The Swiss face the consequences of their neutrality regarding Russian aggression.

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Edmund Burke

COSTS

Ukraine's growing reach is forcing Russia to redeploy in the Black Sea littorals.

ATTACK

UPDATES

zelensky was just too late to retreat now he comes with excuses bcause his troops can’t retreat now that wanger has surrounded the #bahkmut. they are not even russian soldiers in bakhmut but infantry contract soldiers

— rakgomo (@rakgomom) March 8, 2023

This doesn't sound like he (or they) are taking professional military advice.

Russian forces claim progress in Bakhmut but no end in sight https://t.co/vOdxCsjX3N

— Canoe (@Canoe) March 8, 2023

Ukraine’s Bakhmut may fall in days, NATO chief warns, as Russia claims victory over eastern half of city - Fox News https://t.co/UfZlNIrHXx

— PK (@icepk) March 8, 2023

Going to be quite a few casualties to trench foot if that's representative of the state of Ukrainian trenches.

I've seen that pic for at least a week I think. It's Stoltenberg's comment that is new, imho. The Russians are supposedly leaving one road out, and monitoring it for when to shell. Again though, the question is what do you believe, because if so, then of course you'd put out, if Ukrainian, that no retreat is pending, even/especially if you were planning for that at sun down this evening/momentarily.

Think that is how they took out one convoy already, the mud in the field is so bad they just wait until a convoy tries to escape on a paved road and uses artillery to take them out. From the sounds of it Ukraine may be losing hundreds of pieces of equipment unless they can come up with something.

Russia has been making most of the big mistakes so far, looks like Ukraine has their first major blunder. Could all be propaganda so time will tell

Are the Ukrainians still able to use Starlink?

Falaise Gap redux. Very stupid move to allow encirclement to the point were artillery with spotters can cover the entire retreat path. Ukraine pretty much has to launch a spoiling attack against one of the encirclements, an extremely aggressive one, or their retreating forces will take big losses.

MouthBQ98 said:

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Falaise Gap redux. Very stupid move to allow encirclement to the point were artillery with spotters can cover the entire retreat path. Ukraine pretty much has to launch a spoiling attack against one of the encirclements, an extremely aggressive one, or their retreating forces will take big losses.

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At what point does Ukraine give up on getting them out? Bad for morale but the soldiers in the Mariupol steel works were encircled and held out for months. They kept over a dozen BTGs engaged allowing Ukraine time to regroup after the initial invasion.

lb3 said:

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MouthBQ98 said:

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Falaise Gap redux. Very stupid move to allow encirclement to the point were artillery with spotters can cover the entire retreat path. Ukraine pretty much has to launch a spoiling attack against one of the encirclements, an extremely aggressive one, or their retreating forces will take big losses.

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At what point does Ukraine give up on getting them out? Bad for morale but the soldiers in the Mariupol steel works were encircled and held out for months. They kept over a dozen BTGs engaged allowing Ukraine time to regroup after the initial invasion.

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I have been wondering the same thing. Does anyone have a map of existing salt tunnels underneath Bakhmut. I know Soledar is the center of mining, but they have been mining for 150 years. Not saying that they can remove equipment, but are there tunnels to remove personnel at the end.

marcel ledbetter said:

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Are the Ukrainians still able to use Starlink?

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Yes. It's arguably the single biggest tool they've used to stay ahead/in the fight (real time data/targeting being key).

Musk has been a bit outspoken as to his thoughts on the war/strategy of Ukraine, but has continued to support them despite cutting off some of the 'offensive uses' of the platform/datalinks.

Three are east of Bakhmut, another is in a Russian controlled area, and there is a coal mine east of town. I have no idea what kind of coal mine it is but from the looks of it all are Russian controlled or in artillery range. In other word if Ukraine has any weapons in those mines they now belong to the Russians. Remember Russia now hold the high grounds now and can hit all of the paved roads Ukraine can use to exit the city. This is Wagner's dream, they have been asking for more tanks and armoured vehicles, if Ukraine can't make it out they better start destroying their own equipment

Best bet is to do something like the Americans did in Korea at the Chosin Reservoir, have attack elements find a weak spot in the Russian encirclement. In Korea we had mountainous terrain to help while most of the area east of Bakhmut is wooded that has a limited canopy so easy for drones to spot.

