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Kiev Is Burning


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Plenty of cannibal, slaver outliers among the American Indians. Nevertheless, they were civilized in the Spanish territories, and exterminated in the English/French ones.

One only has to look around when walking in Montreal or Boston, and compare with Bogotá or Lima.

Edited by sunday
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8 minutes ago, R011 said:

No worse than anyone else, including the Europeans, with some outliers like the Aztec.  They were a few thousand years behind in technology.  A few hundred to a couple of thousand in social structure depending on which New World and Old World cultures are being compared.  No more peaceful, spiritual,  and connected to Nature than anyone else for that matter.  No question they got screwed by European colonizers.  I don't see several hundred million people movimh bsck to Europe, though, anymore than I see Saxons and Franks moving back to Germany and Poland.

Oh I don't know about that R011--have you read about how the "native Americans" (yeah right) disposed of their captives (the men anyway).    Makes being broken on the wheel sound like losing your virginity....

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13 minutes ago, R011 said:

No worse than anyone else, including the Europeans, with some outliers like the Aztec.  They were a few thousand years behind in technology.  A few hundred to a couple of thousand in social structure depending on which New World and Old World cultures are being compared.  No more peaceful, spiritual,  and connected to Nature than anyone else for that matter.  No question they got screwed by European colonizers.  I don't see several hundred million people movimh bsck to Europe, though, anymore than I see Saxons and Franks moving back to Germany and Poland.

Trying to judge people from the past by current moral standards is an exercise in futility. They were all scumbags if you look close enough.

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13 minutes ago, Poopstain said:

Oh I don't know about that R011--have you read about how the "native Americans" (yeah right) disposed of their captives (the men anyway).    Makes being broken on the wheel sound like losing your virginity....

Have you heard of the Chinese wire jacket?  Some of the rougher Roman spectacles?  What happened to the assassin of William the Silent?  The atrocities of the Thirty Years war migfht not be as inventive, but they more than made up in quantity what they lacked in creativity.

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32 minutes ago, R011 said:

Have you heard of the Chinese wire jacket?  Some of the rougher Roman spectacles?  What happened to the assassin of William the Silent?  The atrocities of the Thirty Years war migfht not be as inventive, but they more than made up in quantity what they lacked in creativity.

William had it coming.   

 

EDIT:   Just kidding -- William was arguably a fine man cut down by vile treachery--I just thought that Sunday might like my comment lol.   JUST KIDDING Sunday!  (anything for a laugh!)

Edited by Poopstain
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This pic is mostly non-burned out stuff, so at least something might be salvageable.

Tanks one.jpg

Rest of pics of burned out stuff - pure scrapbinium.

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34 minutes ago, R011 said:

Have you heard of the Chinese wire jacket?  Some of the rougher Roman spectacles?  What happened to the assassin of William the Silent?  The atrocities of the Thirty Years war migfht not be as inventive, but they more than made up in quantity what they lacked in creativity.

I'm not going to comment on the Chinese.   Apparently this site is hyper-sensitive about "race" -- and even though "Chinese is NOT a "race," I can't take any chances having already been dinged once (admittedly for something that at least arguably could have been misinterpreted -- that will teach me to drunk-post).   

LEOPARD 1 TO THE UKES?

I thought some might find this video from the estimable "Military History Visualized" of interest:

 

Edited by Poopstain
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38 minutes ago, bojan said:

This pic is mostly non-burned out stuff, so at least something might be salvageable.

Tanks one.jpg

Rest of pics of burned out stuff - pure scrapbinium.

Even if tank/AFV is complete wreck - in peacetime situation (and there is no war declared, so it is peacetime for Russian bureocracy) to formally write it off, it have to be recovered from where it rests, prodiuced to comission to make a decision if it is restorable or not, and if found unrestorable - it have then to be scrapped by authorised company. You can't just write a report and leave the tank where it was blown apart by internal explosion. Even as steel scrap, it is significant monetary value.

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I’d assume that tanks that haven’t burned out are still good sources of spare parts, particularly expensive hard to produce items like thermals. If it’s just damaged in the running gear, entire engines could be pulled. Those vehicles don’t look like they could be returned to service but I suspect there’s a wealth of spare parts that could be sent forward.

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7 hours ago, Josh said:

Is there further information about the "40 villages"? I'm not really seeing movement on the front on the mapping sites I'm looking at, just fairly uniform bombardments and some smallish probes. The area that has shown some advances in the last several days is southwest of Izium.

