Ukraine
The Pentagon signed a 1.2 billion dollar contract with Raytheon to send Ukraine six of the top end NASAMS air defense systems, delivery over the next two years. What’s more, the Americans are negotiating with current operators of the system, one is Qatar, to hand over their missiles to Ukraine now and get replacement missile later, and meanwhile America will take care of the air defense gap. Image attached.
In other US military news, the Americans will “train 2500 Ukrainian soldiers a month in “more complex combat tactics, including coordination maneuvers for infantry with artillery support.” The source for this that I saw was CNN. Those of us who know how the US Army and TRADOC (look it up) does business, know that very likely the translation of this news item is that Ukrainian combat companies at least, and possibly brigades, are going to go through combined arms training at Grafenwoehr and Hohenfels.
That’s a bit speculative, but, for sure what this means is that the Ukrainians are not so hard up for troops that they are unable to part with 2500 frontline soldiers every month, to upgrade their combined arms performance. It’s almost like the US Army was listening to me…
The Germans decided to cough up seven more Gepard anti-aircraft cannon systems and, among other items, three Biber bridgelayer vehicles, eight water-operated UAVs, 30 ambulances, and a bunch of Mi-24 attack helicopter spare parts. What I am not seeing yet, but will eventually be coming, is German manufactures — most if not all of this almost certainly was existing inventory. Image attached.
Which brings me back to a question I seem to keep on repeating in these reviews: What in the world is Russia doing trying to win a war of material with American AND German AND South Korean AND Polish etc. etc. military manufacturing on the other side?
Finally on stuff for Ukraine, remember that questionable report about Luxembourg sending Ukraine six drones? Looks like it was real, Luxembourg published a list of things it’s sent Ukraine, and lo and behind six spiffy drones are on it, image attached.
Mobilization
Remember the mobilized soldiers from Serpukhov, who got thrown into the line around Luhansk, got shelled to bits around Makievka, and then the survivors made their way on foot back to the rear area where for days no Russian army organization or commander could be found to take care of them? The update is, they eventually got trucked to Belgorod, spent three days resting and getting new kit, and now they’ve been thrown back into the line. They had threatened to desert and walk back to Russia if that happened, but, as it worked out the army rewarded their protest by sending them to new frontline positions.
And in Belarus, according to the opposition information platform Belarusky Gayun, RF soldiers at a training area just walked off the reservation, with their weapons, and were spotted in a village in the Branovsitsky region. They were peaceful but, the report said, not interested in returning to service. Image attached.
And finally, if you’ve read this far, a video of a Ukrainian airborne unit, er, practicing maneuver and fire tactics, following a recent snowfall.
