Russia requesting technical & financial assistance from Canada to restart the gas supply if its repaired gas turbine returns from Canada, Russia wants to restart energy supplies through the throttled Nord Stream 1 Baltic Sea pipeline.
Ukraine - Russia Conflict
- Thread starter randomradio
- Start date
This tells me ATACMS are on their way. I think 6 ATACMS, with WDU-18/B warhead (Harpoon missile) is enough to bring that bridge down.
Rockets with less than 300 KM range being supplied with HIMARS artillery, in accordance with MTCR rules. That should do the trick...
The thing is the 300km range claim is bs the ATACMS range is much longer just like HiMARS GMLRS which on paper/US claim is 70km but a hand full of former US marines have said it's close to 100km.
British intelligence report makes reference to this.
@RISING SUN, @Innominate, @Amarante, @Bon Plan, @zinswinsin, @Hydra, @Picdelamirand-oil
It's been slow start but HiMARS is starting to make a difference. Lets not forget they also have M270s which will soon make their debut. Ukraine is going to starve Russian forces of ammo and then when they are at the most vulnerable goodbye Crimea bridge.
I think they should take out Russian s400s and Buk systems the US knows their exact locations but I reckon the US knows what needs taking out right now. I figure s-400 and Buks down Ukraine air force can launch air strikes in the east and south.
Kinda makes you wonder if that bridge has been built to spec. With all the corruption you know they stole a lot of the money meant for the construction of that bridge. Likely used cheap material you probably need two maybe tree ATACMS to take it out.
Point de situation des opérations en Ukraine du 6 juillet 2022—La campagne d’été
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Update on operations in Ukraine, 6 July 2022 - The summer campaign
The Russian campaign to conquer the Donbass has reached a new stage with the capture of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, two of the four target cities, and the withdrawal of the Ukrainian forces defending them. After a short operational pause, all Russian efforts will now focus on taking Sloviansk and Kramatorsk before the end of the summer. This will certainly be more difficult and we are now entering a period of great uncertainty.
Endgame in Severodonetsk-Lysychansk
After Severodonetsk on 25 June, the city of Lysychansk fell on 3 July after Ukrainian forces withdrew under the threat of encirclement. Luhansk province is now completely under Russian control, an almost inevitable outcome since the Russian breakthrough in Popasna in mid-May
Ukrainian forces are withdrawing to a Siversk-Soledar-Bakhmut (SSB) line along the Bakhmutovka river and the T0513 bypass. This is a fairly flat, sparsely forested and urbanised area with distant views, but with many small rivers and soft terrain that forces all vehicles to use the roads. The line can be a solid barrier if the terrain can be organised defensively, specifically if solid, deep field fortifications have been dug into it. If this is not the case, which is likely, the two strong points of Siversk (12,000 inhabitants before the war) and especially Bakhmut (77,000) will be solid, while the rest will be vulnerable to Russian long-distance fire. For the time being, the SSB line was occupied by five manoeuvre brigades, including the 4th Mobile Brigade of the National Guard and two territorial brigades, while several militia regiments, one manoeuvre brigade and two territorial brigades were still east of the SSB line and were fighting a braking battle before crossing the line in turn.
A withdrawal manoeuvre with so many units in such a small, visible and compartmentalised space is always complex to organise under pressure. An important question is what forces the Ukrainians lost in the defence of the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk pocket when it became apparent that it was doomed. When you are in a defensive posture with an unfavourable balance of forces, it is practically impossible to hold on to everything at once, whether it be terrain, time or forces. You have to make sacrifices. The Ukrainians decided to resist in the pocket as long as possible in order to gain time but at the risk of having many brigades surrounded. They were unable to hold the ground and delayed the Russian advance by a little over a month, but no doubt at the cost of significant losses. These losses were probably mainly material and the OSINT Oryx site notes a fairly clear increase in the proportion of captures, half of the combat vehicles for example, among the documented Ukrainian losses, but these were not very high either. The extent of Russian material losses, which are probably somewhat higher than those of the Ukrainians, is not known, but when you occupy the ground it is easier to recover and repair your damaged vehicles even if this is not at all a Russian strength.
