Ukraine - Russia Conflict
- Thread starter randomradio
- Start date
It seems like the terrine was not suitable for armoured warfare in the northern sector. Tanks were getting stuck in mud soon after they move out of the roads north of Kiev. In the Russian advance towards Kiev, tanks were just sitting in road for weeks and they couldn't even form up into operational units. Tanks sitting in roads can't attack or advance, first they will have to reassemble and form into operational units. Russian command utterly failed in that regard and they were forced to retreat.
Russia wanted a fast mobile war and they were successful in the south. They managed to connect Crimea with Donabass in first 4 days of the war without any significant loss (Most of the Ukrainian forces were in the north and east, making the job easy).
NLAWs, Javelin & stingers essentially forced the war into a war of positions and threw out entire Russian war strategy out of the window. Stingers make it impossible for the Russian aircrafts to fly at lower-medium altitudes. Unlike the US military, Russians don't have a huge arsonal of Guided bombs. So high altitude bombings outside stinger range would be ineffective. Dropping dumb bombs from high attitude is ineffective and flying in lower-medium altitudes is dangerous in stinger saturated battlefield. So the Russian airforce is forced into extreme low altitude bombing runs. It's once again is ineffective, since it's very hard to identify enemy units if you are flying at very low altitude.
With almost no close air support, Russian ground forces couldn't advance. The NLAW and Javelins knocked out the Russian reconnaissance units further complicating the ability of Russian forces to properly advance. All this factors forced Russian army to a halt and turned the battle into a war of positions. And in war of positions, artillery can cause huge damage and we are seeing it in east Ukraine right now. Ukrainians are also taking heavy damages from Russian artillery, they are suffering hundreds of casualties every day from Russian artillery.
What made it easy was the fact they were approaching from two sides as well. And the element of surprise. They'll never have that again.
In the early days of war, Ukraine had a lot of strategically important targets to defend and they didn't had enough forces to defend it all. Ukrainians expected Russia's main attack from Crimea to be against Odessa and deployed significant resources between Odessa & Kherson. Obviously Odessa was a much more important than Mariupol for Ukraine.Port of Mariupol can't be operated in wartime anyway due to Kerch Strait, so Odessa was more important.
I think he avoided taking Odessa because it's too near NATO, and he was probably hoping NATO wouldn't help Ukraine.
"Wishful thinking - a great way to plan a war."
- Sun Tsu (Never)
Snow melt makes it a bad time. But summer's almost upon them.
No clue if the T-14 has DEW today, but it should eventually get it.
Dedicated DEW AA will be positioned way at the back for it to be targeted easily, especially LoS.
No tank today can survive a direct artillery hit. The real question is how well ATGMs have fared. If the T-90M can shrug them off, then it's going to be a problem.
They basically started the operation thinking there won't be any resistance. It was a complete intelligence failure, hence the head roll comment.
Russia replied to the father of a conscript from "Moskva": the ship did not take part in the war, they dont know where the son is
ROMAN PETRENKO - FRIDAY, 6 MAY 2022, 09:54 Dmytro Shkrebets, the father of conscript Yehor Shkrebets, who served on the "Moskva" cruiser and was declared missing, published a reply from the prosecutor's office stating that the ship had not taken part in the war against Ukraine.