Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Cathar]

You know what I immediately thought was "Theyre defending a coca cola plant?" but apparently its an industrial coke plant. Must be easy to fortify?

Industrial zones have proven extremely resistant defensive structures since the siege of Mariupol afaik. Not only that, the plant is surrounded by fields in the low ground, where the defenders have unobstructed view. You try to sneak armor or prison meat toward the plant, they get spotted by drones and become mortar magnet.

If Russia does take Avdiivka, the Russian propaganda will only talk about the importance of the town and the Ukrainians will only talk about how many Russians died there.

Avdiivka has a symbolic importance, but also have an operational importance as it is a big city, and the Ukrainian foothold in Donetsk. To be fair, it's more like "how hasn't Russia captured this city in eight years of war in Donestk".

Besides, territory can be traded back and forth, but dead people don't come back to life

[King Zultan]

What is the symbolic importance of Avdiivka?

[Loud Whispers]

What is the symbolic importance of Avdiivka?

I think it's the same as Bakhmut. Self-justifying meme where it's symbolically important because Russian high command decided it was important and so now it's politically imperative to capture it otherwise they're embarassing themselves and Putin by ignoring the thing they said was important. So they spent all of these resources to take it and now they have to take it because they spent so much resources trying. It's also next to Donetsk and part of the Donbass oblast they're trying to say they own so it's pretty embarassing to say you own it but don't even control it

Industrial zones have proven extremely resistant defensive structures since the siege of Mariupol afaik. Not only that, the plant is surrounded by fields in the low ground, where the defenders have unobstructed view. You try to sneak armor or prison meat toward the plant, they get spotted by drones and become mortar magnet.

Not to mention some of the older industrial buildings were built with wartime survivability in mind. Azovstal was constructed with bunkers and tunnels by the Soviets. In China it was pretty cool seeing how a lot of offices and commercial centres were built on top of Mao-era networks of tunnels with naval style blast doors capable of resisting nuclear attack. Like you'd be walking around a modern mega mall and if you went down the stairs it was like you were walking in the 1950s. Some countries like Singapore still like making their buildings resilient to attack, but even then, any large concrete building is a useful place to place snipers/mortars/artillery and proves similarly resistant to artillery

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Pictured: Lebanese hotel which had endured rocket and artillery attacks during the Lebanese civil war

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And this is after one of the barrages on Avdiivka coke and chemical plant. Despite extensive damage to machinery, the structure itself is a tough nut to crack. Anything less than a high exposive high yield bomb or missile is going to do very little. This is also before defensive efforts are considered; factories, quarries, even rubbish dumps have been fortified in the course of this war

[Il Palazzo]

Avdiivka is right next to Donetsk. Over what is now nearly a decade of fighting it's been fortified like few other places. It pins the front line and checks the enemy logistics in the neighbouring population centre. It's an important military target whose loss will be likely permanent, and a major setback for the defenders.

We can laugh at the Russians for grinding their troops into paste, but it works. They're grinding down the defenders too, and it's the latter who have bigger manpower, equipment, ammunition, and cashflow problems.

I share Strongpoint's trepidation expressed earlier in the thread. Without a major policy shift in the West, the outlook looks grim.

[Cathar]

We can laugh at the Russians for grinding their troops into paste, but it works. They're grinding down the defenders too, and it's the latter who have bigger manpower, equipment, ammunition, and cashflow problems.

Oh, it's no laughing matter, depopulating moscow is the most serious international affair of the decade.

As for working... Working for what, that's the question. The grind takes one ukrainian per three vatniki, if the war was won or lost on attrition numbers alone (it is not), the AFU will grind down the Z "special operation", not the other way around.
Until the "elections",  while Ukraine is mobilized, Russia refuses to push the draft button.

