Toxic Mental posted:

lol He's really doing the "take my ball and going home" threat? I know he looks like a baby but god drat

zone posted:

The bottleneck for this war is russian materiel rather than their numbers of soldiers under arms. They're already resorting to making strange Frankenstein's monster type technicals, such as the MT-LB with the naval gun mounted on top. The rate of losses of tanks and IFVs don't even match their rate of restoration or production per year even if you only use Oryx's list of battlefield equipment losses. Within another year, I would find myself surprised if Russia has anything approaching an actual land army left.

quote:

https://www.president.gov.ua/en/news/svit-dostatno-silnij-shob-pokarati-rosiyu-za-vijnu-i-mi-damo-81457

The world is strong enough to punish Russia for the war, and we will provide courage and tools to make it happen - address by the President of Ukraine
5 March 2023 - 20:25

...

And, of course, this week is another week when our warriors and everyone who helps defend the state made Ukraine's victory even closer. They repelled assaults, destroyed the occupier, undermined enemy positions and logistics, and protected our borders and cities. I am grateful to all those who are currently in combat! I thank everyone whose life saves the life of Ukraine!

Today I would like to pay special tribute to the bravery, strength, and invincibility of the warriors fighting in Donbas. It is one of the toughest battles. Painful and challenging. The 93rd separate mechanized brigade "Kholodnyi Yar", the 77th separate airmobile brigade, the 56th separate motorized infantry brigade, and the 5th separate assault regiment. Our National Guard and border guards are also there. The 3rd operational brigade of the National Guard. Donetsk, Luhansk, Kramatorsk border guard detachments and consolidated detachments "Dozor", "Volyn", "Chernihiv". Thank you, guys! I thank all the soldiers, guardsmen and border guards who are defending our country in the Bakhmut, Vuhledar, Avdiivka, Siversk, Svatove, Lyman and Zaporizhzhia directions.
...

quote:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/05/bakhmut-ukraine-russia-war-donetsk/

Zelensky calls fight for East ‘painful’ as options dwindle in Bakhmut
By Missy Ryan
Updated March 5, 2023 at 10:22 a.m. EST
Published March 5, 2023 at 7:44 a.m. EST

KYIV, Ukraine — Ukrainian forces clung to their positions in Bakhmut on Sunday, fiercely resisting a Russian push to encircle the city in the eastern Donetsk region and prolonging a fight that has become a symbol of Ukraine’s battlefield defiance.

Ukrainian officials have described their grip on Bakhmut, a small industrial city, as increasingly tenuous in recent days, suggesting they may need to withdraw to prevent their troops from being trapped by Russian fighters advancing on three sides.

The fate of the city, which military experts say holds little strategic value, assumes outsize importance a year into President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale war, as Ukraine prepares for what is likely to be a grueling spring offensive and Western leaders scramble to deliver arms and ammunition they hope will tip the scales in its favor.

...

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking in a nightly video address on Sunday, acknowledged the battlefield difficulties in Ukraine’s embattled east and honored troops fighting there.

“It is one of the toughest battles,” he said. “Painful and challenging.”

...

Zelensky, in turn, has elevated the importance of Bakhmut, calling it “the fortress of our morale” and celebrating the troops defending it. In December, the Ukrainian leader made a rare front-line visit to Bakhmut to meet with troops. When he visited Washington, he gave U.S. lawmakers a flag from the city. Among Ukrainians, “Bakhmut stands” has become a rallying cry.

...

quote:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/05/russia-ukraine-war-news-bakhmut/

Ukraine live briefing: Ukrainian troops hold on, with Bakhmut not quite encircled

By Annabelle Timsit, Rachel Pannett and Ben Brasch

Updated March 5, 2023 at 3:44 p.m. EST
Published March 5, 2023 at 1:03 a.m. EST

A grueling seven-month battle for the front-line city of Bakhmut is coming down to street-by-street fighting and skirmishes on its outskirts, where Ukrainian forces are digging narrow trenches into the muddy ground to fortify their positions.

