Bump
Trust sheās been in contact with Ukraine Associations, which have an Australia wide Facebook, plus one in Lidcombe.
Dunno. Just seemed something tangible worth sharing.
(BC = ammo)
5000 vehicles lost.
Really common in their history.
Seen a few takes recently arguing that Russian weapons donāt work well. Having spent time inside a number of Russian manufactured systems I thought Iād address why I think there is often a gap between Russian weapons on paper versus their performance in the field. 1/25
There are two primary problems with Russian weapons: integration and cognitive load. To begin with integration, a few years ago some Mi-24s allocated to ISAF (Benny - 6 Czech helicopters were donated to Afghanistan under the International Security Assistance Force) were undergoing maintenance. It was found that some of the bolts holding the tail rotor in place had cracks in them. 2/25
This set off a panic among some US officers who went about trying to ground all aircraft of that type fearing that poor quality control in the supply chain represented a flight safety risk across the force. For NATO aircraft this would be a massive problem. 3/25
What the Mi-24 crews had to explain to their US colleagues was that this was normal. It was why the helicopter has 8 bolts in its tail rotor of which 4 would often crack. All 8 bolts are replaced after a specified number of flying hours irrespective of their condition. 4/25
So, on the one hand quality control in Soviet manufacturing was poor. On the other hand the design team just accepted this and built in redundency to produce a very reliable and effective attack helicopter. Russian weapons involve lots of these kinds of workarounds. 5/25
This becomes a problem when you want to integrate new things onto the platform. When the Mi-24 was built it was intended for gun runs using rockets and machine guns. As MANPADS proliferated however the Russians recognised stand-off ATGMs were needed. 6/25
The Russians have built several very effective ATGMs some of which can be mounted from the Mi-35. They have impressive range and penetration. They are accurate weapons. However, the Mi-35 is built with the assumption that lots of its components will break while in use. 7/25
This firstly means that there is a lot of vibration in the platform and secondly means that this vibration is not consistent between platforms or between flights, as various sub-components fail. The result is that the mounted optics on this aircraft are very hard to use. 8/25
The last time I was in an Mi-35 we gave up searching for targets with the sensors in the nose and just used a big pair of field glasses out of the cockpit. The result was that while we had plenty of range with our ATGMs we couldnāt actually accurately engage at that range. 9/25
Youāll have noted in Ukraine the Russians keep teaming Ka-52s and Mi-35s together because the former was built around its sensor suite and so it works much more effectively. The design team made trade-off decisions that ensured the sensors worked. 10/25
So this is the first reason for a delta between capability and performance. Individually Russian weapons and platforms tend to do what they are designed for and do it reliably. When you start integrating things together however there are often problems deep in the design. 11/25
Now for cognitive load. The Soviet military was a conscript military and the Russian military today has a similar structure. When you buy a Russian weapon system you usually get a nice cardboard flow chart showing you the buttons to press in what sequence to get a result. 12/25
If you get in a Buk for example there are a lot of buttons and each one tends to do one thing. Furthermore, each operator does one task. It is actually quite easy to teach someone to use it to a basic standard because using the controls doesnāt understanding the system. 13/25
However, to use the system to a high standard is really difficult because YOU are the integrator. The computer isnāt doing much for you. If something is out of the ordinary you need to find the workaround and get the crew to do all the right things in the right order. 14/25
NATO systems tend to have far fewer controls and what the controls do is contextual. The system supports the user so they can focus on judgement. The result is a system with a much higher initial training burden but a much higher effectiveness for a newly trained crew. 15/25
If you have expert crews then Russian weapons systems are highly effective and can be more effective in some cases than NATO counterparts. If you watch old Finnish or Ukrainian Buk operators who have been at it a while it is impressive. 16/25
But if you have short term contract soldiers - and especially if you lost a lot of your more skilled personnel early - then the Russians are left with crews whose basic proficiency isnāt sufficient. You end up with less and less skilled people using the equipment. 17/25
