Google Translation from Today's analysis (this sunday) Michel Goya ex-military colonel and ALSO military-historian:
The battle for the top spot
Let's start with a figure: 42. This is the number of destroyed Ukrainian combat vehicles (battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and this time also counting the Leopard 2R equipped with breaching device) counted by the Oryx site. from June 7 to 14, 2023, for 75 Russians. We know the great limits of the exercise, the forced lag of the posting in relation to events and especially the fact of not counting what has not been made visible. It should also be remembered that these figures concern the entire Ukrainian theater and not just Operation X, even if we suspect that this is where the heaviest losses are.
What can be said, however, is that this is a higher figure than the average and we have to go back to the first weeks of the war to find equivalents. At the same time, in absolute terms these are not very high figures either. We can consider that the twelve maneuver brigades engaged in the first echelon by the Ukrainians, nine already in place and three as reinforcements, have around 1,200 combat vehicles in working order (around 1,400 in theory). As such, even doubling Oryx's estimate and assuming that a brigade is neutralized when it reaches 40% of its major equipment, this gives a potential of four months of combat at this rate of losses. The men who use these materials will have cracked long before. Let us remember at this stage that despite the videos provided abundantly by the Russian camp, the overall Ukrainian material losses seem rather moderate. Showing a video of a destroyed tank a hundred times always results in a single tank actually destroyed.
These material losses are, on the other hand, fairly unevenly distributed, firstly in terms of quality, with undoubtedly a non-negligible part of the fleet of precious engineering vehicles. A modern army on the attack is delicate clockwork. He must simultaneously engage means which protect the assault troops from threats from the sky, drones, shells, attack planes and helicopters, others which neutralize the enemy strongpoints with fire and finally others which make it possible to seize these points of support or to circumvent them by crossing obstacles of all kinds. If an essential piece is missing in this set, everything breaks down. The Ukrainian force has almost everything it needs, but has a few weak points such as the fight against drones, the means of crossing or the quantity of artillery shells, which moreover reflect our own weaknesses. It remains to be determined whether the whole will still be completely coherent after the conquest of the first Russian position, the disorganization of the Ukrainian assault force was precisely the mission of this first position. It is interesting to note above all that these losses are unequal according to the units. On 42 combat vehicles seen as destroyed in one week, there are indeed 4 Leopard 2A4 and A6, 3 Leopard 2R and 16 VCI Bradley. Considering that all these western vehicles belong to the same brigade, the 47th mechanized, that suddenly makes a lot for a single unit.
For men (94% of Ukrainian civilian and military casualties are men), things are more complicated to determine. If we take again the figures of the losses of Oryx combat vehicles since the beginning of the war and if we compare them with the total estimated human losses on both sides, we obtain an average of 120 Ukrainian killed and wounded for one tank/infantry vehicle found lost and 60 on the Russian side. This is obviously not the losses in these vehicles, but just a rough estimate by applying a correlation coefficient. This would therefore give for this week an order of magnitude of nearly 5,000 Ukrainian soldiers affected, therefore 2,500 definitely out of action (killed, seriously injured, prisoners) in one week and 2,500 who can quickly return to the line. Considering that 3-4,000 of these men are in Operation X, this gives this rate a combat capability of three months for the 12 first echelon brigades before being reduced to 30% of the strength. Here again, the readings will normally be carried out beforehand.
Because behind these twelve Ukrainian maneuver brigades of the first echelon, and these six territorial or national guard brigades which hold the positions, there is to the south of the city of Zaporijia a second echelon of ten maneuver brigades ready to relieve those of the before or coming to attack the line themselves. Between Zaporijia and Dnipro, there is even a strategic reserve of five brigades likely to be engaged anywhere. In short, the Ukrainian resource is barely dented.
But it is substantially the same on the Russian side. Oryx therefore counts 75 combat vehicles destroyed throughout the theater this week. Again, it is unclear what falls under Operation X, but this undoubtedly represents the majority of losses. This is, again, a little more than the average of the previous weeks, but not as much as the 238 combat vehicles lost each week between February 24 and April 1, 2022, largely in the battle for Kiev (the famous "lure" dear to pro-Russian influencers). This would also represent approximately 4,500 men by applying the ratio of 60 to 1 vehicle, the majority of which against Operation X. In both cases, these are still largely sustainable loss rates for the 28 brigades/regiments identified in this sector. .
It should be noted in passing that the losses of the Russian defenders seem to be equivalent in manpower or superior in equipment (we also note 14 Russian artillery pieces lost against four Ukrainians since June 1) to those of the attackers. This may seem paradoxical, the attackers being supposed to discover themselves more under fire than the defenders, it is not in reality. Remember that the units engaged on either side must face two threats. They can confront each other directly in “close” combat, in fact often in a distant way where much more use is made of heavy machine guns, machine guns and tank tubes than of assault rifles. Under these conditions, the case is much more a matter of quality than of quantity.
