there were reports from captured soldiers that russian commanders are shooting wounded soldiers instead of transporting them to the back.
Yeah I always wonder about those captured soldiers takes. Some of them are very likely hamming it up to make their captors happy and paint themselves in a sympathetic light.
It’s hard to imagine a functioning military that shoots its own wounded.
you gotta ask yourself, are you watching a functioning military right now?
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Poorly, but it’s not disintegrating like I keep hoping.
a potemkin army, a paper tiger, or plain old russian “drown the enemy in our own blood” strat. sure worked out great for nikolai II and stalin.
Stalin won ww2.
And the last two times the Russians took Ukrainian territory, they kept it. Three if you count WWII/ post war insurgency.
stalin started ww2 allied with hitler. he was always going to turn on germany, yet soviet union was caught by surprise. they only won ww2 with western supplies and weapons, and stalin lost more soldiers that any other nation. more than soldiers in europe and pacific combined.
everything old is new again.
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It doesn’t help keep casualties low when you’re doing things like reusing helmets:
https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/tj5rv2/russian_tactical_helmet_is_actually_wwii_tin_can/
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https://twitter.com/JamesAALongman/status/1505839536944910339
Incredible. Any7-year-old who can hold their composure in that spot must be a born performer.
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I read some tweets saying the page was fake.
Probably got it from that American in Saving Private Ryan.
It’s real, it was just retracted after a few hours. The story is still up w/o the numbers.
I really don’t have any good sense of how the Ukrainian army is fighting despite reading quite a bit of military analysis. Are they split into group of 5-20? Is everyone freestyling, or is there some command and control for coordination? Any on the national level, any large troop movement/deployments? Probably half the “wins” I’ve seen are from Russians effectively abandoning the battle. I can understand having some success with ambushes and such, but how organized are they, and how many troops? Anyone read a good analysis of this? US had some casualties from ambushes and IEDs in Iraq, but more than an order or magnitude less. If Ukraine is fighting at all like Iraq/Isis, I would expect a lot fewer Russian casualties, so they must be doing a lot more.
There is national command and control. Theatre tactics are limited, but I have seen a few reports of battalion strength reserves being deployed like Belarus volunteers being sent to try to relieve Mariupol. Small scale tactics are mostly squad size units practicing hit and run. The static parts of the front compress the hit and running in a smaller area. My personal guess is the majority of the prewar Ukrainian armor has been destroyed.
If I’m Ze, my biggest worry is that the Russians are able to dig in and hold their captured territory. The UA hasn’t shown any ability to displace Russians from entrenched positions, which is what armor has been designed to defeat since WWI and what the Russians are preparing for now. Without armor to perform quick maneuver, the only way to win is WWI style attrition. While the Ukrainians may destroy the Russian tank units, they won’t destroy their machine guns, which is what made WWI so painful and static. Along those lines, the UAF is focusing requests on heavy weapons including American designed stuff they never used before.
https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1505969770130247687?t=G8ABCbIVRrJOm3yPkeMcSw&s=19
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We’re not going to see any kind of WWI fortifications. There’s too much frontline and not enough bodies. Kharkiv-Mariupol-Crimea is almost as long as the entire Western front, and it took something like 100x as many guys to man the trenches as Russia has available.
From what I’ve read, it seems unlikely that Russia will be able to keep its troops supplied for an extended period without capturing all those cities in the Northeast and/or falling way back.