Russian invasion of Ukraine

[Hillonearth]

20 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

Since WW1 has been rubbished as an analogy, how about WW2? Russia was initially smashed by Germany, rebuilt with the help of Western supplies and threw millions of conscripts at the Germans, eventually succeeding at a huge cost. Who's going to supply the parts they need now? Putin's put all the energy and raw materials revenue into making his ex KBG pals rich beyond avarice, no micro electronics industry, none of the essentials for a modern military apart from raw steel, like back in WW2. Shopping in the West has been closed off, and for some reason China has decided not to fill the void. Apparently his guided missile manufacturers have been reduced to importing fridges and washing machines to cannibalise the circuit boards and chips.  

I suppose the two most successful wars Russia has fought that spring to mind are WW2 and against Napoleon - in both cases it was a case of absorbing incredible amounts of punishment, conceding territory .- something they're obviously not short of - while allowing the enemy to over-extend their lines of supply and eventually letting winter finish the job.

Eventually their opponents exhausted themselves much in the manner of a boxer punching himself out against an opponent who won't go down.

Purely in terms of equipment, the Russian genius in WW2 was to mass-produce low tech but incredibly reliable weapons that minimised potential points of failure...I'm thinking of things like the Sturmovik, the T-34 and the PPSh-41. The German tanks the T-34s faced were much higher tech, but at a cost of requiring much more maintenance at the end of a much longer logistic train. I'm not sure if they possess the Soviet style monolithic industries nowadays that could begin production on that scale, or even if it would be much help to them, as the modern battlefield is so different from 80 years ago.

[welshbairn]

3 minutes ago, Hillonearth said:

I suppose the two most successful wars Russia has fought that spring to mind are WW2 and against Napoleon - in both cases it was a case of absorbing incredible amounts of punishment, conceding territory .- something they're obviously not short of - while allowing the enemy to over-extend their lines of supply and eventually letting winter finish the job.

Eventually their opponents exhausted themselves much in the manner of a boxer punching himself out against an opponent who won't go down.

Purely in terms of equipment, the Russian genius in WW2 was to mass-produce low tech but incredibly reliable weapons that minimised potential points of failure...I'm thinking of things like the Sturmovik, the T-34 and the PPSh-41. The German tanks the T-34s faced were much higher tech, but at a cost of requiring much more maintenance at the end of a much longer logistic train. I'm not sure if they possess the Soviet style monolithic industries nowadays that could begin production on that scale, or even if it would be much help to them, as the modern battlefield is so different from 80 years ago.

America claims they also helped out with $180 billion worth of kit, in todays money, including:

400,000 jeeps & trucks
14,000 airplanes
8,000 tractors
13,000 tanks
1.5 million blankets
15 million pairs of army boots
107,000 tons of cotton
2.7 million tons of petrol products
4.5 million tons of food

Which isn't to diminish the incredible achievements of WW2 Soviet industry, just some doubt about their ability to resupply their armed forces today with seemingly only Iran helping out.

[Sergeant Wilson]

5 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

13,000 tanks

Are they though?

[vikingTON]

1 hour ago, welshbairn said:

Since WW1 has been rubbished as an analogy, how about WW2? Russia was initially smashed by Germany, rebuilt with the help of Western supplies 

Lol wut

It's no wonder that your analogies keep getting rubbished, when your grasp of what *actually* happened in both wars is a tepid 1950s-era Cold Warrior take.

No serious historian grades the Soviet Union as being smashed by Germany. The latter's battlefield victories were never anywhere near enough to destroy a much more resilient state-industrial-military complex than the morons in Berlin believed that they were facing. The Germans themselves knew that they had to win the war in the summer of 1941 or their campaign was toast. They didn't even come close to doing so. 

But aye you keep dreaming that the Arctic convoys and American jeeps were wot won the war, when the Soviets were busy turning out T-34s like sausages and inflicting 90% of all German casualties. 

Edited September 30, 2022 by vikingTON

[Hillonearth]

7 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

America claims they also helped out with $180 billion worth of kit, in todays money, including:

400,000 jeeps & trucks
14,000 airplanes
8,000 tractors
13,000 tanks
1.5 million blankets
15 million pairs of army boots
107,000 tons of cotton
2.7 million tons of petrol products
4.5 million tons of food

Which isn't to diminish the incredible achievements of WW2 Soviet industry, just some doubt about their ability to resupply their armed forces today with seemingly only Iran helping out.