I am not sure if Ukraine is ready to fight with any of the western tanks or APCs, even if they are how many are going to be lost to get the Uke soldiers and equipment out of Bakhmut? If Uke equipment is having issues with the mud getting out of town how the heck are they going to get in?

Long term is the US and the west going to have more say in battlefield decisions since Ukraine is about to receive a massive influx of western weapon systems? I know we have been providing intelligence but if politicians have any say they will want more American decisions.

Mostly infantry in the city, with wheeled vehicles I imagine, and many are probably improvised civilian types. Limited cross country mobility and almost no protection. That's why they can't drive out with muddy conditions. I imagine they could walk out and would have to abandon some mortars and heavier AT or crew served arms.

P.U.T.U. said:

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Best bet is to do something like the Americans did in Korea at the Chosin Reservoir, have attack elements find a weak spot in the Russian encirclement. In Korea we had mountainous terrain to help while most of the area east of Bakhmut is wooded that has a limited canopy so easy for drones to spot.

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I'm not sure Chosin is something the Ukes can emulate.

Even then, while X Corps made it out, the 7th Infantry Division was routed and would have been destroyed had they not been able to reach the 1st Marine Division's lines.

With all the drones watching everything on both sides, a slow moving retreat in the mud under withering artillery fire while the enemy maintains contact is going to produce worse casualty rates than Cardigan's Calvary charge in the Crimean War. Even then, 40+% casualties might be acceptable terms for the soldiers in Bakhmut.

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Blackouts in several regions in preparation to possible missile attack to avoid damage to power infrastructure

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https://liveuamap.com/en/2023/9-march-blackouts-in-several-regions-in-preparation-to-possible

Today's SITREP.

lb3 said:

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MouthBQ98 said:

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Falaise Gap redux. Very stupid move to allow encirclement to the point were artillery with spotters can cover the entire retreat path. Ukraine pretty much has to launch a spoiling attack against one of the encirclements, an extremely aggressive one, or their retreating forces will take big losses.

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At what point does Ukraine give up on getting them out? Bad for morale but the soldiers in the Mariupol steel works were encircled and held out for months. They kept over a dozen BTGs engaged allowing Ukraine time to regroup after the initial invasion.

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It seems that they have for the most part. They've probably rotated out their top line units and replaced them with territorial defense. Their only job is to hold out as long as possible.

Massive missile attack in several more largely populated areas of Ukraine in the past few hours, and ongoing. Updates have been coming in on LiveUAMap.

For a little levity. There is a whole series of these that are quite informative and entertaining.

The Russian army is going to collapse if the Ukes can manage to punch them in the face.

"Put us in jail, 5, 7, 10 years, we're ready!" "We'll leave on foot or by taxi! Fight yourself!"

Footage of a conversation between the mobilised of the 1004th regiment from Kaliningrad and their battalion commander. The mobilised talk about their conflicts with local "L/DPR"… https://t.co/xDmgUL5WQN pic.twitter.com/RVuCBpm3qZ

— Dmitri (@wartranslated) March 8, 2023

Waffledynamics said:

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Massive missile attack in several more largely populated areas of Ukraine in the past few hours, and ongoing. Updates have been coming in on LiveUAMap.

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Looks like 80+ missiles and drones. Mostly missiles. Went after the usual targets in Kharkiv and Lyiv and other major cities. Power distribution and of course, apartment complexes. Several confirmed dead. All civilians so far, of course. A lot were shot down it appears but you will never stop all of them. Or even most of them.

The power plants make sense but the very deliberate targeting of apartments spread across the entire nation? Aside from the moral implications what is the point? This isn't carpet bombing. This is throwing away millions of rubles worth of advanced weaponry to kill a dozen here and a dozen there. It should be ABUNDANTLY clear that the Ukes are not going to break from that level of harassment or even come close. Maybe to waste AA munitions? Russians can't really go 1 for 1 on that either and come out on top. My westernized mind simply can't wrap around it.

It's just so pointless to me. Even smacks of desperation. I just can't think like the Russian leadership and I just have to take solace in the fact that that is probably an endorsement of my own sanity.

I think the issue is how they look at it clearly is entirely different, but it's not a mindset/strategy that is entirely incomprehensible. The Russians are engaged in a classic 'total war' whereby the goal/tool requires a people to be completely defeated, not just on the battlefield/militarily.

Yes, it is cruel to civilians/all, and no I am not debating/supporting the concept. We last engaged in such strategies in WW2.