The human losses of the battle of the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk pocket are even more difficult to determine. They were undoubtedly high on both sides, and it was perhaps the deadliest battle of the war. The twenty or so Ukrainian brigades and corps that took part in this battle, from the 30th mechanised brigade south-east of Bakhmut to the 79th air assault brigade west of Siversk, inevitably suffered greatly in varying degrees during these weeks of fighting. The hardest hit were undoubtedly the few territorial brigades that had been engaged in the front line despite their inexperience and light material. Defeat and withdrawal are often accompanied by a feeling of helplessness, which is never good for morale either. Retreating forces have necessarily lost much of their operational effectiveness, and they would need to be rested-reconstituted behind the combat zone, at least in the Kramatosk area and even better behind the combat zone, but it is not clear that the Ukrainians have this luxury.
What may have saved the Ukrainian forces is that the Russian forces did not actually try to destroy them. This is perhaps too ambitious for forces that are themselves wearing out and can be seen to be struggling to move hansk where the assault force and artillery mass, with its heavy logistics, is concentrated. This effort is also a series of thrusts, within the framework of 'attack boxes' of a maximum of 10 km by 10 km, on the scale of a brigade/regiment and for a few days, always under artillery support. These thrusts, as in Syria, are to be understood in the first degree of seeking to evict the adversary from an area, by the attack itself or the threat of an envelopment after several Russian advances on its flanks. beyond a single major axis of effort - in this case south of LysyscThe method does not seek primarily the destruction of the enemy but his departure, because the primary objectives are the terrain, to be obtained if possible at the lowest cost. An advance at an average rate of 2 km/day, when things are going well, always leaves time for the enemy to withdraw, and it is up to the artillery and air forces to harass him during this movement.
For the moment, Russian forces appear to be continuing to push towards Siversk in a semicircle 5 to 15 km from the city, and perhaps seeking to take the city in the process. They are also attacking south-east of Bakhmut in the area of the Vuhlehirske reservoir and Kodema with the hope at best of encircling the Ukrainian 30th mechanised brigade holding the area and at worst, and more likely, pushing it back towards Bakhmut. Elsewhere, they occupied and pushed forward without much fighting. Progress is quite slow, as the Russian units, and particularly the pool of assault troops on whom the vast majority of attacks are being made, have also suffered and lost capacity. It is difficult to see how they could not go through a phase of reconstitution and redistribution of forces.
The battle ahead
Now that the Donbass campaign has been reduced to the battle of Sloviansk-Kramatorsk, the Russians should logically continue to remain in a defensive posture everywhere else, and seek to resist while fixing the maximum number of Ukrainian forces (artillery strikes on the town of Soumy, Belarusian gesticulation, maintenance of the artillery line - 20 km - north of Kharkiv and strikes, etc.). At the same time, their efforts should be focused on the "attack box" investment of the SK couple.
However, the capture of Sloviansk-Kramatorsk will not be easy. The two cities are almost glued together to form a whole of 250,000 inhabitants in peacetime (a population probably reduced to 20%), the size of Chernihiv which, with reduced means and much less preparation time, had resisted an entire Russian army from the end of February to the end of March. In fact, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk are also linked to Druzhkivka (60,000 inhabitants) and Kostiantynivka (77,000) to form a 60 km long conurbation on the H20 road. The whole area, especially in Kramatorsk, is much better connected to the rest of Ukraine than the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk pocket was.
So a long investment piece by piece is to be expected, starting with Sloviansk, which would be attacked from several directions: from the Izium base area northwest of the city and around the M03 motorway, northwest from Lyman and the wooded area along the Donetsk River, and southeast from Bakhmut, also on the motorway. If only because it is a road junction, possession of Bakhmut seems essential to the continuation of Russian operations in the west. Its capture would also have the advantage of threatening to envelop the Ukrainian forces on the SSB line.
The Ukrainian strategy is still to hold out long enough to prevent the Russians from achieving their goal of complete conquest of the Donbass until the balance of power changes, by weakening Russia and strengthening Ukraine.