That is how you end up with Russian air defence systems getting hit by UAVs. It isnāt that a Buk canāt see or engage it. The Ukrainians Buks which are less capable platforms are detecting and engaging UAVs just fine. 18/25
So what is going on with Long Range Precision Strike. There have been some impressive misses. What is interesting is how often the misses are in the right distribution to have struck the target but are all displaced from it. 19/25
In a lot of misses with the newer Russian systems the problem is that the Russians are either getting the wrong coordinates of the target or the launcher has the wrong coordinates for itself. This is likely a problem with EW fratricide. 20/25
In exercises the Russians had switched to digitised fire control. In Ukraine theyāve lost a lot of the operators who knew how to do that. Theyāre coordinating on voice. And jamming navigation all over the place. Sequencing strikes and deconfliction is hard. 21/25
There are lots of other issues with the Russian targeting process. Often they are 48 hours late striking a target because of how inefficient their kill chains are. In Chernobyl it was noted that their soldiers were using maps from before the disasterā¦ 22/25
Well, some of the things theyāve struck that appear completely random or blatant misses make more sense when you look at the older maps. So in some cases their kill chain is 40 years out of date. 23/25
There are also older systems that have relatively poor accuracy and some systems being used out of role (ACSMs for example) that are similarly less accurate. With the newer systems however it isnāt that the weapons donāt work or arenāt precise. 24/25
In conclusion, the problem with Russian weapons isnāt usually that they donāt work but rather that when they are linked up and operated by under trained crews they become decidely less than the sum of their parts. 25/25
This is in the believable but not confirmed bucket right now. Decent source here, but will wait to see imagery tomorrow.
Surprised more trains havenāt been targeted so far.
Edit - imagery
Ukrinform reporting a pilot boat damaged at the mouth of the Danube in the Bystre Canal, appears to have hit a mine.
Ukraine has refused to demine the grain export ports, but this might not inspire confidence in the safety of the projected shipments.
Reported that 16 vessels fully loaded with grain cargo, ready to go, will stop at Istanbul, first cargoes for Africa (WFP has chartered some) projected to take one and a half months to reach African destinations.
In addition to what Benny40 said, the balance of forces is reaching equilibrium; Russia is very close to not being able to reach the 3:1 advantage (minimum) needed to have a chance to succeed in an attack (thatās why the need to move forces back and forth to enable that ratio or more). Similarly, the UA are concentrating forces to produce that ratio in areas in Kherson and Izum; so, both are at a stage that they can only support small or localized offensive actions by moving troops from one area to another.
However, it seems like the UA forces are now able to rotate units/formations out of the front in order to rest and reconstitute; something the russians are finding harder to do - this indicates to me that the availability of troops for UA is reaching that point where they can feel confortable with committing troops for a progressively aggressive stance.
The obvious response will be for the Russians to place smaller ammo dumps very close to residential or town/village public infrastructure. That basically means more dumps and more guards deployed to protect the sites but making the sites less desirable targets.
Thereās reports of Russia storing ammo in buildings of cultural significance in Kherson, likely to dissuade Ukrainian strikes.
Update from the Ukrainian I follow:
This morning, the biggest shelling of Mykolayiv to date. The Russians used high precision missiles in conjunction with Grad shelling to hit certain civilian targets. One of them was the house of Oleksii Vadaturskyi, a giant person in Ukrainian agronomy. Almost single-handedly, he built a grain empire in the South of Ukraine, revived freight navigation on Dnipro and Pivdennyi Bug rivers, invested in road, port and rail infrastructure, had multiple pet projects in tech, such as the renaissance of passenger hydrofoil fleet on Dnipro. He stayed in Ukraine and continued managing the farming at the place. He got killed with his family this morning.
Russia is using the news outlets oriented at Taiwan and Kosovo to kill more Ukrainian civilians.
Ukrainian Armed Forces are successfully catching Russian convoys with military equipment and ammo and hit them with HIMARS missiles. This evening, a massive ammo depot got hit in Skadovsk in the south of Kherson region.
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