Ukrainian officials say Russian forces have not seized full control of the city, whose capture would offer the Kremlin a symbolic victory after months of battleground setbacks and Ukrainian counteroffensives.
...

quote:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-wagner-troops-exhaust-ukrainian-forces-in-bakhmut-b58e726c

Russia’s Wagner Troops Exhaust Ukrainian Forces in Bakhmut
By Yaroslav Trofimov
Photographs by Manu Brabo for The Wall Street Journal
Updated March 5, 2023 2:56 pm ET

...
With their policy of executing on the spot troopers who attempt to retreat or surrender, and a disregard for losses that is shocking for modern warfare, Wagner’s disposable penal battalions have emerged as a unique threat to Ukrainian defenders, advancing at the time when the regular Russian military remains largely stalled.

No military in a democratic society can keep sending wave after wave of soldiers to near-certain death to gain another few hundred yards. Even Russia’s regular armed forces, known for their high tolerance of casualties, shy away from dispatching troops on clearly suicidal missions. Yet it is precisely such an approach that has allowed Wagner to come to the verge of capturing Bakhmut, at a cost that Ukrainian and Western officials estimate at tens of thousands of Russian casualties.

On Sunday, Wagner’s forces pushed toward central Bakhmut from the east and the north, as remaining Ukrainian defenders retreated west of the Bakhmutka river that runs through the city. Ukrainian forces battled to retain control over the two remaining supply routes into Bakhmut, with heavy artillery exchanges ringing across the frontline.

Ukraine has also suffered large casualties during the eight months of battling for Bakhmut, losing some of the troops that it needs to mount a spring offensive with new weapons supplied by the U.S. and allies. President Volodymyr Zelensky has come under growing pressure to pull back from the eastern city, home to 70,000 people before the war, in what would be Kyiv’s first such significant retreat since last summer.

...

Wagner’s goal, Mr. Prigozhin has said, wasn’t so much to take Bakhmut but to grind down Ukraine’s military. To an extent, this plan worked: As Ukraine poured some of its best brigades in to defend the city in recent months, even a lopsided casualty ratio in the Ukrainian favor ultimately worked to Moscow’s advantage given Russia’s larger population—and the fact that Russia was trading ill-trained prisoners for the lives of Ukrainian troops.

Such losses in the Bakhmut area are threatening Kyiv’s ability to mount a strategic counteroffensive once the current mud season ends in the spring and unpaved roads become passable again.

“The war is won not by the party that gains territory, but by the party that destroys the armed forces of the adversary,” said Sr. Lt. Horbatenko, the Third Storm Brigade battalion commander. “Here, we are using up too much of the offensive potential that we’ll need for a breakthrough once Ukraine’s black earth dries up.”
...

quote:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/05/ukraine-fight-for-bakhmut-continues-as-russian-forces-call-for-more-support

Russia-Ukraine war live: Kyiv vows to defend ‘fortress Bakhmut’ – as it happened
Sun 5 Mar 2023 18.17 GMT

Intense fighting has continued in and around the eastern Ukrainian city of Bakhmut as both Kyiv and Moscow seemingly struggle with ammunition shortages and mounting casualties.

Ukrainian forces still control the city despite the street fighting, the deputy mayor of Bakhmut, Oleksandr Marchenko, told BBC Radio 4. Though Russian forces are pounding the routes out of the city, they have publicly pleaded with Moscow for more supplies. Ukrainian troops said one woman was killed and two men were injured attempting to cross a makeshift bridge on Sunday.

The Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who controls the mercenary Wagner force that is leading the Russian offensive in Bakhmut, warned late on Saturday that if his men were forced to withdraw, it could lead to the collapse of the entire Russian frontline.

Prigozhin has complained that the Russian ministry of defence is not supporting Wagner’s efforts in terms of men and ammunition.

“If the private mercenary force Wagner retreats from Bakhmut, the whole front will crumble … to the Russian borders and maybe further,” said Prigozhin in a video address on Sunday. “Wagner is the cement … We are drawing the entire Ukrainian army on ourselves, breaking them and destroying them.”

