What is really happening in the Ukraine Conflict?

[cromwell]

I don't think this thread does your credentials as being the forums Russian correspondent any harm at all, Sampanski

I remember Alistair Cooke and "Letter from America"

Missives from Moscow?

[DeppityDawg]

I don't think this thread does your credentials as being the forums Russian correspondent any harm at all, Sampanski

[Sampanviking]

Mariupol appears to be reaching its climax with Russian and DPR forces reaching the city center.
The Ukrainian forces seem to be split up into a number of smaller groups and I have no doubt that these groups will chopped into an ever greater number of small groups

Here is a selection of media purporting to be from or relating to the battle

https://gab.com/ASBMilitary/posts/107976983774390337

https://twitter.com/spriter99880/status/1504799028680269835?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1504799028680269835%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sinodefenceforum.com%2Ft%2Fukrainian-war-developments.8899%2Fpage-1354

https://twitter.com/RWApodcast/status/1504567909359751172?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1504567909359751172%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sinodefenceforum.com%2Ft%2Fukrainian-war-developments.8899%2Fpage-1352

https://twitter.com/MapsUkraine/status/1504521243663470597?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1504521243663470597%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sinodefenceforum.com%2Ft%2Fukrainian-war-developments.8899%2Fpage-1348

https://twitter.com/Freedom_Slips/status/1504562679733645314?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1504562679733645314%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sinodefenceforum.com%2Ft%2Fukrainian-war-developments.8899%2Fpage-1348

https://twitter.com/KYTKYTKYTKYTKYT/status/1504101781848174592?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1504101781848174592%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sinodefenceforum.com%2Ft%2Fukrainian-war-developments.8899%2Fpage-1348

[Sheepy]

Ukraine's position is simple, they only want victory over the Russians and would have us create WW3 to get it, they are already armed to the teeth and eventually although they think they will be victorious as the country is being flattened, it is very doubtful they will be victorious, whatever the media says. It is their war with Russia not NATO world police.

[Groo]

Outside political influences may also change things.

It looks like China are changing to back Ukraine's position which if true, could be devastating for the Russian position.


Twatter

[srb7677]

It took the Germans three months to overrun the Ukraine.

The Russians have done it in three weeks

Well they haven't actually. The Ukraine is far from being overrun as yet.

It would be as if the UK was said to be overun by an invader that had thus far only captured Cornwall and Kent, and had as yet failed to reach London.

[Nick]

It took the Germans three months to overrun the Ukraine.

The Russians have done it in three weeks

Speaking from the depths of my armchair, I reckon that the reasons that the Russians have not completed the encirclement of the Ukrainian cities is that

(a) they don't have to. There are no Ukrainian armies coming to raise the sieges or garrisons able to sally forth and chase the enemy back across the border

(b) the Western media is desperate to show pictures of children starving in the streets of Kyiv, so the Russians are happy to leave gaps for food convoys to get through.

I sincerely hope that Putin's trousers explode and that he spends eternity in such a place as been reserved for evil old men, but the sad truth is that so far the Russians appear to be winning.

They haven't achieved their objectives of day one yet!!

[Nick]

a lot of very credible independent sites are also being blocked or impeded in various ways.

How are independent sites being blocked? How do you know what info they have if they're being blocked? Who is blocking them?

Again that is just utter nonsense that you can't prove, and you'll just move on to some other tinfoil argument without proving independent sites are being blocked. 

Here goes. 

PUTIN IS A WAR CRIMINAL AND SHOT BE SHOT AT DAWN, AND ID PERSONALLY DO IT. 

How are the 'Coffee Machine' going to block this site?

[Borchester]

It took the Germans three months to overrun the Ukraine.

The Russians have done it in three weeks

Speaking from the depths of my armchair, I reckon that the reasons that the Russians have not completed the encirclement of the Ukrainian cities is that

(a) they don't have to. There are no Ukrainian armies coming to raise the sieges or garrisons able to sally forth and chase the enemy back across the border

(b) the Western media is desperate to show pictures of children starving in the streets of Kyiv, so the Russians are happy to leave gaps for food convoys to get through.

I sincerely hope that Putin's trousers explode and that he spends eternity in such a place as been reserved for evil old men, but the sad truth is that so far the Russians appear to be winning.

[srb7677]

Strategically and politically the most obvious imperative for the Russians was to take or at least encircle Kyiv quickly. That they have failed to do so is an obvious strategic and political setback for them.

Militarily of course there would have been some sense in abandoning the east and falling back behind the Dniepre River, but this could have been politically disastrous, undermining their own people's will to resist and gifting the Russians an easy conquest and a fait accompli.

