> Once there is a casus belli, cyberattacks will likely follow to degrade Ukraine’s military command and control systems and public communications and electrical grids. Next, kinetic operations will likely begin with air and missile strikes against Ukraine’s air force and air defense systems. Once air superiority is established, Russian ground forces would move forward, slightly preceded by special operations to degrade further command and control capabilities and delay the mobilization of reserves by conducting bombings, assassinations, and sabotage operations.
The Russian commandants were so sure about their chances that they didn't wait for air superiority.
Or, they didn't want to be seen as an invader but a liberator and as we know that failed terribly.
> I speculate that Russian airforce weaponry is not generally high-precision, and the order to avoid targeting civilians implies restraint on use of indiscriminate bombing. Again, we've seen counterexamples which could be explained by all of the above reasons, plus the possibility of friendly fire from failed Ukrainian air defences.
That doesn't explain this, though:
> Vastly outmatched by Russia's military, in terms of raw numbers and firepower, Ukraine's own air force is still flying and its air defenses are still deemed to be viable - a fact that is baffling military experts.
> After the opening salvos of the war on Feb. 24, analysts expected the Russian military to try to immediately destroy Ukraine's air force and air defenses.
> That would have been "the logical and widely anticipated next step, as seen in almost every military conflict since 1938," wrote the RUSI think-tank in London, in an article called "The Mysterious Case of the Missing Russian Air Force."
> Instead, Ukrainian air force fighter jets are still carrying out low-level, defensive counter-air and ground-attack sorties. Russia is still flying through contested airspace.
...
> Did they really launch this invasion on the assumption that the people of Ukraine would just roll over and accept foreign rule?
It seems like it. I've seen videos of captured Russians where they claimed they were lied to and told the Ukrainians would welcome them. IIRC, their invasion of Crimea wasn't met with much resistance, and maybe they assumed it would be the same this time.
Also, if they'd been faster they might have had more success. I've seen reports that the Russian military has been acting in risk-averse ways that gave the Ukrainians time to organize more effective resistance.
> The Russian air defenses seem to be not able to do much when Ukrainians use Bayraktar drones
There’s a lot we don’t know about what happened. For example, the USA could (or could not, of course) have a much bigger hand in such attacks than they let out.
I doubt the USA would actually fire weapons, but they do provide intelligence to the Ukraine, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we eventually learnt that they shared knowledge on how to get past the Russian air defense systems, or even hacked Russian air defense systems to make these ships more vulnerable to these attacks.
I guess it will be decades before we know, if that ever happens.
> If courageous Ukrainians make it there, Russian soldiers will send in drones and artillery. All the while Russia’s army—which excels at jamming and GPS spoofing—is working to take out Ukrainian drones.
actually i saw plenty of complaints from russian side that when they start jamming they can't operate their own equipment (drones, radio)
on same topic, recently one of Ukrainians blogs write that they started to make suicide drones with SDR that tries to lock on jamming source and blow it up
>The most important battle was, again, for Kyiv. Russia failed to seize an airport on its outskirts on February 24th, the first day of the war.
Spetsnaz airborne were routed day 1. Was it really just Ukrainians? Or did they have some proxy help?
>Despite its impressive resistance, the city faced the prospect of imminent encirclement.
General mobilization is a huge factor here. Russian troops are fighting against people who have nothing left to lose. encirclement doesnt matter, when they enter the city they will lead with spetsnaz because if they don't... they will take tremendous losses. Russia hasn't even started to see the real resistance yet.
> As far as demilitarization goes, it seems the Ukrainian fleet, air defenses and bases have been mostly destroyed by stand-off weapons, and an encirclement maneuver is appearing (North and South prongs).
But many former civilians were recruited and armed, some airbases are still operational, and drones are wrecking havoc on Russian logistics. The encirclement has been appearing since day one, and has only advanced from the south..