It’s been reported by Sky News, and that the Ukrainians also admitted to this

I’m just not sure where these villages are, Sky News never mentioned that 

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7 minutes ago, alejandro_ said:

Russian missile launches into Ukraine since the start of the war.

Grafico%20EN.jpg

http://alejandro-8en.blogspot.com/2022/04/graph-of-estimated-russian-missile.html

Just to rub it in a bit :P The current average is quite lower that the 40 missiles/ day I used to asses Russian capabilities, at the moment its around 30.

2 minutes ago, crazyinsane105 said:

It’s been reported by Sky News, and that the Ukrainians also admitted to this

I’m just not sure where these villages are, Sky News never mentioned that 

I heard an explanation that in includes all the villages taken since the start of "special operation" in February. This makes much more sense in my opinion.

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12 hours ago, CValdor said:

If this was the offensive's preparations... Maybe if this intensity of shelling continues for several months. But at this time it is safe to say that Russia is done conventionally.

The evidence that the Russians are done is that for over a week now they've been hitting over 1,000 targets a day with air and artillery? 

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12 hours ago, Josh said:

I think this crisis has legs. I doubt some of the rosy assessments that involve Us/EU rebuilding Ukraine, but I think they do have vested security interest in keeping Russia out that simply didn’t apply to any of Russias other conquests. Russia isn’t getting Ukraine; it can probably hold what it has and finish taking Donbas, but the rest of the country will be forever in a low level conflict with it.

Not a bad outline on what might happen.  I think that if the Western military support does not translate into battlefield success that the Ukrainians should look for some sort of ceasefire and bide their time for another decade.  The Ukrainian strategy was clearly that Western assistance would stronger, and that has not come.  Now I suspect that the casualty ratio under Russian artillery tactics is becoming increasingly one-sided.  If this is so, (and we cannot really know), then sooner or later history says that the army suffering massive casualities and not inflicting them eventually collapses.  Ukraine must avoid that at all costs, and if that means and end to this war that leaves Putin with his breakaway territories, then this is a price worth paying to keep the Ukrainian army intact for later.

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10 hours ago, Josh said:

How closely do those numbers jive with Ukraine's account of Russian casualties?

Though honestly I don't think I'll ever believe anyone's numbers on either side for this war, probably even long after it is over.

What I'm trying to decide on is not so much the total KIA's on each side, but whether or not the Russians are starting to inflict a more and more asymmetrical daily casualty total.  At the start of the war I assumed the Russians were losing about 2 dead for every 3 Ukrainians.  Now, I would not be surprised if the ratio was 1:10 or even 1:20 due to the switch to a material battle.

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30 minutes ago, glenn239 said:

The evidence that the Russians are done is that for over a week now they've been hitting over 1,000 targets a day with air and artillery? 

Evidence shows that Russians after 3 days of great new offensive are moving at pace of asthmatic ant with very heavy shopping. Thir losses keep on mounting. They weren't able to take Mariupol after 2 months, there are still 10000 troops there. Should I mention Moskva?

Russians have no reserves at all and are not creating any at the moment, while Ukraine has mobilized and new units are mustering as we speak. Pentagon reported yesterday that UA has more tanks in the theater than RU. There are Somme amounts of guns and ammunition on the way to the frontlines. UA logistics are unaffected.

Now we can discard every single point I lined here and argue about it ad nauseum, but for anyone that really cares to look, the writing is on the wall. Even Ukrainians officials start to talk about strategic counteroffensive

Edited by Huba
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Actually there has been some talk already how Ukrainians are running out of artillery munitions - many depots have been captured or destroyed, and obviously they have also expended quite a bit.

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That's true but there are 180K rounds of 155mm on the way and 90  M777s from US, plus some pledged by UK and Canada (already some landed in Poland yesterday). On top of that there are CAESARs and freaking Pzh2000 in the pipeline. Czechs were caught today moving 2S1s eastward. Poland is not disclosing it's donations, but we have hundreds of those and at least gave 1 battalion and ammo. Ditto for Grads. Today Ukrainian MoD was in Romania and while not disclosing the details, said that he's very happy about Romanian help - only thing that is really worth it from Romanian army are Grads. And so on, and so on.

It seems that Ukraine has a little hiccup regarding in it's artillery arm, but it is being alleviated really quickly.