Der Kyhe posted:

Well, short answer yes I agree. But the longer answer, the grind can work both ways, towards Dnieper or towards borders. Since Ukrainian armed forces realistically cannot go beyond the 1994 borders, there really is nothing stopping the Russian high command from keeping the grind up, even if the front goes to follow the actual borders. Eastern part of Ukraine is still completely devastated, and the manpower is something that the Russians simply will not run out of. Along with 50's 60's era gear that nobody bought off when the Soviet Union collapsed, let alone they find someone to supply them with gear.

It is a war of attrition and a waiting game at this point, unless the Ukrainian army can keep achieving major victories, which puts actual pressure to the Russian ruling elite.

FirstnameLastname posted:

?

Do you think the recruiters are *asking* the people they're recruiting and sending out to fight? They literally don't have a choice. If you refuse conscription you go to prison - where you also get conscripted.

fatherboxx posted:

Yes
You just ignore the mobilization draft notice and dont go

Conscripts in the regular draft are not used in combat and not sent to Ukraine but are persuaded to sign service contracts

fatherboxx posted:

Yes
You just ignore the mobilization draft notice and dont go

Conscripts in the regular draft are not used in combat and not sent to Ukraine but are persuaded to sign service contracts

FirstnameLastname posted:

?

Do you think the recruiters are *asking* the people they're recruiting and sending out to fight? They literally don't have a choice. If you refuse conscription you go to prison - where you also get conscripted.

Karma Comedian posted:

The poster you are responding to is a resident of St Petersburg.

Look at all of this aid!

https://twitter.com/TreasChest/status/1632157106408247297?t=XsdGaym1S1hlFLU4_cQq5Q&s=19

WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:

Lol. Companies have to buy their own air defense systems?

What's next will they have to buy their own conscripts to defend their stores/warehouses? This is loving insanity.


What is going to be like Russian Prada puts out an ad for air defense operators?

Blitz of 404 Error posted:

Maps?

Power Khan posted:

Places big and small look like this in the east. It will all need to be rebuilt, some places will not be rebuilt.

https://twitter.com/OstapYarysh/status/1632282407578611712

While we're at it, it will take decades to demine Ukraine.

Flavahbeast posted:

in a post from a couple hours ago Prigozhin alleges that Wagner is still being starved of ammo and recruits:

flubber nuts posted:

war

CommieGIR posted:

Scorched earth seems to be the only thing they are capable of

CommieGIR posted:

Scorched earth seems to be the only thing they are capable of

Karma Comedian posted:

The poster you are responding to is a resident of St Petersburg.

quote:

As military recruiters began knocking on doors with summons in hand and almost a dozen schools in the region’s capital have been transformed into conscription centers, activists say some men in remote areas have resorted to hiding in the forest while others flee the country, with lengthy lines reported at the country’s land borders.

“Today, Buryatia experienced one of the most terrible nights in its history,” Alexandra Garmazhapova, president of the Free Buryatia Foundation, wrote on Facebook on Thursday.

Although reports have emerged from across the country of men receiving military summons—including some of those arrested for protesting in Moscow—the intensity of the recruitment drive in Buryatia has further fueled suspicions that ethnic minorities are being sent to fight and die in Ukraine at disproportionate rates. The region is home to nearly 1 million people, some 30 percent of whom are ethnically Buryat and share close cultural and historic ties with Mongolia.

Over the past two days, reports have emerged of men being recruited from towns and villages across Yakutia, a large but sparsely populated region in northeastern Siberia that is home to a large population of ethnic Yakuts. According to local media, 4,500 men are expected to be recruited from the region. In Dagestan, a majority Muslim republic in southern Russia, local men can be seen arguing with an unidentified official encouraging them to enlist. “You are fighting for your children’s future,” said the woman.

“We don’t even have a present,” replies a man from the crowd. “What kind of future are you talking about?”