There are several ways of doing this. The first is, of course, the defence of the objectives themselves, through remote defence by field fortifications and resistance inside the bastions. It is to be hoped that the Ukrainians have used these four months to dig underground, fortify, accumulate stocks of food and ammunition, etc. To at least hope to hold out for as long as they have. To at least hope to hold out for that long.
The second is through peripheral counter-attacks, intended to force the opponent to clear the main front. At present, having attacked north of Kharkiv and been pushed back, the Ukrainian effort is clearly on the Kherson front, between Mykolaev and Kherson on the one hand and further north in the Lozove and Davydiv Brid area where the Ukrainians have established a small bridgehead across the Inhulets River. They are seeking to take control of the road across the Dnieper to Nova Kakhovka, the capture of which would presumably involve the withdrawal of Russian forces across the Dnieper. This is far from the case, the forces are balanced and the Ukrainians lack the artillery to carry out their own thrusts, especially as they cannot use it as overwhelmingly and indifferently to the population as the Russians. For the moment Ukrainian advances were minimal and sometimes cancelled out by Russian counter-attacks.
The campaign in depth
The war in Ukraine is in many respects the war that did not take place in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) during the Cold War, with more or less the same methods and 80% of the same equipment, barely modernised. In the 1970s, there was a lot of discussion on the Soviet side about how the FRG could be conquered in a few days without the use of nuclear weapons on either side. This gave rise to Marshal Ogarkov's doctrine of "high-speed offensives", directly inspired by the methods of the end of the Second World War, such as Operation August Storm in Manchuria in 1945, the absolute model of Russian operational art.
On the Western side, we were first interested in a combat of braking and wear and tear, then with the doctrines AirLand Battle and FOFA (Follow-on-Forces Attack) we added the idea of hitting as much as possible the enemy in depth on a certain number of decisive points, the destruction of which would stop the Soviet machine. This led to the development of specific equipment such as the high-precision multiple rocket launchers, which can now be found on the Ukrainian terrain.
Beyond the direct defence of the Russians' primary objective and peripheral attacks, the third axis of the Ukrainian effort is a campaign of precision strikes in depth. They are obviously not the only ones to practice this campaign, the Russians also do it and essentially with ballistic or cruise missiles. This is not new either, the Ukrainians have succeeded in such deep attacks on logistical targets, command posts, bases or in occupied areas and even in Russia. On 1 April, a raid by two Ukrainian attack helicopters destroyed a fuel depot in Belgorod, the major Russian rear base some 40 kilometres across the border, and on 3 July, several Ukrainian Totchka-U missiles fell on the city. Ukrainian special forces also managed to carry out some sabotage raids.
This was obviously useful, with the major constraint for both sides that deep strikes can hit the population, which inevitably provokes outrage, and for Ukraine that any attack on Russian soil (they are never claimed) can contribute to the escalation towards an official declaration of war. This is not decisive, however. What is new is that with the arrival of precise long-range artillery such as the German PzH 2000 or the French Caesar, but especially the American M142 HIMARS rocket launchers that can strike over 80 km with a probable circular gap of 5 metres (every second shot in a circle of 5 m radius), it becomes possible to cross a threshold. The long-range artillery has already largely contributed to making the holding of Snake Island, 40 km from the coast, untenable for the Russians, but for more than a week now, we have seen numerous destructions of Russian ammunition depots, 11 in 9 days to be precise, half of them in the Donetsk region behind the main front and two near Melitopol, with enormous damage, it seems.
Artillery is the main strength of the Russians, but this artillery is dependent on a heavy and complex supply of shells. As with all heavy goods, transport was first carried out by boat or in this case by rail from Russia to depots systematically placed near railway stations. The trucks of the army supply brigades then shuttled to the forward depots of the divisions, some 40 km from the front line, from where the depots of the brigades/regiments (10-15 km) and the battle groups (4-5 km) were then supplied. In the campaign around Kiev, it was these long truck columns that had been attacked primarily by drones or by Ukrainian melee forces, which had been a determining factor in the victory. This time, the convoys, operating at the rear of the front and better protected than in February-March, were less vulnerable.