Avdiivka is not "next to Donetsk". It is straight up in Donetsk. It is located in the territory "annexed" by Putin, which makes the annexion straight up clownesque. Nothing says "we've annexed that territory" than launching meat waves on your own coke plant.

the outlook looks grim.

the war is grim but the outcome is pretty much decided at this point. The variable is, how much moscow will depopulate before they give up that absurd chase.

Edit : As for the importance of symbols, I take the opportunity to remind people that if 3 4 digits of orcs die in free Ukraine per day, it is to prop up Putin's already decided candidacy to his own succession. This has to make into a list of "most pointless reason to die in war" in the history of mankind, I'm sure.

[Il Palazzo]

Donetsk is the city. Giving name to the oblast. Avdiivka is part of the oblast, but not of the city. It is, however, right next to it.

As for the rest, I don't share your optimism. I'd rather say its unwarranted at this point.

[Cathar]

Yes Avdiivka the city it is in Donetsk the oblast not Donetsk the city, I didn't thought it was necessary to be mentionned but sure.

Remember that the "status quo" is the child snatchers take Kiyv in three days - then the west funds a slow, grinding underground militance, until someone who can count makes a cost analysis and go back home Afghanistan style. That is the war we were expecting to weight on. Ukraine is blowing expectations out of the water.

Yeah Ukraine did not deliver the knock out punch that we were expecting. Instead it "only" forced the second army in the world to cower in fear and to install thousand of kilometers of mines to protect itself from the big bad AFU for six months, and had its control of the black sea nullify by a country without a navy.

War is grim, but doomposting when vatniki trade three hundred bodies for each couple of meters of mud - is nonsensical. But surely we should pay for the grind to go faster yes

[Il Palazzo]

Then why did you object to it being right next to Donietsk... you know, never mind.

[Cathar]

My point is, Avdiivka is located in the territory annexed by Russia in 2022 and never left the control of the AFU, please excuse my ESL phrasing

[Loud Whispers]

Avdiivka is right next to Donetsk. Over what is now nearly a decade of fighting it's been fortified like few other places. It pins the front line and checks the enemy logistics in the neighbouring population centre. It's an important military target whose loss will be likely permanent, and a major setback for the defenders.

We can laugh at the Russians for grinding their troops into paste, but it works. They're grinding down the defenders too, and it's the latter who have bigger manpower, equipment, ammunition, and cashflow problems.

I share Strongpoint's trepidation expressed earlier in the thread. Without a major policy shift in the West, the outlook looks grim.

I agree with 99% of your post, however I would just like to question one thing - "We can laugh at the Russians for grinding their troops into paste, but it works. They're grinding down the defenders too, and it's the latter who have bigger manpower, equipment, ammunition and cashflow problems." Russia may have superior manpower, but it's not willing to piss off the metropoles by mobilising it. Russia retains its superiority in artillery yet its practice of sacrificing its best trained units until they are no longer cohesive enough to be commanded or coherent as a unit makes large scale offensives impossible. This is a problem as Russia's only win state requires them to go on the offensive, for the West to suddenly cut support for Ukraine, and for Ukrainian morale to collapse. Meanwhile Ukraine just has degrade the Russian military's will or ability to wage war. Adopting a strategy which then maximises Russian casualties in exchange for territory of symbolic but not strategic value is fighting the war in a way that suits Ukrainian strategic objectives.

Politically it sucks that Ukraine has failed to take territory since our politicians are foolishly counting victory in the number of Khersons and Kharkivs liberated rather than the number of Russian counter-battery radars destroyed, so they gift Ukraine tanks and pressure them to launch NATO style armoured assaults without giving Ukraine NATO airplanes to provide NATO style air cover which normally underpins NATO doctrine... Also of note is that Russia may have superiority in quantity of artillery and ammunition, but Ukraine's shooting spree of Russian ammo dumps with American guided artillery or British cruise missiles shows again that if the ammo doesn't make it to the frontline, it may as well not exist. Hopefully Boeing can stop being a bitch about price reviews so Ukraine can start receiving air dropped bombs - which are compatible with HIMARS rockets or deployable by aircraft, and relatively cheap. There is also the substantial South Korean artillery shell stockpile, which although SK denies supplying shells to Ukraine, is suspected as being sent to Ukraine via USA by proxy.

