Russia has never had actual "allies" and so it cannot understand how other nations have friends and voluntarily vow to defend each other. https://t.co/gbNDllo47E
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 30, 2022
The Warsaw Pact was an "agreement" between a master nation and subservient nations. As soon as the Soviet Union fell apart, so did the Warsaw Pact. Nobody since 1914 has voluntarily entered into a defense pact with Russia. In Russia's worldview, nations fall into two categories: Client states and potential enemies.
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StrategyPage has looked into the supply of Russian munitions and has concluded that the Russians are heading up Shit Creek without propulsive equipment:
Russia believed the Ukraine invasion would succeed quickly and be over within weeks. That was a major miscalculation because months of sustained combat have depleted Russian stockpiles of guided missiles and rockets as well as unguided artillery shells. That may seem odd but post-Soviet Russia could not afford to maintain manufacturing facilities capable of producing large quantities of ordinary artillery shells and unguided rockets. That was not going to be a problem if the Ukraine invasion was over quickly. It wasn’t and now the Russians have less artillery ammo to fire at the Ukrainians. This got worse when Ukraine finally began receiving American GMLRS (guided rockets) in late June. The Russians lost lots of shells when these GMLRS rockets hit Russian ammo storage sites within range. Forced to establish new ammo storage sites farther away from the front line, the Russian also discovered that they did not have enough additional trucks to transport the shells to artillery units near the fighting.
I am, by far, not an expert on the Russian way of war, but it does seem that, for a very long time, the Russians do best when their troops are supported by massive amounts of artillery fires. As it is now, there are reports that the Russians have been using senior commanders (colonels and up) to run company-grade actions. And it's hard to motivate soldiers to go into battle when the price of being wounded is to be killed by one's own officers.
The takeaway here is that the Ukrainians appear to have a real chance of winning this war. Which, in a way, is also terrifying, as who knows what Gospodin Putler will do in that eventuality. He knows full well that Russian history is not kind to losers.
5 comments:
You haven't talked about the gun barrel replacement problem.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/07/25/russias-artillery-is-wearing-out-and-blowing-up/?sh=1d9fecb9734c
I do not first the first link goes where you think it goes.
Sikhandtake, thank you! It should be fixed.
Thank you for referring to strategypage.com; the writers usually know what they are talking about and can write about it quite clearly and plainly (most of them are ex wargame designers).
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