It was therefore necessary to take advantage of the new Ukrainian allonge, precise but not massive, and of the good intelligence capacity of American resources and local partisans to strike upstream, in particular the railways (but there were repair brigades dedicated to their rapid restoration) and above all the depots. The more depots are destroyed, the more the Russian artillery is prevented from working, much more than if we try to destroy the pieces. This is what is starting to happen. This may mean moving the stations and depots further out of range of the HIMARS, but this will be at the cost of longer truck shuttles and therefore also at the cost of fewer shells being brought to the batteries each day. Without shells, no attack and without an attack no victory.
One can imagine now what would have happened if we (the US in fact) had carried out these transfers of equipment, but also the NASAMS anti-aircraft batteries from the end of March when the new Russian modus operandi was taking shape. The deep precision strikes would last for a month and things would be very different, probably forcing the Russians to change their practice again. As long as you can change, you can continue to fight, when you can't, you are defeated by the strongest.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Update on operations in Ukraine, 6 July 2022 - The summer campaign
The Russian campaign to conquer the Donbass has reached a new stage with the capture of Severodonetsk and Lysychansk, two of the four target cities, and the withdrawal of the Ukrainian forces defending them. After a short operational pause, all Russian efforts will now focus on taking Sloviansk and Kramatorsk before the end of the summer. This will certainly be more difficult and we are now entering a period of great uncertainty.
Endgame in Severodonetsk-Lysychansk
After Severodonetsk on 25 June, the city of Lysychansk fell on 3 July after Ukrainian forces withdrew under the threat of encirclement. Luhansk province is now completely under Russian control, an almost inevitable outcome since the Russian breakthrough in Popasna in mid-May
Ukrainian forces are withdrawing to a Siversk-Soledar-Bakhmut (SSB) line along the Bakhmutovka river and the T0513 bypass. This is a fairly flat, sparsely forested and urbanised area with distant views, but with many small rivers and soft terrain that forces all vehicles to use the roads. The line can be a solid barrier if the terrain can be organised defensively, specifically if solid, deep field fortifications have been dug into it. If this is not the case, which is likely, the two strong points of Siversk (12,000 inhabitants before the war) and especially Bakhmut (77,000) will be solid, while the rest will be vulnerable to Russian long-distance fire. For the time being, the SSB line was occupied by five manoeuvre brigades, including the 4th Mobile Brigade of the National Guard and two territorial brigades, while several militia regiments, one manoeuvre brigade and two territorial brigades were still east of the SSB line and were fighting a braking battle before crossing the line in turn.
A withdrawal manoeuvre with so many units in such a small, visible and compartmentalised space is always complex to organise under pressure. An important question is what forces the Ukrainians lost in the defence of the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk pocket when it became apparent that it was doomed. When you are in a defensive posture with an unfavourable balance of forces, it is practically impossible to hold on to everything at once, whether it be terrain, time or forces. You have to make sacrifices. The Ukrainians decided to resist in the pocket as long as possible in order to gain time but at the risk of having many brigades surrounded. They were unable to hold the ground and delayed the Russian advance by a little over a month, but no doubt at the cost of significant losses. These losses were probably mainly material and the OSINT Oryx site notes a fairly clear increase in the proportion of captures, half of the combat vehicles for example, among the documented Ukrainian losses, but these were not very high either. The extent of Russian material losses, which are probably somewhat higher than those of the Ukrainians, is not known, but when you occupy the ground it is easier to recover and repair your damaged vehicles even if this is not at all a Russian strength.
The human losses of the battle of the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk pocket are even more difficult to determine. They were undoubtedly high on both sides, and it was perhaps the deadliest battle of the war. The twenty or so Ukrainian brigades and corps that took part in this battle, from the 30th mechanised brigade south-east of Bakhmut to the 79th air assault brigade west of Siversk, inevitably suffered greatly in varying degrees during these weeks of fighting. The hardest hit were undoubtedly the few territorial brigades that had been engaged in the front line despite their inexperience and light material. Defeat and withdrawal are often accompanied by a feeling of helplessness, which is never good for morale either. Retreating forces have necessarily lost much of their operational effectiveness, and they would need to be rested-reconstituted behind the combat zone, at least in the Kramatosk area and even better behind the combat zone, but it is not clear that the Ukrainians have this luxury.