The principle is simple in the event of a meeting between two units, the unit with the highest tactical level on a scale of 1 to 10 systematically wins and the extent of its victory will be more than proportional to the difference in level between the two enemy forces. The defensive position on an entrenched position brings a bonus of one level as well as, in attack as in defense, the support of a powerful complex of reconnaissance-strikes. In the end, at an equivalent level, the fight is undecided and subject to the vagaries of chance; with a higher level you gain in a limited way; with two levels difference, one clearly wins with much less loss than the other: with three levels, one crushes the enemy.
Let us also remember before going any further that the notion of a ratio of forces of "3 to 1" to be united in order to be able to win an attack makes sense at the strategic level (the French Army of 1990 would win probably on that of 2023 because it was three times larger) but not at the tactical level, say at the brigade level and below. In this very dangerous world, from a certain threshold, adding men is to slightly raise the M of the equation but it is above all to add losses. So it is possible if you make fun of losses, as Wagner did in Bakhmut, but it is by no means the norm. For almost a hundred years, the balance of power in land battles has rarely exceeded 2 against 1 and very often the attackers are outnumbered by the defenders. So we come back to it, at the tactical level, size does not matter much. Only the difference in tactical level counts.
All the difficulty of an army will be to reconcile mass and tactical level because these are not perfectly compatible criteria. The key point is to have and keep a large number of cadres – officers and non-commissioned officers – of good quality, despite the intensity of the fighting and the scale of the losses.
What do we see now on the ground? The Ukrainians launched almost everything from their first echelon to attack the Russian first position, each brigade acting in columns of combined arms battalions.
From West to East, near the Dnieper at Lobkove the 128th Mountain Brigade progressed and was stopped by the advanced Russian elements without suffering too many losses. The 65th mechanized brigade did the same further east in the Nesterianka area. On the other hand, the engagement of the 33rd and 47th mechanized brigades from Orikhiv in the direction of Robotyne and Verbove respectively was more intense. The 33rd Brigade made good progress before being halted. It even suffered a counter-attack from the main line of the 291st regiment of the 42nd motorized division, but this was stopped in turn. The losses were quite significant on both sides. The biggest failure came from the 47th Brigade, whose four assault columns were severely crushed in front of the Russian grouping of the 22nd Spetsnaz Brigade and the 45th Special Forces Brigade, used in infantry formation. In the central sector of Houliaipole, the 46th Ukrainian airmobile brigade (equipped in particular with French VAB vehicles) made slight progress. So we generally had in the West and in the center of the fights of balanced level which did not give much and an unbalanced fight which ended in a serious failure.Since the 47th Brigade is supposed to have been trained by Westerners, some questions may have to be asked.
If the Ukrainians were clearly contained in the western part of the front, they were much more victorious in the area of Velika Novosilka. They benefited there from the form of protruding from the front, which enabled them to coordinate the flank action of several brigades (if pockets are formed on the flanks, the Russian units at the front are threatened with encirclement and must fall back), where the brigades to the west had to attack in parallel in a straight line without having much possibility of helping each other. The Ukrainians had units that were not necessarily among the most heavily equipped but of good tactical quality, such as the 37th marine infantry brigade (with French AMX-10RCs) which came from the Vuhledar sector and which successfully attacked the eastern flank from the pocket. The 35th Marine Infantry Brigade to the north and the 68th Hunter Brigade as well as the 31st Mechanized to the East also hammered the first position until imposing the Russian withdrawal. The Ukrainians thus captured the first Russian position on both sides of the Mokri Yali River, repelled a counterattack by the 127th Motorized Division from the main line, and now continued their methodical advance south. More than 75% of the ground conquered by the Ukrainians in one week was in this area alone, and it is likely that the same is true for the losses inflicted on the Russians.
In summary, as one might expect, the fight is difficult and obviously much more like the long months necessary for the conquest of the Kherson bridgehead, where the Russian position was shallower and three times weaker than in the Zaporizhia-Donetsk area, than the Kharkiv breakthrough in September 2022, which was in fact an anomaly as the Russians were abnormally weak there. These fights are also pretty much in line with expectations. The experienced brigades are better than the young brigades, and this regardless of the equipment of the same range used and although of course it would be even better if the best had the best equipment. But even elite brigades don't succeed if they don't coordinate well with a reconnaissance-strike complex that can offer them protection from what falls from the sky and support from what comes from the ground.
This first week of combat is probably only a half success compared to what was hoped for by the Ukrainian command, but it is precisely only the first week. Many more will come and there is still at this stage no way of knowing who will prevail in this tussle.
Quote (Djunior @ 18 Jun 2023 07:48)
Hungary needs Russian energy, there are no other options.
On top of that?? Posting other random stuff (like you always do) does not counter the fact that Hungary is dependent on Russian energy.
Others countries managed to do it, Hungary is just about to become Russia's spy hub in EU if it's not already the case.
Hungary should not only being expelled from EU but also partially isolated, like Belarus. Fair.