Russia Ukraine Update Thread - part 3

Another drone attack on a Russian oil facility.

www.bbc.co.uk...

Apparently this is in Smolensk.

i give it 6 months tops before they ask for more money and weapons and i guarantee at that point they still haven't repelled Russia.

too many people are seeing this as taking sides - Russia invading is absolutely wrong but don't let that cloud the fact that Ukraine has spunked away a fortune with nothing to show for it.

a reply to: stu119

Russia invading is absolutely wrong but don't let that cloud the fact that Ukraine has spunked away a fortune with nothing to show for it.

id say they have, when this first started they were then rated the 22nd ranked most powerful military now their up to 18,and have kept the world's 2nd ranked military from rolling over their country, for almost two and a half years.

that doesn't say much for russia.if russia just wanted the eastern parts as ol farty claims, all they would have to do is pull back there and defend.

double post

originally posted by: BernnieJGato
a reply to: stu119

Russia invading is absolutely wrong but don't let that cloud the fact that Ukraine has spunked away a fortune with nothing to show for it.

id say they have, when this first started they were then rated the 22nd ranked most powerful military now their up to 18,and have kept the world's 2nd ranked military from rolling over their country, for almost two and a half years.

that doesn't say much for russia.if russia just wanted the eastern parts as ol farty claims, all they would have to do is pull back there and defend.

how are those stats decided? if its by spend then i guess they should be rolled into the US figures

a reply to: stu119

several dedicated military analytical groups here's one i like,

Comparison of Ukraine and Russia Military Strengths (2024)

Russia's economic growth to surpass the UK, US and others according to the IMF

www.bbc.com...

WAKE UP!!

originally posted by: BernnieJGato
if russia just wanted the eastern parts as ol farty claims, all they would have to do is pull back there and defend.

That's more or less what they did last year. They're on the offense now because Ukraine was hurting from not getting our support the last few months and it was an opportunity for Russia to push them back. You don't want the enemy right up against the territory you wanna hold, if you can help it.

24 April Update

The Pentagon announced that the first tranche of US military assistance from this bill is worth $1 billion and includes: RIM-7 and AIM-9M air defense missiles; Stinger anti-aircraft missiles; HIMARS ammunition; 60mm mortar rounds; 105mm and 155mm artillery shells; Bradley infantry fighting vehicles; High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWVs or Humvees); Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (MRAPs); Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles; Javelin and AT-4 anti-armor systems; precision aerial munitions; and other equipment and transport vehicles.

Unspecified sources told Ukrainian outlet Suspilne on April 24 that Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) successfully conducted drone strikes against oil depots in Yartsevo and Razdorovo, Smolensk Oblast. Smolensk Oblast Governor Vasily Anokhin stated that the drone strikes caused fires at fuel and energy facilities in two raions in Smolensk Oblast.

Russian authorities arrested Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov on April 24 on charges of accepting bribes, although other Russian sources reported that Ivanov is suspected of treason.

The Kremlin explicitly threatened Armenia if Armenia does not resume active engagement in the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and resume its pro-Kremlin alignment. Armenian Security Council Secretary Armen Grigoryan announced on April 23 that he would not participate in the International Meeting of High Representatives for Security Issues in St. Petersburg on April 24 and 25.

Moldovan authorities filed a criminal case against Yevgenia Gutsul, the Kremlin-affiliated governor of the pro-Russian Moldovan autonomous region of Gagauzia, for campaign finance violations

Russian forces recently marginally advanced near Avdiivka, Donetsk City, and Robotyne.

More at URL above.

Cheers

US trying to poke the bear in secret i see:

Ukraine has begun using longer-range ballistic missiles against Russia that were secretly provided by the US, American officials have confirmed.

The weapons were sent as part of a previous US support package, and arrived this month. Officials said they were not announced publicly to maintain Ukraine's "operational security".

They have already been used at least once to strike Russian targets in occupied Crimea.

Further US aid is now heading to Kyiv.

More American weaponry is expected to be sent imminently, after President Joe Biden signed off on Wednesday a new package of economic and military support for Ukraine worth $61bn (£49bn).

US to send new aid right away, Biden says
The missiles that have already been quietly provided are the longer-range version of the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), a state department spokesman confirmed on Wednesday.

The US previously supplied Ukraine with a mid-range version of the ATACMS, but had resisted sending anything more powerful, partly over concerns about compromising US military readiness.

originally posted by: stu119
Russia's economic growth to surpass the UK, US and others according to the IMF

www.bbc.com...

WAKE UP!!

What's your point?

Russia increased their defense spending by 70% this year, while the US increased their defense spending by only 3.2%.