What may have saved the Ukrainian forces is that the Russian forces did not actually try to destroy them. This is perhaps too ambitious for forces that are themselves wearing out and can be seen to be struggling to move hansk where the assault force and artillery mass, with its heavy logistics, is concentrated. This effort is also a series of thrusts, within the framework of 'attack boxes' of a maximum of 10 km by 10 km, on the scale of a brigade/regiment and for a few days, always under artillery support. These thrusts, as in Syria, are to be understood in the first degree of seeking to evict the adversary from an area, by the attack itself or the threat of an envelopment after several Russian advances on its flanks. beyond a single major axis of effort - in this case south of LysyscThe method does not seek primarily the destruction of the enemy but his departure, because the primary objectives are the terrain, to be obtained if possible at the lowest cost. An advance at an average rate of 2 km/day, when things are going well, always leaves time for the enemy to withdraw, and it is up to the artillery and air forces to harass him during this movement.
For the moment, Russian forces appear to be continuing to push towards Siversk in a semicircle 5 to 15 km from the city, and perhaps seeking to take the city in the process. They are also attacking south-east of Bakhmut in the area of the Vuhlehirske reservoir and Kodema with the hope at best of encircling the Ukrainian 30th mechanised brigade holding the area and at worst, and more likely, pushing it back towards Bakhmut. Elsewhere, they occupied and pushed forward without much fighting. Progress is quite slow, as the Russian units, and particularly the pool of assault troops on whom the vast majority of attacks are being made, have also suffered and lost capacity. It is difficult to see how they could not go through a phase of reconstitution and redistribution of forces.
The battle ahead
Now that the Donbass campaign has been reduced to the battle of Sloviansk-Kramatorsk, the Russians should logically continue to remain in a defensive posture everywhere else, and seek to resist while fixing the maximum number of Ukrainian forces (artillery strikes on the town of Soumy, Belarusian gesticulation, maintenance of the artillery line - 20 km - north of Kharkiv and strikes, etc.). At the same time, their efforts should be focused on the "attack box" investment of the SK couple.
However, the capture of Sloviansk-Kramatorsk will not be easy. The two cities are almost glued together to form a whole of 250,000 inhabitants in peacetime (a population probably reduced to 20%), the size of Chernihiv which, with reduced means and much less preparation time, had resisted an entire Russian army from the end of February to the end of March. In fact, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk are also linked to Druzhkivka (60,000 inhabitants) and Kostiantynivka (77,000) to form a 60 km long conurbation on the H20 road. The whole area, especially in Kramatorsk, is much better connected to the rest of Ukraine than the Severodonetsk-Lysychansk pocket was.
So a long investment piece by piece is to be expected, starting with Sloviansk, which would be attacked from several directions: from the Izium base area northwest of the city and around the M03 motorway, northwest from Lyman and the wooded area along the Donetsk River, and southeast from Bakhmut, also on the motorway. If only because it is a road junction, possession of Bakhmut seems essential to the continuation of Russian operations in the west. Its capture would also have the advantage of threatening to envelop the Ukrainian forces on the SSB line.
The Ukrainian strategy is still to hold out long enough to prevent the Russians from achieving their goal of complete conquest of the Donbass until the balance of power changes, by weakening Russia and strengthening Ukraine.
There are several ways of doing this. The first is, of course, the defence of the objectives themselves, through remote defence by field fortifications and resistance inside the bastions. It is to be hoped that the Ukrainians have used these four months to dig underground, fortify, accumulate stocks of food and ammunition, etc. To at least hope to hold out for as long as they have. To at least hope to hold out for that long.
The second is through peripheral counter-attacks, intended to force the opponent to clear the main front. At present, having attacked north of Kharkiv and been pushed back, the Ukrainian effort is clearly on the Kherson front, between Mykolaev and Kherson on the one hand and further north in the Lozove and Davydiv Brid area where the Ukrainians have established a small bridgehead across the Inhulets River. They are seeking to take control of the road across the Dnieper to Nova Kakhovka, the capture of which would presumably involve the withdrawal of Russian forces across the Dnieper. This is far from the case, the forces are balanced and the Ukrainians lack the artillery to carry out their own thrusts, especially as they cannot use it as overwhelmingly and indifferently to the population as the Russians. For the moment Ukrainian advances were minimal and sometimes cancelled out by Russian counter-attacks.