Ukraine cannot win in traditional terms ( counterattack and push back), but they can surely win by crippling enemy morale, dealing devastating and unsustainable losses, and in general making the war too expensive to continue ( let alone a possible occupation). And that's going splendidly!
> It's hard to fathom any rational justification for this.
It can only be because they think that it's essential to strike now; they think that if they leave it, terminal decline is inevitable.
This is a military operation that's been planned for years; by 'now', I mean 'this decade'. I imagine they saw the European gas crisis as an opportunity, and one that would slip away quickly if they didn't seize it. That's why it's happened this spring.
That long column: that's mostly logistics for the planned long siege of Kiev. I think those guys have barely begun.
> I'm surprised that this article doesn't even mention the ongoing, continual attacks on the civilian Ukrainian electrical grid, in a concerted effort to take it out with thousands of cruise missiles and loitering drones.
It doesn't have to, because the past 83 years has proven, over and over again that strategic bombing does not work. [1] And so far, this war is once again, proving that same point.
The purpose of those missile and drone attacks isn't to win the war by making the Ukrainian army unable to fight. The purpose is either terror, positive domestic Russian propaganda, or, most likely, it's just something keeping the Russian Aerospace Force generals busy.
[1] It doubly doesn't work when you aren't actually bombing the warmaking industrial capacity of your opponent (Which in this case is located in North America and Western Europe).
> Russia did not target (initially, now they are) major essential civilian infrastructure like power plants.
Initially, Russia was planning a decapitation strike and to take Ukraine relatively whole afterwards, either by annexation or installation of a puppet regime or a mix of the two.
They started heavily hitting civilian concentration with no military value as a terror tactic pretty quickly when the swift decapitation strike bogged down, and then started hitting civilian infrastructure where the combination of attacks on military targets and terror civilian attacks didn't produce a collapse that left them in control.
>> Russia seems to believe it can “bomb” Ukraine to the negotiating table.
> I doubt Russia wants any such thing, they just want their toy back in their pram and the good feeling that having Ukraine under their heel gave them, as well as any useful resources Ukraine might have - agricultural land, seaports, raw materials. Stuff like that.
In a technical sense, I can agree with you. The opening weeks of the war showed that Russia ideally wanted to do to Ukraine what the US did the Iraq in 1990-1991. If they had their druthers, they'd conquer the country without damaging any infrastructure. The only trouble is that Russia's military doesn't have that capability.
And Russia is perfectly willing to fall back on plan b: use artillery, drones, and missiles to level literally every building in the country as they try to conquer it 1 square meter at a time.
> So even if the ground forces continue to do poorly, what stops Russia from continuing to hit civilian targets with air strikes indefinitely until Ukraine is ready to negotiate?
Well for one Ukraine is receiving more anti air which will allow them to shoot down a lot more of the missiles. It likely won’t get all of them but if it gets most it’ll be a lot better.
> he Russian forces have enough firepower to level cities to the ground, but they have orders to minimize damage if possible
How do you square that with the mass destruction of Ukrainian cities, including by aircraft bombing? It seems to be a ridiculous assumption long debunked.
> Air supremacy is already achieved (almost all Ukrainian war planes and strike drones have been shot down), so it does not make much sense to patrol the air space too much, since operating a plane is far from being cheap
Nope, Ukrainian drones continue to inflict heavy damage - either directly or indirectly with targeting, just this past day there were direct strikes on a railway bridge, command post deep in Russian held territory, and an indirect one with artillery on Russian troops in a forest. Check out Oryx the blog or twitter account, they verify posts and retract errors if any are detected. Furthermore, Ukraine still operated fighters as of what, 2-3 says ago at the latest? Russia does not have air supremacy, only local air superiority.
> Plus now that the troops have had time to dig in and erect defensive works, it seems very unlikely Ukraine will be able to throw them back without at least a 3 to 1 advantage, or willingness to suffer massive losses.
I think the likely scenario here is that Ukraine is looking to starve Russia of ammo by destroying a lot of their ammo depots and command posts. Ukraine can use the same weapons they use to do that to also hit defensive positions, without any counter fire.