There is a certain logic to what the Ukrainians are doing. Making the Russians fight hard for every inch of ground and costing them much in terms of cash and blood, will gradually cause misgivings in Russia itself and cause Putin to be more reasonable in his negotiations. In this sense it is a bit analogous to the Winter War of 1939-40. And defending and fighting hard for every city undermines the hardware advantage of an attacker. Street fighting always results in huge losses for an attacker and requires a large expenditure of time, resources, and lives. But this war differs from both Winter War and the much more frecent Syrian civil war in that the west is supplying large numbers of arms to the defenders, and acting in concert to cripple the aggressor's economy.

As for Zelensky himself and others around him not having a long background in politics, this too has it's advantages in the sense of making it easier for their hearts to be with the people.

[Sheepy]

As always everybody needs to justify their reasons for doing as they are doing, the truth won't have much in common with any of it. I doubt the Russians will be having real peace talks until they fully have the upper hand and the powers that be in our end will do everything to make sure they don't. 

[Sampanviking]

Trying to figure out what is really happening on the ground, in the conflict zones of Ukraine is proving incredibly difficult
The western media say very little and the little they say is largely worthless
Most Russian sources are blocked and more importantly, a lot of very credible independent sites are also being blocked or impeded in various ways.
As a result, the Fog of War, compounded by blatant propaganda, disinformation, faked clips, misrepresented clips and endlessly recycled clips, makes genuine verification of event, extremely hard.

As most of the information we receive in the UK comes via the Ukrainian government, I am going to start by looking at them, something that our own media very seldom does.
The other day, somebody showed me a list of the many of the top officials and ministers in the Ukrainian government which came with a quick bio of what they were doing before they enetered into Government. I was very surprised by what I saw and tested it but taking a number of random names and checking the bio given with official details etc.
The bio;s checked out every time.
Now, I knew that Zalenskyy had been a comedian before being elected President, what I had not realised is that virtually his entire cabinet and team had also been either performers or Company Executives from the world of Ukraine's light Entertainment industry.
This means that the country is being run by a group of people who's main skill is the creation of make believe, media manipulation and public perception shaping.
It certainly appears that these skills have been the basis for the Ukraine's policy making for the war.

I can see two key policy decisions that they made at the start of the conflict, which undoubtedly make for good media presentation but actually constitute very poor strategic thinking. In other words, choosing sound bites over sound strategy.

Mistake 1 - Telling the army to dig in where it was in the East and not fall back to the best possible defensive line.
Mistake 2 - Not closing its borders to its citizens trying to get out.

Mistake 1 has been all about creating the image of resolve, by not retreating or conceding an inch of territory. This was a mistake, because despite initially catching the Advance Russian units by surprise it has left the greatest part of the Ukrainian army stranded and encircled in very poor strategic positions.
The obvious strategy would have been to fall back to the West bank of the Dneiper and use the river and its limited number of crossings as the perfect defensive line. It would have meant conceding all the territory to the East, but the army would have been preserved, it could be fully resupplied, it could still undertake maneuver and it could still plan and execute counter offensive. Instead by simply digging in where they were and in the nearby cities, all they have done is get themselves encircled and cut off which means that any realistic form of initiative has been lost.

I have little doubt that when the Russians crossed the border, they fully expected the Ukrainians to fall back to the Dneiper and expected the first days of the war to be a sprint to the river. I believe this is why we say advance units in those early days being surprised by large Ukrainian formations still being close to the border.

Don't get me wrong, on a tactical level the Ukrainians are fighting fiercely, effectively and bravely. It is simply that without any coherent strategy or strategic thinking, all of it is rapidly being proven futile.

The Western media is still concentrating on event around Kiev, but I still maintain that this is and always has been a side show, primarily designed to split the Ukrainian resistance and keep their forces off balance. I have never believed that a Storming of Kiev was likely or likely to happen any time soon.
The real action is in the South, where a force originally 10 - 15 thousand strong has been encircled in the city of Mariupol and which is now being squeezed into a small pocket (maybe a spllit in half pocket) in the Western part of the City.
The biggest action is against the 50 - 60 thousand Ukrainian soldiers trapped and nearly encircled in the Donbas itself. The Russians and their DPR/LPR allies may not yet have fully encircled this force, but they have fire control and air superiority over virtually all the territory that enables movement in and out of it.

Russian strategy here is very much like that which was evolved on the ground in Syria, where the fall of one pocket of resistance releases large number of troops to concentrate and collapse the next and start a chain reaction. In this case it will be Mariupol and then the Donbas, after which there will be precious little left of a Ukrainian army to prevent a Russian advance west as far as it wishes to go.

This is the main failure of the mistake 1 as not only will they still lose the territory, but they will also lose the army as well and that will leave them with precious little to negotiate with, when that time finally arrives.

very late now.... more later....