Owing to its history of empire and territorial expansion, Russia is home to more than 160 different ethnic groups, according to the country’s 2010 census. Ethnic and Indigenous groups made up 20 percent of the country’s population as of 2002.

Russian officials have been deeply secretive about their battlefield losses, which U.S. officials estimate could be as high as 20,000 deaths and which Ukrainian officials peg at more than twice that. Analysis by activist groups and the media have raised suspicions that ethnic minorities are dying at disproportionately high rates. The BBC’s Russian service examined reports of more than 6,000 confirmed battlefield losses and found that by the beginning of September, troops from Dagestan, Buryatia, and Krasnodar in southern Russia had lost the most soldiers—over 200 deaths from each region. By comparison, only 15 people from the Moscow region, which accounts for almost one-tenth of Russia’s population, had been killed in battle.


Russian regions are significantly poorer than western Russia. In Buryatia, where the average monthly salary is one-third of that in Moscow and St. Petersburg, the military offered local men the possibility of a stable salary. “The army for them before the war was a good way to earn money and take care of their mortgages,” said Natalia Arno, president of the Free Russia Foundation, who is originally from the region.

Units from Russia’s eastern military district—which encompasses Buryatia and large parts of Siberia, the most neglected of Russia’s military regions—led the assault on Kyiv in the early days of the war in some of the most intense fighting thus far. Sending troops from poorer and more remote regions also enables the Kremlin to avoid ruffling the feathers of wealthy city-dwellers.

“These people are less defended,” said Vasily Matenov, founder of Asians of Russia, which was launched on social media four years ago to gather Russians of Asian heritage. “If they were to start rounding up Muscovites, then everyone would hear about it.”

In a video address on Friday, former Mongolian President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj called on Putin to stop the war. “I know since the start of this bloody war, ethnic minorities who live in Russia suffered the most,” he said. “The Buryat Mongols, Tuva Mongols, and Kalmyk Mongols have suffered a lot. They have been used as nothing more than cannon fodder.”

HonorableTB posted:

It's unfortunate about the mobiks but ultimately there's nothing we can do about them and they are, at the end of the day, the ground forces of the aggressor state participating in an illegal invasion during a war of imperialistic expansion. You can feel bad about the mobiks who don't have a choice, nobody's stopping you from feeling that way, but at the end of the day the Russian armed forces are - indeed - The Baddies.

Deteriorata posted:

what is it good for?

Arc Hammer posted:

So when bakhmut falls, then what?

zone posted:

CommieGIR posted:

Scorched earth seems to be the only thing they are capable of

Der Kyhe posted:

The frontline moves outside Bakhmut.

Karma Comedian posted:

The poster you are responding to is a resident of St Petersburg.

HonorableTB posted:

The imperial centers of Moscow and St Petersburg absolutely receive preferential treatment when it comes to conscription. Here, check out this map of where troops have been conscripted from to get a better idea - these were mapped due to casualty counts



A resident in SPb or Moscow would have a much different experience simply refusing a conscription order than a resident of Tuva or Buryatia. When I lived in Russia I was based out of Saint Petersburg and the stark contrast between SPb and even a respectably sized city like Arkangelsk or Irkutsk in terms of sheer wealth and modernization was, at times, stunning. If you go 15 miles outside of Samara you start encountering dirt roads, for example. The cities are the only places of influence in Russia and of the cities only two actually matter and those are St Petersburg and Moscow. Everything else is distinctly on lower levels and that level drops the further east you go

Arc Hammer posted:

So it'll be a nothingburger "victory" that Russia will hail as a decisive blow against the Commie Nazi Ukrainians while the reality is they've captured seventeen square feet and Field Marshall Ivan moves advances his vodka cabinet two inches closer to Kyiv.

Herstory Begins Now posted:

you know if there's a more recent version of that chart (that one is from may 22)? I'd be really curious to see what it looks like at this point after a conscription wave and the mobilization wave

Analysis posted:

Map uses figures for identified dead Russian soldiers reported by BBC News Russia and Mediazona, based on finding their obituaries or other announcements about their deaths. There are currently about 15000 identified soldiers. Black and red means higher losses per population in a region, blue and green means lower losses. This is only a fraction of the total losses, but they should be representative because the identification is distributed randomly. I.e., it is unlikely that men from Moscow are less likely to have an obituary than men from Altai.