> I would take the (sadly looks more like wishful thinking) incompetence over the current destruction.
You get me wrong there. The current destruction is a result of the incompetence, not an alternative to it.
If they were a well organized well maintained troup going full Blitzkrieg they would have overwhelmed the Ukrainian forces so fast they already would have taken the capital more than a week ago. This is what they intended to do.
Now if they can't get forward because the majority of their transport can only happen on roads they are definitely in dire need of air superiority, because air superiority would keep the convoys safer. They started shelling civilian infrastructure because they want to break the unexpected fighting spirit and they have no other ways to do it. But this was definitly not what the leading heads in Russia would have preferred, they thought they would go in full Blitzkrieg and after 3 days the capital would have fallen due to overwhelming force.
> It's because Ukraine has no military infrastructure to speak of, anymore
That seems unlikely. We know that the Ukrainians are launching hundreds of HIMARS rockets, drones, M777 artillery strikes, and more. Those weapons are stored _somewhere_, and its intelligence's job to find them.
When an ammo-dump blows up, we know what it looks like. The Russians are incapable of hitting ammo dumps (or unwilling). Either way, it just means that the Ukrainian military will continue to use HIMARS / M777 artillery to push the front line further.
At a minimum, if these attacks were truly "successful", then the HIMARS / M777 attacks would stop. But... they won't. Its blatantly obvious that Ukraine wasn't hiding their HIMARS in an open playground in Kyiv.
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So while Russia continues to attack dog-parks and universities, Ukraine continues to attack training centers, command posts, ammo dumps, and supply routes.
The difference is palpable. Its clear who is winning the war.
I'm not sure if there's a real response to these Russian terror attacks unfortunately. But Ukraine seems like they'll inevitably be able to recapture the land at this rate, if the Russians really have such crappy intelligence that they wasted these missiles on such unimportant targets.
>the timing of this is more related to Putin's political situation at home.
yes, as i already wrote during the last year, Ukraine got Turkish drones and with them the window of opportunity to win the Donbass war (like Azerbaijan/Turkey did against Armenia/Russia). The fall of Donbass would have been a large failure for Putin which his regime would have hard time to survive. Without bringing aviation though Russian forces couldn't operate successfully there (especially given the tank swallowing deep Spring mud what is going to happen in few weeks), and this is what happened yesterday across Ukraine - attacks on airfields and air-defenses, command and control centers, etc.
> Ukraine does have a mechanized infantry core that's already done some pretty amazing offenses. But Ukraine obviously needs to make that core larger and stronger for the upcoming offensive.
It's also big news as an offensive in the south can cut off supply to Crimea and thus lead to a siege similar to the one of Kherson. It would already be very hard for Putin to endure more major defeats but Ukraine retaking Crimea or even Mauripol could ultimate sign Russia's defeat and Putin's demise.
> Why would Russia want to start with extremely costly urban combat when the ukrainian forces are still a coherent fighting force?
Did you not pay attention to the first weekend of fighting? Your analysis is correct but the Russians did try to take the 2 largest cities right away. There's massive wrecked convoys outside both Kyiv and Kharkiv.
And it was extremely costly. And now the Russians look extremely weak.
And now they're slowly making progress doing what you think they should to win. And they will win if the Russian oligarchs and military support them until the end. But that last point is a huge question mark.
> If they truly do a cyber attack on infrastructure like they’ve been doing to Ukraine it will end in war.
This has been the conventional wisdom, yes. Just like the conventional wisdom before February was that full scale land warfare between modern industrialized european nations was a thing of the past.
What we’ve seen over the last year invalidates all of that. If they could paralyze Ukraine with a cyberattack, they would have by now. That bodes pretty poorly for their ability to meaningfully impact the US.
The Russian commandants were so sure about their chances that they didn't wait for air superiority.
Or, they didn't want to be seen as an invader but a liberator and as we know that failed terribly.
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