Zeihan analysis/transcript a couple weeks ago;

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Any conflict with the Russians was always going to be heavy on numbers and the Ukrainians simply don't have the population in order to face down the Russians man for man. So they need to inflict massively out of whack casualty ratios on the folks that are fighting. And I'm not talking 2 3 to 1 like we've seen so far. Like 8 10 to 1 is really kind of the minimum if they are going to walk away from this. The Russians see this war as a battle for their existential survival, their right. They're not going to stop. And so the only way for Ukraine to emerge victorious is to kill so many Russian soldiers so quickly that the Russian front collapses and the military system within the Russian Federation requires years to recover. We are nowhere close to that. And the only way that the Ukrainians can pull that off is if they can outmaneuver the Russians. And that requires fields that are not mud.

This has allowed the Russians to play to their strengths and just throw body after body after body into a few battles, most notably the battle of Bakhmut, which until now the main effort has been led by the Wagner Group for internal political reasons. But honestly, the internal political reasons don't matter. As long as the Ukrainians can't maneuver and as long as the Russians have superior numbers, it's just an issue of throwing wave after wave of humans at them until the weather changes to a degree where the logistics shifts to a degree that the battles can move elsewhere.

That's unlikely to happen until May. Now, Wagner has been using almost exclusively convicts in their human wave tactics. And as to the number of people that have been lost, the estimates are in the process of being revised by everyone, because everyone is, you know, always changing these sort of things during a war. They're starting to use more radio intercepts to guess how many Russians have been killed. The problem is, if you go with just visual confirmation, you're going to wildly undercount because it doesn't count people who are injured who then were taken away from the front and then die because the Russians' triage system and medical system is beyond atrocious. And so probably for every person that is visually killed, there's another half to a person that then wandered away and died. Anyway, we now know that the minimum deaths in the war so far on the Russian side is 120,000, and the estimates for Russian deaths in the battle of Bakhmut specifically are somewhere between ten and 40,000, just for one little strategically insignificant town.

Anyway, for the next couple of months, this is just where we are. It's probably too late in the season at this point to hope for a really hard freeze. So we're going to have to wait for things to dry out in May before the Ukrainians might be able to move. By the time we get to May, the Russians will really move a lot more troops into the front. They started the war with somewhere between 100 and 150,000. Today they probably have about 250,000. And with the second mobilization already deep underway, we're probably going to be around 6 to 700,000 by the time we get to May and June. Now, they will be badly led and they will be badly equipped and will be badly supplied and they will have poor morale and they'll be badly trained. And you know what you call troops like that, Russian.

There is nothing about the conflict to this point that is atypical in Russian history. They rarely win on quality. They almost always went on numbers. And we're almost to the point where we're going to see just how well these new infusions of NATO equipment help the Ukrainians on the front line and just how many massive waves and assaults the Russians can sustain at the same time. And this is going to put the battle in a bit of a pickle for the Ukrainians because they're going to be facing two or three major assaults from the Russians at different points of contact. And if they allow themselves to get bogged down, deflecting each and every one of those, they're going to lose. They need to free this up into a war of movement and allow their tanks and artillery and the rockets to do an offensive in a place where the Russians either can't resist or can't maneuver or to counter them.

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This used to be a city in Ukraine.
💔 pic.twitter.com/ZcV61bVqOb

— Xenta (@Xenta777) March 9, 2023

Large Plumes of Smoke can be seen rising from what is claimed to be the KyivEnergo #5 Thermoelectric Power Plant in the Holosiivskyi District of Kyiv City after Russian Missiles hit the Plant earlier this morning. pic.twitter.com/oBcELQDKkO

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) March 9, 2023

The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Central Ukraine is currently without Power due to the Russian Missile Strikes that have taken place across the Country this morning. pic.twitter.com/wuiPG1IeXK

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) March 9, 2023

Popko said that the city's air defense shot down the cruise missiles and drones but that a Russian nuclear-capable hypersonic aero-ballistic air-to-surface Kinzhal missile hit an infrastructure site. (2/2)

— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 9, 2023

⚡️Governor: 4 killed in Russian attack on Lviv Oblast.

Four people were killed by a Russian missile strike that hit a residential area in the Zolochiv district in Lviv Oblast on March 9, Lviv Oblast Governor Maksym Kozytsky said.

