Blyatskrieg

[EACLucifer]

Explosions in Rostov, Taganrog and Azov, so quite a way into Russia. Could be drones, talk also of modified S-200s. Worth keeping an eye on. There's an airbase at Taganrog, Rostov's a key supply node - the key supply node really - and a lot of the positions Russia uses to sustain its war are within drone and/or modified S-200 range.

Taganrog was definitely an S-200. It came down in the city, though it's important to note that the Russians claimed they shot it down and "debris" hit the city, so it could very easily have been knocked off course. I'd assume the nearby airbase was the target. Also possible it's just a miss, as we don't know how accurate these conversions of S-200 surface-to-air missiles are, and also possible that jamming around the airbase may have caused a GPS guidance system, if such a thing were fitted, to malfunction.

[Woodchopper]

Ukrainian officials have cautioned that their drive toward the Sea of Azov, a key objective of their counteroffensive, will require a bl..dy slog through extensive minefields and fortified trenches, likely under heavy artillery fire along roads lined with Russian armor and machine guns. But Kyiv has a more immediate goal.

That is to penetrate deep enough into occupied territory to bring more Russian military targets within range of Ukraine’s gradually expanding arsenal, further disrupting Moscow’s supply lines and its ability to parry Ukrainian advances.

“The main task we face now, in addition to moving forward, is, of course, to weaken the enemy’s ability to defend itself,” Hanna Malyar, the deputy minister of defense, said on Ukrainian national television. “And in fact, this is what we are doing now.”

[…]

Before Ukraine launched its counteroffensive two months ago, its frontline positions were between 60 and 90 miles from the coast, just out of the reach of HIMARS, truck-mounted launchers that fire satellite-guided rockets.

That means that every mile that Ukraine gains in its current assault, the closer it gets to Russian targets along the coast.

Though the HIMARS are mobile — the name stands for High Mobility Artillery Rocket System — Ukrainian forces have a limited number, and prefer to keep them some distance from the front line. And over time, the Russians have shown an ability to adapt to HIMARS strikes, dispersing their supplies, as well as jamming the weapon’s GPS guidance.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/28/worl ... ussia.html

For the Ukrainians the war is being won, slowly, with a combination of artillery and infantry. They are effective at hitting Russian logistics and artillery and that will be the key to success.

[EACLucifer]

Chongar rail bridge is seriously damaged, presumably by a further application of Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG cruise missiles.

Here's a rail map courtesy of Special Kherson Cat on Twitter, with the bridge highlighted in red - the importance of this connection is quite clear.

[TopBadger]

Chongar rail bridge is seriously damaged, presumably by a further application of Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG cruise missiles.

Here's a rail map courtesy of Special Kherson Cat on Twitter, with the bridge highlighted in red - the importance of this connection is quite clear.

Map also shows the strategic importance of pushing south to take Tokmak / Chernihivka in terms of cutting rail logistics fully (not sure how much the Russians are using it given it's proximity to the front line). Probably makes more sense to take Chernihivka and try to encircle Tokmak to pin any Russian forces within.

[Woodchopper]

Chongar rail bridge is seriously damaged, presumably by a further application of Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG cruise missiles.

Here's a rail map courtesy of Special Kherson Cat on Twitter, with the bridge highlighted in red - the importance of this connection is quite clear.

Map also shows the strategic importance of pushing south to take Tokmak / Chernihivka in terms of cutting rail logistics fully (not sure how much the Russians are using it given it's proximity to the front line). Probably makes more sense to take Chernihivka and try to encircle Tokmak to pin any Russian forces within.

They don’t even need to take the railway line. It would be enough to get within regular artillery range and it’s not usable.

[Woodchopper]

Back to US ammo production.

US Army effort to increase monthly output of the crucial munitions to 90,000 will take until 2025, highlighting the challenge of ramping up such production quickly, particularly when the US had not previously been focused on it.

The Pentagon has asked to buy only about 790,000 155mm rounds over the past 10 years, mostly for use in training exercises. That suggests the US has already given Ukraine more than the quantity it procured in 155mm purchases over the past decade, according to a report by the Center for a New American Security think-tank in Washington.

[…]

The dearth of US supplies of 155mn shells to support the current push was an important driver behind President Joe Biden’s controversial decision last month to authorise shipments of cluster munitions to Ukraine.

The decision “helped ensure that Ukraine has the ammunition it needs and that they would not run out”, one US official said.

[…]

Ukraine is currently firing up to 8,000 rounds of artillery a day, a much larger quantity than the US would fire, according to American officials.

[…]

The US is now also working to ramp up supply of the shells, with a target of producing up to 90,000 a month by fiscal year 2025, according to the US Army, compared with 24,000 now and 14,000 per month before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

However, production takes place mainly at four government-owned, contractor-operated sites in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia and Iowa. A report by CNAS described the effort as “a lean production process with multiple bottlenecks”.