Here is a similar map for 9th September 2022: link
And for 10th May 2022: link

Observations
Moscow continues to be by far the lowest contributor, pushing even further ahead of other areas. It has only 98 casualties, even though proportionally it should have had about 1400. The highest casualties are for the Tuvan Republic, which also happens to have consistently the highest homicide rates in Russia. The likelihood for a Tuvan to die in the war is about 70 times higher than for a Muscovite. This is probably because proportionally, many more Tuvans serve in the army because they see it as a "social lift".

Another comparison is that if we take the top 20 regions by casualty rate, they would have 13m population and 2996 identified deaths, compared to Moscow's 12.5m and 98 deaths.

There is a correlation with income, although some poor regions like Ingushetia have a low rate. Oil-rich regions have a lower rate, but still not as low as Moscow despite being technically slightly richer (so HDI is probably the better predictor).

Largest contributors to casualties per capita:

Tuva Republic 52.91
Buryatia 46.00
Nenets Autonomous Okrug 38.17
Magadan Oblast 37.74
Zabaykalsky Krai 30.57

Lowest contributors to casualties per capita:

Moscow 0.78
Saint Petersburg 2.44
Tyumen Oblast 3.42
Moscow Oblast 3.60
Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug – Ugra 5.87

Highest overall contributors:
Krasnodar Krai 617
Sverdlovsk Oblast 568
Chelyabinsk Oblast 477
Bashkortostan 473
Buryatia 452

FirstnameLastname posted:

the russian conscripts are largely, at the individual level, victims of the russian state's aggression about as much as the ukranian conscripts and civilians ar

Herstory Begins Now posted:

you know if there's a more recent version of that chart (that one is from may 22)? I'd be really curious to see what it looks like at this point after a conscription wave and the mobilization wave

the site it is from appears to be more or less defunct

quote:

Description
Map uses figures for identified dead Russian soldiers reported by BBC News Russia and Mediazona, based on finding their obituaries or other announcements about their deaths. There are currently about 15000 identified soldiers. Black and red means higher losses per population in a region, blue and green means lower losses. This is only a fraction of the total losses, but they should be representative because the identification is distributed randomly. I.e., it is unlikely that men from Moscow are less likely to have an obituary than men from Altai.

Here is a similar map for 9th September 2022: link
And for 10th May 2022: link

Observations
Moscow continues to be by far the lowest contributor, pushing even further ahead of other areas. It has only 98 casualties, even though proportionally it should have had about 1400. The highest casualties are for the Tuvan Republic, which also happens to have consistently the highest homicide rates in Russia. The likelihood for a Tuvan to die in the war is about 70 times higher than for a Muscovite. This is probably because proportionally, many more Tuvans serve in the army because they see it as a "social lift".

Another comparison is that if we take the top 20 regions by casualty rate, they would have 13m population and 2996 identified deaths, compared to Moscow's 12.5m and 98 deaths.

There is a correlation with income, although some poor regions like Ingushetia have a low rate. Oil-rich regions have a lower rate, but still not as low as Moscow despite being technically slightly richer (so HDI is probably the better predictor).

Largest contributors to casualties per capita:

Tuva Republic 52.91
Buryatia 46.00
Nenets Autonomous Okrug 38.17
Magadan Oblast 37.74
Zabaykalsky Krai 30.57

Lowest contributors to casualties per capita:

Moscow 0.78
Saint Petersburg 2.44
Tyumen Oblast 3.42
Moscow Oblast 3.60
Khanty-Mansiysk Autonomous Okrug – Ugra 5.87

Highest overall contributors:
Krasnodar Krai 617
Sverdlovsk Oblast 568
Chelyabinsk Oblast 477
Bashkortostan 473
Buryatia 452