I think this abridged, translated blog from a pro-Russian writing in 2022 is very illustrative of why it's a bad idea for Russia and a gift to Ukraine for Russia to attack where Ukraine is strong and defend where Ukraine is weak:

After leaving Kherson, the public, instead of soberly assessing the situation, began, with the active help of the media, military correspondents, and all other available means, to suck out the “positivity” from any bullshit, often demonstrating just the opposite – complete fuck ups. A typical example of this, again, was in my TG – a video with grandiose music from the 127th division, in which Ukrainian grenade launchers are allowed to approach tanks at 50 meters. At the 10th month of the war. Unteachable. Moreover, no one is embarrassed by the fact that in the frame it is clear that the tank missed with a return shot – the shell passed over the trench and exploded off-screen. Loud and prolonged applause. Pew Pew! We attack!

Separate fierce fuck-up are the constantly popping up videos from the 1st Army Corps of the DPR showing firing from tanks from closed positions, practiced on a regular basis. The horror here, of course, is not that tanks shoot from closed positions, they can do it, a good tankman should be able to do it, moreover, tankmen were trained for this in 2016-2017 and the KCPN carried manuals for this on the topic. The horror is that with the silent catastrophic lack of shells in artillery (you can’t talk about it, because then someone will have to answer for it, but no one wants to), it was decided to replace artillery with tanks on a regular basis.

In reality, such shooting is an emergency temporary measure in a situation where it is necessary to cover a large concentration of the enemy, and there is no free artillery at hand or it is impossible to use it because of the operational counter-battery fire, to which the tank, due to thick armor, is much less susceptible than self-propelled artillery guns and, especially, the towed guns in which the crew and ammunition load are not covered at all.

The task of the tank is to destroy enemy tanks with direct fire in a tank battle with such “crowbars”. If – you lose the barrel, you won’t hit anything, the enemy will destroy you first. And the survivability of the barrel of a tank gun, it is much less than that of a rifled howitzer. And the tanks that are doing all this are no longer new, the barrels have already been used, so to destroy targets from closed positions, a large consumption of shells is required, which wears out the barrels even more. In the LPR, still very much before the SMO, there was already a situation at one time when in one of the division’s tank barrels were shot to the point where further training firing at the range would deprive the tanks of combat value in the future, so the unit at the range began to shoot from 14.5 -mm inserts with cartridges from the KPVT machine gun.

But in combat, you can’t shoot like that. And the guns on the old T-64/72/80 tanks, the old models of the 2A46 gun, they can’t be changed without dismantling the turret. That is, we are now methodically putting out of action the last surviving tanks of the People’s Militia Corps, trophied tanks captured in a tolerable condition, and those removed from storage, are all urgently taken to the front.

It is understandable when the obsolete 100-mm Rapira smoothbore guns were assigned to support the infantry. They are not very relevant against modern tanks, so can be used to “finish off” the resource of barrels with high-explosive fragmentation shells before decommissioning. But to ruin our tanks … For what?

In the end, a “counter-battery fire” against such missile terror by searching for and destroying systems with our current resources will give almost nothing. And that’s exactly what the enemy is counting on. He is counting on the fact that politicians, having seen enough of burning city blocks, will put pressure on the military – “Drive the ukrops away from the city!” And the 1st Armed Corps will continue to kill the remnants of their infantry at the Ukrainian fortified areas around Donetsk.