The US Army is building more production lines, including retooling a facility in Ontario, Canada, and erecting a new assembly line in Texas. Army officials have said they may also establish new facilities to load, assemble and pack 155mm shells in Arkansas, Iowa and Kansas.

https://www.ft.com/content/b2c89d88-3e7 ... 85236aa684

The estimate of 8000 per day is in line with previous estimates. However production of 24000 per month is about a tenth of what Ukraine needs. Obviously there is production in Europe and they are importing from South Korea and elsewhere.

But we still have the prospect of Ukraine running short of ammunition. The fighting may slow down in the winter as both sides replenish their stocks.

[EACLucifer]

Something massive has exploded in Sevastopol, by the looks of it

No idea what, though.

[jimbob]

Something massive has exploded in Sevastopol, by the looks of it

No idea what, though.

Looks like it is geoloccated in this tweet

https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status ... 49056?s=20

[Woodchopper]

Something massive has exploded in Sevastopol, by the looks of it

No idea what, though.

Looks like it is geoloccated in this tweet

https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status ... 49056?s=20

I assume an ammunition stockpile got stormshadowed.

[EACLucifer]

Something massive has exploded in Sevastopol, by the looks of it

No idea what, though.

Looks like it is geoloccated in this tweet

https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status ... 49056?s=20

I assume an ammunition stockpile got stormshadowed.

The current consensus seems to be that it was an arsenal belonging to the Black Sea Fleet.

As for the weapon, there's three main weapons Ukraine has that can reach that far - Storm Shadows/SCALP-EG cruise missiles, missiles from the S-200 SAM complex modified for ground attack, and drones, including converted Tupolev recon drones and new production "Bober" drones. Of those, Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG is the one most likely to penetrate air defence and accurately hit the target, and likewise the one most likely to be able to destroy hardened ammunition storage.

[Woodchopper]

As the Ukrainian forces deploy Western-supplied weapons, the Russian troops are making use of deadly new tactics and weapons of their own, including attack drones and remote-detonated mines.

In Staromaiorske, Russian soldiers dug bunkers underneath the village’s houses with multiple exits so a house would erupt like an anthill when under attack, said Dikyi, the Ukrainian commander. He lost one of his best men, a 27-year-old called Vyacheslav, who used the call sign Bandit, in an assault on such a house, he said.

The key to the Ukrainian success in the village, he said, was wearing down the Russian soldiers’ will to fight. The first sign of the Russian collapse was when 20 soldiers abandoned their position after complaining that reinforcements had failed to arrive, he said.

From intercepts of Russian communications and interrogations of prisoners, the Ukrainian forces knew that their opponents were taking casualties and that some were refusing to fight.

“They were panicking,” Dikyi said. The Ukrainians redoubled their attack with a frontal assault with two battalions along four streets.

[…]

As officials celebrated Ukraine’s progress in Staromaiorske, troops elsewhere on the ground said that Russian defenses and firepower remained formidable and in places impassable.

A soldier at a medical post, awaiting evacuation for a concussion, recently described how his battalion had been decimated when it came under Russian artillery and tank fire. His brigade, the 23rd, was one of nine newly formed, Western-trained units prepared and equipped for the counteroffensive. But the brigade, he said, had been thrown into the fight without sufficient artillery support and had been unable to defend themselves against Russian firepower.

[…]

After their armored vehicles were largely destroyed by artillery strikes on the first day, they revised their plan to approach the village on foot through a tree line that had been mined. The Ukrainians cleared a narrow path with demining explosives and the first soldiers reached the Russian positions and dropped down into a trench.

Drone footage of the event showed what happened next. Explosions suddenly detonated inside the trenches and other strikes hit soldiers on the edge of the tree line. The video footage has been verified by The New York Times.

“The trenches were mined,” said the assault commander, who uses the call sign Voskres, short for Resurrection. “Our guys started jumping in the trenches and blowing up,” he added. The Russian forces were watching, and they remotely detonated the mines, he said.

Those who managed to avoid the mines came under attack from multiple Russian kamikaze drones. “It seemed like they had a drone for each person,” he said. “The amount of equipment the Russians have, had we known, it was like mission impossible.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/30/worl ... ussia.html

[Woodchopper]

Comprehensive assessment of the state of the offensive so far: https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-sta ... paign=post

[Woodchopper]

The first several weeks of Ukraine’s long-awaited counteroffensive have not been kind to the Ukrainian troops who were trained and armed by the United States and its allies.