The campaign in depth
The war in Ukraine is in many respects the war that did not take place in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) during the Cold War, with more or less the same methods and 80% of the same equipment, barely modernised. In the 1970s, there was a lot of discussion on the Soviet side about how the FRG could be conquered in a few days without the use of nuclear weapons on either side. This gave rise to Marshal Ogarkov's doctrine of "high-speed offensives", directly inspired by the methods of the end of the Second World War, such as Operation August Storm in Manchuria in 1945, the absolute model of Russian operational art.
On the Western side, we were first interested in a combat of braking and wear and tear, then with the doctrines AirLand Battle and FOFA (Follow-on-Forces Attack) we added the idea of hitting as much as possible the enemy in depth on a certain number of decisive points, the destruction of which would stop the Soviet machine. This led to the development of specific equipment such as the high-precision multiple rocket launchers, which can now be found on the Ukrainian terrain.
Beyond the direct defence of the Russians' primary objective and peripheral attacks, the third axis of the Ukrainian effort is a campaign of precision strikes in depth. They are obviously not the only ones to practice this campaign, the Russians also do it and essentially with ballistic or cruise missiles. This is not new either, the Ukrainians have succeeded in such deep attacks on logistical targets, command posts, bases or in occupied areas and even in Russia. On 1 April, a raid by two Ukrainian attack helicopters destroyed a fuel depot in Belgorod, the major Russian rear base some 40 kilometres across the border, and on 3 July, several Ukrainian Totchka-U missiles fell on the city. Ukrainian special forces also managed to carry out some sabotage raids.
This was obviously useful, with the major constraint for both sides that deep strikes can hit the population, which inevitably provokes outrage, and for Ukraine that any attack on Russian soil (they are never claimed) can contribute to the escalation towards an official declaration of war. This is not decisive, however. What is new is that with the arrival of precise long-range artillery such as the German PzH 2000 or the French Caesar, but especially the American M142 HIMARS rocket launchers that can strike over 80 km with a probable circular gap of 5 metres (every second shot in a circle of 5 m radius), it becomes possible to cross a threshold. The long-range artillery has already largely contributed to making the holding of Snake Island, 40 km from the coast, untenable for the Russians, but for more than a week now, we have seen numerous destructions of Russian ammunition depots, 11 in 9 days to be precise, half of them in the Donetsk region behind the main front and two near Melitopol, with enormous damage, it seems.
Artillery is the main strength of the Russians, but this artillery is dependent on a heavy and complex supply of shells. As with all heavy goods, transport was first carried out by boat or in this case by rail from Russia to depots systematically placed near railway stations. The trucks of the army supply brigades then shuttled to the forward depots of the divisions, some 40 km from the front line, from where the depots of the brigades/regiments (10-15 km) and the battle groups (4-5 km) were then supplied. In the campaign around Kiev, it was these long truck columns that had been attacked primarily by drones or by Ukrainian melee forces, which had been a determining factor in the victory. This time, the convoys, operating at the rear of the front and better protected than in February-March, were less vulnerable.
It was therefore necessary to take advantage of the new Ukrainian allonge, precise but not massive, and of the good intelligence capacity of American resources and local partisans to strike upstream, in particular the railways (but there were repair brigades dedicated to their rapid restoration) and above all the depots. The more depots are destroyed, the more the Russian artillery is prevented from working, much more than if we try to destroy the pieces. This is what is starting to happen. This may mean moving the stations and depots further out of range of the HIMARS, but this will be at the cost of longer truck shuttles and therefore also at the cost of fewer shells being brought to the batteries each day. Without shells, no attack and without an attack no victory.
One can imagine now what would have happened if we (the US in fact) had carried out these transfers of equipment, but also the NASAMS anti-aircraft batteries from the end of March when the new Russian modus operandi was taking shape. The deep precision strikes would last for a month and things would be very different, probably forcing the Russians to change their practice again. As long as you can change, you can continue to fight, when you can't, you are defeated by the strongest.
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