Britain too - a lot of the aircraft the RAF found to be obsolete in the more high-tech Western European theatre ended up in Russia...early marks of the Hurricane, Hampden bombers and so on. As far as the Americans went, if they decided they didn't fancy an aircraft themselves, chances are it would get papped off to the Russians...they produced 8000-odd units of the Bell Airacobra, 5000ish of which ended up in Russian hands, and the majority of the rest given to various co-belligerents like the Free French.

[welshbairn]

4 minutes ago, virginton said:

Lol wut

Ivan and Randy, buddies in arms..

 

[Benjamin_Nevis]

Tbf, Germany didn't exactly smash the Russians in the early part of Barbarossa, they simply conceded a lot of lightly defended territory which the Wehrmacht blitzkrieged their way across to within shelling distance of Moscow. The might of Russia's manpower and manufacturing ability, allied to some fucking wild decision-making by Hitler saw the invasion falter to it's inevitable conclusion. 

[Dev]

This time round it's the Russians who are playing the role of the Nazis.

If it comes to it then removing a single head of state would be less difficult than going after multiple opponents who have sworn to back-up each other through Nato.

 

Edited September 30, 2022 by Dev
.

[Boo Khaki]

2 hours ago, Sergeant Wilson said:

Are they though?

Pretty much yes, as it happens.

Soviets vastly preferred their own indigenous SPG's to anything that could be supplied to them by the Allies, so repeatedly requested nothing but tanks in the way of armour. There wasn't anything like the multitude of different tracked vehicle types you see in modern armed forces back then anyway, so chances were if you saw something with tracks it actually was a tank. 

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about Soviet WWII armour, some of it no doubt due to Soviet propaganda, but also due to the fact that things written in books authored in the 50's and 60's, when the reality wasn't fully understood and more difficult to research due to ongoing Soviet scepticism, are still 'accepted wisdom' today. In 1941 the Soviets did have a vast numerical advantage over the Axis, and in many ways they'd grasped the technical and doctrinal demands of mechanized, combined-arms warfare way ahead of the Axis also, but the well documented early-war Soviet issues with command structure and command paralysis rendered that advantage useless, and it's also true that a huge portion of the Soviet inventory was outdated, more or less useless crap in any case. Their best armour, the KV and T-34, both had huge issues of their own. The KV was well armoured and could stand up to most German AT weapons in 1941, but it was slow, underpowered, unreliable, and couldn't be deployed in significant numbers. Early T-34's were just a terrible vehicle all around. Unreliable, terrible ergonomics, riddled with design flaws that made them as likely to kill and injure their own crews as as the enemy, and again they just weren't available in the sort of numbers that could have been a real issue for the Axis to contend with.

Lend-lease supplied US M3 Lee, various M4 Sherman, M5 Stuart, British made Valentines, Matildas, Churchills, and no doubt a few other types I've forgotten about. Just as with the LL supply of aircraft, Soviet views of Allied equipment were often in complete contrast to how their original producers viewed them. Soviet airmen were far less enthusiastic about the Spitfire than UK airmen were, largely because they were supplied initially with early model Spits that were genuinely inferior to the 109's and 190's they were encountering over the Soviet Union, but also because the air combat was of a distinctly different type to that being fought over England and France at the time and it exposed the Spits' weaknesses rather than playing to its strengths. Conversely, they appreciated the P-39 for it's rugged airframe and heavy armament, yet it was almost universally loathed by US airmen and the LL supply was pretty much an inventory dump. Soviet tankers reported a lot of the same shortcomings in Allied armour that Allied crews did, but they appreciated most of the same strengths as well. They liked the Stuart for its reliability and ease of maintenance, and despite being ridiculously slow by comparison to their peers, they also appreciated the Matilda II's ability to shrug off hits from the lower calibre German AT guns, and the superior protection the Churchill offered crews compared to most Soviet tanks. On the whole though they preferred their own indigenous tanks, but it's difficult to know how much of that is down to how the various vehicles compared to each other in a fight, and how much is down to propaganda 'buy in', patriotism, ergonomics, familiarity, logistics, and ease of maintenance and resupply.

Edited October 1, 2022 by Boo Khaki

[pawpar]

[Newbornbairn]

For most of WWII, the Soviets had little or no aluminium production. Between 1941-43 they had absolutely none until they managed to get one plant running (their 3 main sites were dismantled and moved East of the Urals to stop the Germans getting them).  Aluminium is essential for aircraft production hence the huge number of planes sent to them by the West. The US also supplied over 300,000 tons of aluminium directly. Without Western support, the Soviets would have had virtually no air force at all.

 

Western support was key to the Soviet victory. In essence, the West supplied the kit, the Soviets supplied the manpower.

 

This time around, the Ukrainians are supplying the manpower and the West are supplying the kit. 