Equipped with advanced American weapons and heralded as the vanguard of a major assault, the troops became bogged down in dense Russian minefields under constant fire from artillery and helicopter gunships. Units got lost. One unit delayed a nighttime attack until dawn, losing its advantage. Another fared so badly that commanders yanked it off the battlefield altogether.

Now the Western-trained Ukrainian brigades are trying to turn things around, U.S. officials and independent analysts say. Ukrainian military commanders have changed tactics, focusing on wearing down the Russian forces with artillery and long-range missiles instead of plunging into minefields under fire. A troop surge is underway in the country’s south, with a second wave of Western-trained forces launching mostly small-scale attacks to punch through Russian lines.

[…]

The complicated training in Western maneuvers has given the Ukrainians scant solace in the face of barrage after barrage of Russian artillery.

[…]

Ukraine’s decision to change tactics is a clear signal that NATO’s hopes for large advances made by Ukrainian formations armed with new weapons, new training and an injection of artillery ammunition have failed to materialize, at least for now.

It raises questions about the quality of the training the Ukrainians received from the West and about whether tens of billions of dollars’ worth of weapons, including nearly $44 billion worth from the Biden administration, have been successful in transforming the Ukrainian military into a NATO-standard fighting force.

[…]

Biden administration officials had hoped the nine Western-trained brigades, some 36,000 troops, would show that the American way of warfare was superior to the Russian approach. While the Russians have a rigidly centralized command structure, the Americans taught the Ukrainians to empower senior enlisted soldiers to make quick decisions on the battlefield and to deploy combined arms tactics — synchronized attacks by infantry, armor and artillery forces.

[…]

Western-trained brigades received only four to six weeks of combined arms training, and units made several mistakes at the start of the counteroffensive in early June that set them back, according to U.S. officials and analysts who recently visited the front lines and spoke to Ukrainian troops and commanders.

Some units failed to follow cleared paths and ran into mines. When a unit delayed a nighttime attack, an accompanying artillery bombardment to cover its advance went ahead as scheduled, tipping off the Russians.

[…]

Military experts said that using newly learned tactics for the first time was always going to be hard, especially given that the Russian response was to assume a defensive crouch and fire massive barrages of artillery.

“They were given a tall order,” said Rob Lee, a Russian military specialist at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and a former U.S. Marine officer, who has also traveled to the front lines. “They had a short amount of time to train on new equipment and to develop unit cohesion, and then they were thrown into one of the most difficult combat situations. They were put in an incredibly tough position.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine acknowledged in late July that his country’s counteroffensive against dug-in Russian troops was advancing more slowly than expected.

[…]

A Western official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational details and intelligence assessments, said the Russians were stretched and still experiencing problems with logistics, supply, personnel and weapons.

General Breedlove concurred and said he still expected the Ukrainian counteroffensive to put Russia at a disadvantage.

“The Ukrainians are in a place now where they understand how they want to employ their forces,” he said. “And we’re starting to see the Russians move backwards.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/us/p ... ining.html

[Woodchopper]

The US is still waiting for European officials to submit a final plan for training Ukrainian pilots on F-16 fighter jets, which the US will have to authorize before the program can actually begin, officials familiar with the matter told CNN.

The training is supposed to start this month, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and European officials have said publicly. But two months after President Joe Biden announced US support for training Ukrainian pilots on F-16s, there remain a number of critical details to work out.

The US still needs to approve the transfer of F-16-specific equipment and materials, including flight simulators and training manuals. But officials told CNN that the Biden administration has not yet received a final training plan from the Europeans, meaning there is nothing for the US to sign off on yet.

[…]

The number of Ukrainian pilots set to be trained is also still being determined, but the Air Force memo recommended a pool of 10-12 participants. That is in line with the number of pilots US defense officials believe Ukraine will be able to realistically sacrifice for a months-long training course in Europe as the war rages on.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/01/politics ... index.html

[EACLucifer]

Looks like naval drones made it to Novorossiysk.

Russian side claims all drones were destroyed. Well yes, they are suicide drones, aren't they. Looks like one of them was destroyed alongside a landing ship. That's the third Ropucha Ukraine's damaged or destroyed, with the other two hit by a Tochka-U and damaged by ammunition they were transporting last year in Berdyansk.

I presume the ship is repairable if she's only listing and in port, but it won't necessarily be quick or economic.

[Martin Y]

That's quite a serious list. And I see the BBC now has camera footage from the drone itself. Appears to cruise straight in on the port side below the bridge. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66402046
I really don't think they saw this one coming. There's no sign of any activity, certainly no visible flashes of weapons trying to intercept it.

I'm surprised that Russia can still drop the ball so badly. They know what the threat is, they know what these drones are and what they can do. Small fast torpedo boats have been a threat to fleets in harbour since the 1800s.