— The Kyiv Independent (@KyivIndependent) March 9, 2023

The Ukrainian Minister of Energy has announced that Russian Missile Strikes on Energy Infrastructure were reported in the Kyiv, Mykolaiv, Kharkiv, Zaporizhia, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk and Zhytomyr Regions with 3 Thermoelectrical Power Plants in the Country suffering Severe Damage.

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) March 9, 2023

In total 81 Missiles of different Variants were fired at Targets in Ukraine this morning.

— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) March 9, 2023

This is one of the few things I'd agree with you on probably. The LRASM isn't of course compatible with their current platforms, but it would seem like this is something that could be improvised/figured out, if we are going to continue supporting them with munitions. The Flanker platform is easily large enough to handle this.

They've also obviously worked on it from a ship-based/vertical launch system:

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The missile has also been test fired from a Navy ship-firing technology called Vertical Launch Systems currently on both cruisers and destroyers as a way to provide long range surface-to-surface and surface-to-air offensive firepower.

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We've toyed with the idea ourselves, in the past (note: the B-1B's are being retired and are just worn out).

lb3 said:

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MouthBQ98 said:

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Falaise Gap redux. Very stupid move to allow encirclement to the point were artillery with spotters can cover the entire retreat path. Ukraine pretty much has to launch a spoiling attack against one of the encirclements, an extremely aggressive one, or their retreating forces will take big losses.

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At what point does Ukraine give up on getting them out? Bad for morale but the soldiers in the Mariupol steel works were encircled and held out for months. They kept over a dozen BTGs engaged allowing Ukraine time to regroup after the initial invasion.

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I watch a lot of uke videos which have subtitled and many of the fighters refer to exactly what you state

it may be a suicide mission for a lot of them

Eliminatus said:

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Waffledynamics said:

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Massive missile attack in several more largely populated areas of Ukraine in the past few hours, and ongoing. Updates have been coming in on LiveUAMap.

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Looks like 80+ missiles and drones. Mostly missiles. Went after the usual targets in Kharkiv and Lyiv and other major cities. Power distribution and of course, apartment complexes. Several confirmed dead. All civilians so far, of course. A lot were shot down it appears but you will never stop all of them. Or even most of them.

The power plants make sense but the very deliberate targeting of apartments spread across the entire nation? Aside from the moral implications what is the point? This isn't carpet bombing. This is throwing away millions of rubles worth of advanced weaponry to kill a dozen here and a dozen there. It should be ABUNDANTLY clear that the Ukes are not going to break from that level of harassment or even come close. Maybe to waste AA munitions? Russians can't really go 1 for 1 on that either and come out on top. My westernized mind simply can't wrap around it.

It's just so pointless to me. Even smacks of desperation. I just can't think like the Russian leadership and I just have to take solace in the fact that that is probably an endorsement of my own sanity.

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you are leaving out the possibility that the Russkies were not trying to hit random apartment blocks.

but that their weapons and command/control suck so bad they can't effectively target what they are trying to hit.

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Ukrainian missile and artillery units destroyed the Russian self-propelled howitzer "Msta-S" on the Kinburn spit - operational command "South"

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https://liveuamap.com/en/2023/9-march-ukrainian-missile-and-artillery-units-destroyed-the

As a reminder, this is a peninsula on the Black Sea near Kherson. I can't upload a map screenshot at the moment.

Attacks with missiles and drones are ongoing. Zaporizhzhia was hit by S300 missiles, and the Kherson area is being targeted by drones. This is reported in a few updates on LiveUaMap.

So ready for a few hundred smuggled in drones to attack Moscow infrastructure.

Here's a more credible assessment of the Bakhmut situation.

• Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin announced on March 8 that Russian forces captured all of eastern Bakhmut, a claim consistent with available visual evidence.
• Russian forces remain unlikely to exploit a breakthrough beyond Bakhmut if Russian forces capture the city.
• Russian forces continued offensive operations around Bakhmut on March 8 but have not succeeded in completing a turning movement around the city.

ISW

Also:

• A US official denied that US intelligence assessed that a pro-Ukrainian group sabotaged the Nord Stream pipelines in September 2022.

UPDATE

"A security source claims Russian-flagged vessels were carrying millions of bullets and hundreds of thousands of shells from Iran to Russia."

https://news.sky.com/story/irans-alleged-ammunition-for-russias-war-in-ukraine-the-secret-journey-of-the-cargo-ships-accused-of-supplying-invasion-12828039