[The DA]

6 hours ago, Boo Khaki said:

Pretty much yes, as it happens.

Soviets vastly preferred their own indigenous SPG's to anything that could be supplied to them by the Allies, so repeatedly requested nothing but tanks in the way of armour. There wasn't anything like the multitude of different tracked vehicle types you see in modern armed forces back then anyway, so chances were if you saw something with tracks it actually was a tank. 

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about Soviet WWII armour, some of it no doubt due to Soviet propaganda, but also due to the fact that things written in books authored in the 50's and 60's, when the reality wasn't fully understood and more difficult to research due to ongoing Soviet scepticism, are still 'accepted wisdom' today. In 1941 the Soviets did have a vast numerical advantage over the Axis, and in many ways they'd grasped the technical and doctrinal demands of mechanized, combined-arms warfare way ahead of the Axis also, but the well documented early-war Soviet issues with command structure and command paralysis rendered that advantage useless, and it's also true that a huge portion of the Soviet inventory was outdated, more or less useless crap in any case. Their best armour, the KV and T-34, both had huge issues of their own. The KV was well armoured and could stand up to most German AT weapons in 1941, but it was slow, underpowered, unreliable, and couldn't be deployed in significant numbers. Early T-34's were just a terrible vehicle all around. Unreliable, terrible ergonomics, riddled with design flaws that made them as likely to kill and injure their own crews as as the enemy, and again they just weren't available in the sort of numbers that could have been a real issue for the Axis to contend with.

Lend-lease supplied US M3 Lee, various M4 Sherman, M5 Stuart, British made Valentines, Matildas, Churchills, and no doubt a few other types I've forgotten about. Just as with the LL supply of aircraft, Soviet views of Allied equipment were often in complete contrast to how their original producers viewed them. Soviet airmen were far less enthusiastic about the Spitfire than UK airmen were, largely because they were supplied initially with early model Spits that were genuinely inferior to the 109's and 190's they were encountering over the Soviet Union, but also because the air combat was of a distinctly different type to that being fought over England and France at the time and it exposed the Spits' weaknesses rather than playing to its strengths. Conversely, they appreciated the P-39 for it's rugged airframe and heavy armament, yet it was almost universally loathed by US airmen and the LL supply was pretty much an inventory dump. Soviet tankers reported a lot of the same shortcomings in Allied armour that Allied crews did, but they appreciated most of the same strengths as well. They liked the Stuart for its reliability and ease of maintenance, and despite being ridiculously slow by comparison to their peers, they also appreciated the Matilda II's ability to shrug off hits from the lower calibre German AT guns, and the superior protection the Churchill offered crews compared to most Soviet tanks. On the whole though they preferred their own indigenous tanks, but it's difficult to know how much of that is down to how the various vehicles compared to each other in a fight, and how much is down to propaganda 'buy in', patriotism, ergonomics, familiarity, logistics, and ease of maintenance and resupply.

But when is a tank not a tank?

Moral: don't try to be a smartarse without reading the post!

Edited October 1, 2022 by The DA

[Sergeant Wilson]

6 hours ago, Boo Khaki said:

chances were if you saw something with tracks it actually was a tank. 

 

We all thought that until recently. Now I'm up all night pondering this dilemma.

[Detournement]

There seems to have been very little reaction to the content of Putin's speech other than libs saying it was demented rantings. As ever the opposite is true and it was a very effectively targeted piece of propaganda. The main conflict/contradiction at the moment is US Dollar hegemony and what replaces that, that will have had a big impact in the Global South.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/5/6/rich-countries-drained-152tn-from-the-global-south-since-1960

The stuff about leaders being spied on was a reference to the CIA bugging Merkel's phone and all of the EU offices. Again a comment targeted at EU citizens that aren't happy at the freeze for Ukraine line coming from the other side of the Atlantic and being enforced by domestic politicians.

 

 

[LongTimeLurker]

Not fully clear what is happening around Lyman:

 

[Jacksgranda]

10 hours ago, Sergeant Wilson said:

Are they though?

 

7 hours ago, Boo Khaki said:

Pretty much yes, as it happens.

Soviets vastly preferred their own indigenous SPG's to anything that could be supplied to them by the Allies, so repeatedly requested nothing but tanks in the way of armour. There wasn't anything like the multitude of different tracked vehicle types you see in modern armed forces back then anyway, so chances were if you saw something with tracks it actually was a tank. 

