Actually, according to Cooper this AM, that's exactly what they're doing, a phased withdrawal from the town, blowing the bridges over the river behind them. I didn't post it, because it's largely a diatribe against the West for providing too little, too late, and then against the ZSU generals...
I saw an interesting post on another board the other day by a Belarusian. He said that Belarusian and Ukrainian are much more similar than either is to Russian, both being descended from the old Ruthenian language. He said that Russian is much more influenced by south Slavic languages and more foreign borrowings. He estimated that Belarusian and Ukrainian were at least 80% mutually intelligible, accents and dialect aside, and that Russian was far below that...
From what I have seen, that is true. Of course, I was only trained in Russian so Ukrainian and Belarusian both look weird to me.
A pretty balanced view.
I had intended to continue my thoughts on the S-400. It takes 30 minutes to reload (open source intel). That is why the article mentioned talks about "saturation bombing." If a battalion has 18 launchers, then send 36 cruise missiles against it, and the entire system will collapse. The S-400 system may get the first 18 of your cruise missiles, but the next 18 will wipe the battalion out. Then the Russians in Kaliningrad will have no air defense (except maybe manpads), so the Air Force can bomb at will.
This is remarkable to me - I remember reading stories in the last twenty years or so, where our troops were asked their opinions of who our toughest opponent would be in a war (I assumed non-nuclear war); more than a few responded that they would least like to fight the Russian army.
I think a lot of it was Russian propaganda and the Defense Industrial Complex which needs to hype an enemy to justify spending ruinous amounts of money on defense.
True, but (as you likelyknow better than anyone else here) those wars were fought with what amounts to Civil War era technology compared to today - and that seems to be where the russkie weakness has shown up. Without the almost endless supply of dollars to be spent on military tech, it appears they lack the widespread war capability that the US has. All the willpower in the world (which the russkies also appear to lack) won't make up for an enemy that can kill you before you even know they're there.
True, but warfare is an interactive activity and the enemy gets a vote. Being at the bow-wave of development is very expensive, being at the trailing edge is much cheaper. Let me give you a mundane example from local history.
True, but that had yet to be proven in 1935. In fact, 1940 was the year it was pretty clearly demonstrated.
Fixed fortifications are not guarantors of victory, but they do help.
One of many stupid things Hitler did in Russia was to declare "Fortress Cities." Probably impressed with how the Soviets defended Stalingrad, he wanted his guys to be equally stalwart in fighting in other cities. The problem was thatStalingrad was never cut off from the outside. When Hitler declared Smolensk a fortress city, the Soviets simply surrounded it and reduced the pocket. Since the trapped Germans were cut off from resupply and reinforcement, it was merely a matter of time. Same thing with Minsk, etc.
I've become convinced that the ZSU is using Bakhmut to bleed the Russians and making a strategic phased withdrawal. They are fortifying a fallback defensive line west of Bakhmut. They're just making the Russians pay in blood for every meter. Some Russians are down to fighting with trenching tools. They realize that the Russian tactics are demographic suicide...
I think you are right. The value of the city to the Ukrainians appears to be solely that the Russians want it.