In other sectors of the front, the Russian command does not need such a goading, as it voluntarily drives to slaughter the last remnants of the infantry, no longer very combat-ready due to previous losses. The Russian military has an incredible talent for turning any village with a couple of landings and a pig farm into Verdun, on which their own, not enemy, units are ground. Why? Yes, because “BUSV”, the Combat Charter of the Ground Forces, these people do not open and read almost ever. And more than any “Javelins” and “HIMARS”, more than any “NATO satellite groups” fighting against us is the Combat Charter of our own Ground Forces, on which our valiant command wanted to shit. And ukrops [Ukrainians] – they read it and creatively processed it, taking into account the available new technologies.

In the text about radio communications, I described the main problem of command and control in the Russian army, due to which the army cannot really advance, cannot maneuver, and cannot even fully repel enemy attacks. Nothing larger than the “remnants of a motorized rifle battalion” in the RF Armed Forces can be controlled as a single organism. And, of course, in this situation, the battalion commanders and company commanders of these “remnants” become well-deserved heroes, who, if possible, drag all the shit on their own backs. Although more often, alas, they don’t. And they are buried with their subordinates when, after half a dozen assaults, each organized worse than the previous one, we still capture another piece of land and collect their rotten remains.

From the fact that the Russian army can do nothing except for, bleeding, capture another village while surrendering a district center or an entire region on the other flank, the Russian army made an amazing conclusion – let’s take more villages! And arranged the maximum possible Verduns along the entire front line, including the very infamous Pavlovka in the DPR. And, of course, Bakhmut. How could it be without it? Why not kill the last remnants of combat-ready infantry at it? It’s not possible at all. These fucking bastards need to get positive motives for the news somewhere! Here, we freed another 100 meters of such and such village. And whoever is the first to report on the complete liberation of the village gets an order.

I think that the Ukrainian command later, already in captivity, will give these people the appropriate awards. Because on the eve of the winter offensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, it is almost impossible to provide the Armed Forces of Ukraine with some more significant service than killing the remnants of our infantry and the remnants of our tanks.

Recommend giving the whole thing a read. It's a pretty good description from a Russian POV of how they utterly fucked everything up in a way that gave Ukraine the chance to seize the initiative. "Maximising their mini-Verduns by turning every village into Verdun" is hell for them

[ChairmanPoo]

I do get the feeling that this is turning out to be like the Winter War... embarrasing Russian defeats early on, but Russians eventually rallying by raw force of numbers.

I was concerned early on about it turning out like that, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one...

[Loud Whispers]

I do get the feeling that this is turning out to be like the Winter War... embarrasing Russian defeats early on, but Russians eventually rallying by raw force of numbers.

I was concerned early on about it turning out like that, and I'm guessing I'm not the only one...

If the Iran-Iraq War or WWI is anything to go by, defence in depth and artillery has rendered human wave assaults a futile waste of life

[Il Palazzo]

LW, I remember those posts of Murz's, from back when he was blogging them - which was a year ago. The point here is that the russians of today are not the russians from back then (fuck it, I'm not capitalising that).
A year ago they were still scrambling to damage control after they found themselves fighting a different war than the one they were prepared for. Now they've settled for what looks like a sustainable routine that they can keep eroding the defenders' with for years to come.
So what if they claw their way in a dog park or a coke plant at a time - they're still advancing and they're currently at little risk of ever losing what they gain. Barring sudden implosion for reasons as of today not apparent, or the West stopping patting themselves on their backs for how much they've already done, and getting their shit together.
If by 2025 or even 2030 there's russian army at the whole length of the Dnipro line that may or may not be enough of a victory for them, but it certainly won't be much of one for the Ukrainians.

[KittyTac]

Meanwhile I just sit and hope... might as well hope... for my country to get the comeuppance it deserves. I no longer want all of it to burn down but I'm still the opposite of a patriot.

[EuchreJack]

I wish my political party (American Republican) was not so heavily infiltrated by fanatical plants of the Russians...

In reality, most Republicans still remember when Russia was "the bad guy" and the Republican party was the party of the military complex. 
It's just a radical fringe that realize they can stall foreign policy by shutting everything down.
But, there are small minor signs that we might just possibly get our shit together.