Of course the 70% increase dwarfs the 3.2% increase, and is going to show up in the economic growth numbers, but it's a war economy dedicated to making things that blow up or get blown up like bombs and tanks and doesn't benefit the Russian people, who are dying by the thousands, and even the people not in the military are having their usual social benefits diverted toward the war effort. Remember all the people freezing in Russia last winter when Russia stopped spending on maintenance of the public heating systems? That's also because they are spending more on the war and less on the people, in fact they are doing that for the first time in their history!

Russia plans to increase its military budget by 70% in 2024

The nearly 70% increase is staggering. In 2023, defense spending on a war budget was €63 billion – or 3.9% of Russia's GDP. In 2021, military spending was equivalent to 2.7% of GDP.

Meanwhile the United States defense budget for 2024 is expected to stand at $842 billion, up 3.2% year-on-year.

For the first time in its history, Russia is preparing to spend more on defense than on social policy

Meanwhile, as GDP in Russia is growing due to defense spending, the Russian economy has gone from operating in the black to operating in the red (they have to use reserves to keep their economy afloat with their huge defense spending and reduced income due to sanctions).

Those figures are graphed from the official Russian sources and show 2021 was a good year economically for Russia, then 2022 was a bad year due to the invasion and sanctions, and 2023 was an even worse year, all in the red.

originally posted by: YourFaceAgain

originally posted by: BernnieJGato
if russia just wanted the eastern parts as ol farty claims, all they would have to do is pull back there and defend.

That's more or less what they did last year. They're on the offense now because Ukraine was hurting from not getting our support the last few months and it was an opportunity for Russia to push them back. You don't want the enemy right up against the territory you wanna hold, if you can help it.

The problem with that "You don't want the enemy right up against your territory" statement is that Russia is just using that and any other excuse he can think of to justify more land grabs. He brought that up recently regarding Kharkiv, which Russia initially took, then Ukraine Pushed Russia back to their pre-war border, and now Putin is threatening to take it again for this so called "buffer zone", though I think that claim is probably a diversion to get Ukraine to send more troops to Kharkiv to divert them from other areas of the front.

But let's say Putin takes Kharkiv again, claiming it is for a buffer zone (it's one of Ukraine's largest cities). If he was able to take that, then Ukraine would still be right up against the new fromt line. Then he would need to take more territory to create a new buffer zone west of Kharkiv. He could keep using this excuse to advance all the way across Ukraine if he had the resources to do that.

Russia has more land than any other country on the planet so if they wanted a buffer zone they could set that up inside their 2021 borders and still have more land than they know what to do with.

Kremlin says the only way to protect Russia is to create a buffer zone with Ukraine

Putin ... said such a zone might have to be big enough to stop foreign-made weapons striking Russian territory.
He made the remark after being asked whether he thought it necessary for Russia to take Ukraine's Kharkiv region, which borders Belgorod, a Russian province that has come under regular attack from Kyiv's forces since 2022.

This is just Russian propaganda that Putin can use for endless land grabs. Now he's talking about taking Kharkiv again to create a buffer zone. If he takes Kharkiv he will claim that's Russian, and he needs to take more land to create another buffer zone, he could keep making these ridiculous claims without end, when he had plenty of land to make buffer zones inside Russia, before he invaded Ukraine, not that he needed them because Ukraine had no plans to attack Russia other than possibly re-take the illegally annexed Crimean peninsula.

a reply to: stu119

Bravo USA.

25 April Update

Geolocated footage published on April 25 indicates that Russian forces advanced into central Solovyove (northwest of Avdiivka) from Novobakhmutivka after likely seizing all of Novobakhmutivka on the night of April 24 to 25.

Ukrainian forces recently made confirmed advances near Siversk, and Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Avdiivka and the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area.

More at URL above.

Cheers

Scared , hungry and pinned down , Russian soldiers at the front in Avdiivka share their experience of the "special operation" ..."we are just cannon fodder".

We've talked before about how modern warfare is evolving in the Ukraine theater with the extensive use of drones. Some of you may have seen numerous strange modifications to Russian tanks to try to protect them against drones, like fences, and nets forming cages above the tank. They have some obvious problems like if the crew needs to escape the fencing can block their escape.

But Russia kept losing so many vehicles to Ukraine's drones that they kept trying different things, and finally came up with something that looks strange but it may actually work as protection from Ukraine's FPV drones, it's been nicknamed "turtle tank", and it's basically an improvised sheet metal shell that surrounds the tank. A number of sources are reporting that so far, these "turtle tanks" seem to have better survivability against Ukraine drone attacks than either regular tanks or the previous attempts to modify the tanks. Here's an article about them:

The Russian Turtle Tank Is The Weirdest Armored Vehicle Of The Ukraine War. The Craziest Thing Is, It Might Actually Work.

The Russian custom, it seems, is to send one turtle tank fitted with jammers and mine-rollers ahead of other vehicles—often laden with infantry—to clear a safe path right up to Ukrainian lines.

