yeah, it appears this advance is 1) already underway with high battle intensity since mid-jan, and 2) is coming with a lot fewer armor and rockets and more mobiks than the blitzkringe. it’s just not going to achieve any goals.
american intelligence estimates that ru forces are losing upto a thousand soldiers per day both dead and injured, with ukrainian estimates being ~25k ru dead in january alone, most of them around vuhledar, soledar, and bakhmut. mobilized bodies are better as defenders than attackers as well. i am expecting a complete bloodbath and a meat grinder which will probably never going to even be registered by the russian population. it will be just another horrific month of the war, blocked out by the collective memory.
there’s some low key buzz about a himars strike at a weapon depot near Melitopol. posted video hasn’t been fully confirmed but the explosions clearly include lots of secondary detonations. proUA accounts are mum, and the video is shared by proRU accounts who claim all missiles were taken down by anti-air measures and was targeted at the town, but the video itself contradicts that assertion.
ZSU could be conducting offensive actions or a kharkiv-like operation could be underway. basically the public found out about it a couple days later.
ATACMS has a very complicated history. there’s so few of them because of the lessons of iraq. it’s an offensive weapon that wasn’t strictly necessary then or since, specs get closer to treaty limitations, and its development did run over, so it was cut back for good reason.
although obviously it did not account for a significant fraction of total budget, and by comparison the same money could have gotten 5x number of himars and even more howitzers and excaliburs. the stock of which is also being drained by the war.
I don’t know anything about Moldova but seeing bunch stuff about alleged imminent coup plot by Russia? Was going to involve traveling soccer fans or something?