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I don't think getting all that stuff on the front is as trivial as you make it sound, - it's a long trip, most of the stuff has to be rail transported, with all the obvious risks etc. Not to mention that more complicated stuff like Pzh2000 requires quite a bit of training.

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1 hour ago, Yama said:

I don't think getting all that stuff on the front is as trivial as you make it sound, - it's a long trip, most of the stuff has to be rail transported, with all the obvious risks etc. Not to mention that more complicated stuff like Pzh2000 requires quite a bit of training.

It won't happen tomorrow, that's a given, but especially the towed guns will trickle down there in next few days/ weeks. The nice thing about M777 is that it weights nothing and can be towed by a pick-up, it should make it much easier to move.

On another forum I talked with the guy who actually served with CAESARs, and in his opinion 1 week should be enough for experienced artillerymen to switch to it from previous platform. PzH2000 will for sure take a lot more time, I agree.

Edit: the important thing in my opinion is that Ukraine is really quickly moving from being reliant on the old Warsaw Pact stuff, and will be able to tap into huge NATO reserves. It may face some problems during the transition, but long term the prospects of it's artillery are rather good. The next logical step, and I'm sure we'll see it sooner than later, will be deliveries of M270/ HIMARS (no ATACMSs for now, but GMLRS will get there at some point).

Edti2: more to this point:

 

Edited by Huba
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54 minutes ago, glenn239 said:

Not a bad outline on what might happen.  I think that if the Western military support does not translate into battlefield success that the Ukrainians should look for some sort of ceasefire and bide their time for another decade.  The Ukrainian strategy was clearly that Western assistance would stronger, and that has not come.  Now I suspect that the casualty ratio under Russian artillery tactics is becoming increasingly one-sided.  If this is so, (and we cannot really know), then sooner or later history says that the army suffering massive casualities and not inflicting them eventually collapses.  Ukraine must avoid that at all costs, and if that means and end to this war that leaves Putin with his breakaway territories, then this is a price worth paying to keep the Ukrainian army intact for later.

I’m not getting the impression that the UA is suffering mightily in the field yet during this new phase; if they were I think Russian advances would be more pronounced. They are largely in prepared positions. the bigger problem is likely the continued damage to civilian infrastructure.

as for ending the war, that gives Russia as much time to regroup as it does Ukraine, and Russia has oddly made it crystal clear what it’s objective is-Ukraine all the way to Moldova via the coast. Assuming NATO artillery pieces can be rushed into service effectively, it seems to me giving Russia time to regroup isn’t necessarily the best course of action. The RA was squarely punched in the face such that it withdrew from three axes of attack and the US estimates that it lost 20% of its heavy equipment; I don’t trust Ukr numbers but I suspect DoDs are in the ballpark. 10,000+ KIA with a similar or greater number of wounded seems perfectly possible, in which case a lot of BTGs probably are combat ineffective without replacements.

Additionally some of the NATO artillery could be quite game changing depending on the types of rounds and fuses being sent. Adoption of 155mm caliber opens up a lot of options.

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8 hours ago, Roman Alymov said:

I tend to generally agree with your opinion on our policy people (not only foreign policy) - they only looks more or less mediocre when compared to Western ones who are complete nuts as for me. But I do not think it got something to do with Vucic etc. - it is too complex theory for our politicians and media. It is more to do with public sentiments for Serbs that are wide spread in Rus society, so anything that goes against that is almost automatically falling into sort of public blind spot.

If you don't withdraw your forces, we are going to airdrop Justin Trudeau on you, complete with his groupies and socks.

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I think people are vastly overestimating how quickly Ukraine can get over 100K artillery shells to the front lines in time. It’s already hard enough for the Ukrainians to hand out a few thousand anti tank guided missiles to units that need them the most (I’ve read a very large number of reports stating the significant logistical issues the UA has). To think they can overcome all that and transport 100K plus artillery shells, or even a third of that, to the front lines, that’s a bit beyond belief. 
 

Regardless of the shortcomings the Russians have shown, they have not at all been lacking in artillery. The Ukrainians straight up admit that the volume of Russian artillery is not a joke, and with the Russians concentrating their efforts on just one specific area, they are going to have a significant upper hand in this.

Will it be enough to grant them victory? I mean, we honestly won’t know until the end of summer IMO. This isn’t something anybody on this forum can predict given the events of the past few days, or even past month, as the conflict going forward is much different than it was back then.

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