“Sacrificing observation and the ability to rotate the turret on one tank per platoon that can jam many FPVs’ frequencies at once makes sense,” Lee wrote. “The priority is to get infantry assault groups across open fields to buildings or defensive positions.”

For that purpose, in the current environment, the turtle tanks appear to be working just fine. The problem, for the Russians, is that the environment is about to change. The first batch of fresh U.S. aid should arrive in Ukraine any day now—and it includes hundreds of millions of dollars worth of artillery shells and anti-tank missiles. It’s a safe bet subsequent U.S. aid packages will include even more shells and missiles.

Ukraine has relied a lot on FPV drones to repel Russian attacks lately, since they have an adequate supply of drones, but not artillery shells. And the turtle tank does seem to provide some protection against the FPV drones, at a cost of not being able to rotate the turret and limited visibility.

But once the Artillery shells come to Ukraine from the US, which will be any day now, the turtle tank's "shell" will not protect the tank against artillery, which has enough momentum and kinetic energy to pierce right through the shell.

Ukraine used a HIMARS strike to destroy one of the Russian shops where they were adding these turtle shells to tanks, which might make Ukraine feel better, but it seems to me like it's not much of a setback for Russia since the construction seems to be a fairly simple operation they could set up in any building that can house a larger version of the tank including the shell.

There are various ad-hoc designs for the "shell", I have seen half a dozen or so various shapes and sizes so they are not using any standardized blueprint to make all of them. Here's one example, that shows why visibility and turret mobility are both limited, plus a skilled FPV operator might be able to fly the drone through the opening in the shell, if the $400 drone is not disabled by electronic warfare, a feature seen on the top of some, but not all of these "turtle tanks". The electronic warfare (EW) won't disable the new EW-proof $1000 Ukraine drones, but they don't have those in quantity yet.

Russian Blyatmobile – The Turtle Tank

Authorities in Kyiv are evacuating 2 hospitals following threats to strike them from the Chairman of the State Security Committee of Belarus yesterday , it seems Belarusians are fighting with Ukraine and may be or are planning to launch attacks in Belarus like those being seen in Southern Russia.

As noted in a message on the Telegram channel of the Kyiv City State Administration, the city is urgently beginning to evacuate two hospitals, one of which is a children’s hospital, located on the street. Bogatyrskaya. “Because a video is being widely distributed in the Internet media, where an enemy attack on these medical institutions is actually announced. And that, supposedly, there are military personnel in these hospitals,” explained the Kyiv City State Administration.

He states that Belarusian volunteers fighting on the side of Ukraine are planning to capture one of the border settlements of the Republic of Belarus.
“All these persons, their activities and the plans of the committee are known. In the fight against terrorism, we act according to the laws of war, decisively and without hesitation. Among the terrorists and their accomplices there are both killed and wounded. All of them will suffer a well-deserved punishment. Even despite the fact that that they chose Kyiv hospitals at Bogatyrskaya 30 and 32 as their lair, where they actually hid behind the backs of sick children,” Tertel said.
ukrainetoday.org...

It's probably bluster but Ukraine are taking it seriously

a reply to: Arbitrageur

That's exactly how innovation happens. Sometimes you have to keep trying things, even things that seem absurd, until you find something that works.

That's one reason our Defense budget is so high. We do a lot of R&D trying all kinds of crazy things to see what's best.

originally posted by: gortex
ukrainetoday.org...

It's probably bluster but Ukraine are taking it seriously

I thought this was the most important part of that article:

It is noted that this is “an absolute lie and a provocation of the enemy, which he is trying to use to attack the social infrastructure of the capital.”

So it's not even true according to that, but I can see evacuating the hospitals in abundance of caution anyway.

a reply to: YourFaceAgain
Yes, DARPA and others do some innovation, but it's not always visible to the public and I don't see it getting tested immediately in actual combat conditions.

In Ukraine, it's interesting to see the innovations being developed and tested in the "public eye" of drone footage that gets published where anybody who wants to see it, can, with the "testing" being done in actual combat conditions.

We will also be able to see how the combat conditions will change when Ukraine receives the next tranche of US aid which should arrive any day now, when those turtle tanks won't offer much protection against artillery.

26 April Update

The Ukrainian military has reportedly pulled US-provided M1A1 Abrams tanks from the frontline in part because of the widespread threat of Russian drones and other strikes. . . . Ukrainian drone operators recently told the Washington Post that the number of drones that both Russian and Ukrainian forces use has made the battlefield “almost transparent” given that up to 100 Russian and Ukrainian reconnaissance and attack drones can operate simultaneously within a 10-kilometer radius.

Russian forces recently made a confirmed advance northwest of Avdiivka, and Ukrainian forces made a confirmed advance in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast, although this advance was likely not recent.

More at URL above.

Cheers