Saturday, May 28, 2022

Misadventure.

This is coolbert:

As extracted a paragraph from a very recent Strategy Page article.

Artillery-centric Russian army "developments".

"Artillery: Unexpected Developments In Ukraine"

In with the unguided, out with the guided. 

Telltow Canal Berlin 1945 all over again?

"The new and still current plan [Russian] is to use lots of unguided artillery shells and rockets to bombard urban areas, especially civilians. This massed firepower and the dwindling supply of guided weapons, especially the long-range ones, were used against military targets in the east (Donbass) and along the Ukrainian Black Sea coast. This lowered Russian casualties while increasing those of the Ukrainians. It also means slower advances as well as increasingly effective counter-attacks [?] by Ukrainian forces. The Russian attacks on civilians led to more Ukrainians in Russian controlled areas turning to partisan warfare. This sort of thing is an ancient Ukrainian tradition that makes civilians even more of a target. That is less of an obstacle when the Russians are already killing lots of Ukrainian civilians. The Russian response against civilians believed supporting local partisans are so similar to German methods used against partisans throughout occupied Europe that the Russians are taking a major hit in their propaganda campaign to the Russian people that Russian troops are fighting Nazi Ukrainians. The partisans and their civilian supporters still have their cellphones to covertly record Russian war-crimes. The Russians realized this and made it a capital crime for Ukrainian civilians to possess a cellphone that can operate with Ukrainian cellphone networks. That doesn’t stop civilians from making videos of these atrocities, it just takes a little longer for the videos to reach the outside world, including Russia, where a growing number of civilians are openly protesting the war and more are attacking the war effort, usually by setting fires to recruiting stations and storage areas for military fuel and ammunition needed by Russian forces in Ukraine. Russia is a major oil producer and still has large stocks of elderly (Cold War era) shells and unguided rockets that are often dangerous to use. The chemicals used in shells and rockets become unstable and unreliable as it gets older. This causes some casualties for Russian artillerymen but not so many make their job as dangerous as troops in the combat units or transportation units carrying these fuel and ammo supplies to front line troops. Some of the Russian troops handing this unstable ammo notice when shells or rockets show signs of dangerous degradation and abandon it rather than risk using it. That’s what more and more Russians want to do with the Russian misadventures in Ukraine."

Frustration with slow advance Russian forces Ukraine changes to "the plan" the old Russian steamroller? Massive force used massively inexorably will result in victory?

coolbert.





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