There are a lot of myths and misconceptions about Soviet WWII armour, some of it no doubt due to Soviet propaganda, but also due to the fact that things written in books authored in the 50's and 60's, when the reality wasn't fully understood and more difficult to research due to ongoing Soviet scepticism, are still 'accepted wisdom' today. In 1941 the Soviets did have a vast numerical advantage over the Axis, and in many ways they'd grasped the technical and doctrinal demands of mechanized, combined-arms warfare way ahead of the Axis also, but the well documented early-war Soviet issues with command structure and command paralysis rendered that advantage useless, and it's also true that a huge portion of the Soviet inventory was outdated, more or less useless crap in any case. Their best armour, the KV and T-34, both had huge issues of their own. The KV was well armoured and could stand up to most German AT weapons in 1941, but it was slow, underpowered, unreliable, and couldn't be deployed in significant numbers. Early T-34's were just a terrible vehicle all around. Unreliable, terrible ergonomics, riddled with design flaws that made them as likely to kill and injure their own crews as as the enemy, and again they just weren't available in the sort of numbers that could have been a real issue for the Axis to contend with.

Lend-lease supplied US M3 Lee, various M4 Sherman, M5 Stuart, British made Valentines, Matildas, Churchills, and no doubt a few other types I've forgotten about. Just as with the LL supply of aircraft, Soviet views of Allied equipment were often in complete contrast to how their original producers viewed them. Soviet airmen were far less enthusiastic about the Spitfire than UK airmen were, largely because they were supplied initially with early model Spits that were genuinely inferior to the 109's and 190's they were encountering over the Soviet Union, but also because the air combat was of a distinctly different type to that being fought over England and France at the time and it exposed the Spits' weaknesses rather than playing to its strengths. Conversely, they appreciated the P-39 for it's rugged airframe and heavy armament, yet it was almost universally loathed by US airmen and the LL supply was pretty much an inventory dump. Soviet tankers reported a lot of the same shortcomings in Allied armour that Allied crews did, but they appreciated most of the same strengths as well. They liked the Stuart for its reliability and ease of maintenance, and despite being ridiculously slow by comparison to their peers, they also appreciated the Matilda II's ability to shrug off hits from the lower calibre German AT guns, and the superior protection the Churchill offered crews compared to most Soviet tanks. On the whole though they preferred their own indigenous tanks, but it's difficult to know how much of that is down to how the various vehicles compared to each other in a fight, and how much is down to propaganda 'buy in', patriotism, ergonomics, familiarity, logistics, and ease of maintenance and resupply.

I preferred the Sarge's answer, tbh...

[welshbairn]

From Putin's speech to the crowds on Red Square.

Quote

I cannot help but go back to the time when the Soviet Union was formed, when Russia was creating modern Ukraine. It was Russia that created modern Ukraine, giving it significant swathes of land, historical lands of Russia, along with the people, who no one asked about where and how they want to live, how they see the future of their children, and in which country. The same thing happened when the Soviet Union broke apart. The elites decided everything among themselves, and no one asked millions of ordinary citizens anything.

Only now, only modern Russia has given the residents of the Lugansk People's Republic, the Donetsk People's Republic, Zaporozhye and Kherson the right to choose. People came to the referendum and made their choice to be with their historical homeland, Russia.

The referendum on Ukrainian independence in 1991:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Ukrainian_independence_referendum

Edited October 1, 2022 by welshbairn

[Jacksgranda]

One of the usual Ivans will be along shortly to explain that that's not valid.

[Salvo Montalbano]

4 minutes ago, Jacksgranda said:

One of the usual Ivans will be along shortly to explain that that's not valid.

Exactly. Apparently nobody read the text of the speech and just decided it was full of bullshit and that if we just took the time to see what he was saying, it would he proved that Russia was in the right all along. Or something. America bad, Biden has dementia, George Soros.

[welshbairn]

From Putin's speech to the Kremlin elites.

Quote

Let’s answer some very simple questions for ourselves. Now I would like to return to what I said and want to address also all citizens of the country – not just the colleagues that are in the hall – but all citizens of Russia: do we want to have here, in our country, in Russia, “parent number one, parent number two and parent number three” (they have completely lost it!) instead of mother and father? Do we want our schools to impose on our children, from their earliest days in school, perversions that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want to drum into their heads the ideas that certain other genders exist along with women and men and to offer them gender reassignment surgery? Is that what we want for our country and our children? This is all unacceptable to us. We have a different future of our own.

Let me repeat that the dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies, including the citizens of Western countries themselves. This is a challenge to all. This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a “religion in reverse” – pure Satanism. Exposing false messiahs, Jesus Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” These poisonous fruits are already obvious to people, and not only in our country but also in all countries, including many people in the West itself.

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/69465