[EACLucifer]

That's quite a serious list. And I see the BBC now has camera footage from the drone itself. Appears to cruise straight in on the port side below the bridge. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66402046
I really don't think they saw this one coming. There's no sign of any activity, certainly no visible flashes of weapons trying to intercept it.

I'm surprised that Russia can still drop the ball so badly. They know what the threat is, they know what these drones are and what they can do. Small fast torpedo boats have been a threat to fleets in harbour since the 1800s.

I think it was actually hit just outside the harbour, but the point stands.

This should hopefully be a deterrent against use of these versatile assault transports to move cargo to Crimea, which is what they have been doing lately to bypass the damaged bridge, and also shut down any idea of Russia sending ships to board grain transports and maintain the blockade of Ukraine's grain industy in that way.

On the other hand the repeated attacks on Izmail are a serious danger. Russian attack drones have even flown over Romania to get at Ukrainian grain terminals. Surely NATO could position some air defences in eastern Romania, or even combat air patrols, to shoot down anything heading for Romania and, to play it safe, also protect Izmail, which is less than a kilometre from Romanian soil.

[Woodchopper]

That's quite a serious list. And I see the BBC now has camera footage from the drone itself. Appears to cruise straight in on the port side below the bridge. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66402046
I really don't think they saw this one coming. There's no sign of any activity, certainly no visible flashes of weapons trying to intercept it.

I'm surprised that Russia can still drop the ball so badly. They know what the threat is, they know what these drones are and what they can do. Small fast torpedo boats have been a threat to fleets in harbour since the 1800s.

I think it was actually hit just outside the harbour, but the point stands.

This should hopefully be a deterrent against use of these versatile assault transports to move cargo to Crimea, which is what they have been doing lately to bypass the damaged bridge, and also shut down any idea of Russia sending ships to board grain transports and maintain the blockade of Ukraine's grain industy in that way.

Yes, especially as ships can transit Turkish, Bulgarian and Romanian territorial waters on their way to Ukraine, and if so any Russian boarding would have to be in a limited area.

[EACLucifer]

Ukrainians hit a Russian military tanker long linked with their Syrian deployments in the Kerch Strait with a drone-boat

There's no particular reason to think that in the long run Crimea cannot be liberated the way right-bank Kherson was.

[Martin Y]

Thanks for the ID of the ship. The first report I read didn't say whether this was a random civilian tanker or something supplying the Russian war effort. It did make me wonder about how Russia supplies fuel to Crimea, and how vulnerable the Kerch railway bridge is if it's their only route.

[Woodchopper]

I wrote a summary of issues around the military aid provided to Ukraine during the first year of the war.

It’s an open access academic article, which can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... 23.2235121

[EACLucifer]

Thanks for the ID of the ship. The first report I read didn't say whether this was a random civilian tanker or something supplying the Russian war effort. It did make me wonder about how Russia supplies fuel to Crimea, and how vulnerable the Kerch railway bridge is if it's their only route.

Yeah, Sig's notorious for supplying aviation fuel to the Syrian regime, which enabled things like barrel bombings of urban neighbourhoods. Ukraine have also warned that anything sailing to occupied Ukraine might be considered a target, which is a reasonable warning to give, and Sig appeared to have been shuttling fuel to occupied Crimea.

[Martin Y]

I wonder if the Russians' report of nobody hurt is the same sort of nobody hurt as the Moskva. The Ukrainians are talking about a spectacular effect which could be seen from afar, which is rather what you would expect from a jet fuel tanker, though it's possible they just assume that. The Russians say minor damage to the engine room. If it was laden I'd expect something up toward the more catastrophic end of the scale.

I also wonder why it wasn't underway. Hanging around waiting for an escort?

[Grumble]

I wonder if the Russians' report of nobody hurt is the same sort of nobody hurt as the Moskva. The Ukrainians are talking about a spectacular effect which could be seen from afar, which is rather what you would expect from a jet fuel tanker, though it's possible they just assume that. The Russians say minor damage to the engine room. If it was laden I'd expect something up toward the more catastrophic end of the scale.

I also wonder why it wasn't underway. Hanging around waiting for an escort?

They may have had other unmanned boats near enough to see, though I don’t expect they would release that footage.

[jimbob]

I wonder if the Russians' report of nobody hurt is the same sort of nobody hurt as the Moskva. The Ukrainians are talking about a spectacular effect which could be seen from afar, which is rather what you would expect from a jet fuel tanker, though it's possible they just assume that. The Russians say minor damage to the engine room. If it was laden I'd expect something up toward the more catastrophic end of the scale.

I also wonder why it wasn't underway. Hanging around waiting for an escort?

The engine room looks flooded.

https://twitter.com/revishvilig/status/ ... 09696?s=20