Ukraine Blog 07 - Kremlin Revelations and Russian air force limits

 Dear friends, family and colleagues,

During the past day, it became clear that the Russian advance is really stalled now. The Ukrainians even pushed back the Russians further away from Kyiv to the north (No! I’m not gonna waste words on the “convoy”) and from Mykolayiv.

Instead I would like to focus on two out in the open revelations from the Kremlin. Revelations from the Kremlin are extremely rare and for two of them happening on the same day is extraordinary. Both are really important and have been completely missed by the Western media. Let’s break them both down (it will be very elaborate).

1.       The first revelation comes from the bravest woman in the Russian Federation, senator Lyudmila Narusova and can be seen in the following video.

 NEXTA on Twitter: "⚡️Russian Senator Lyudmila Narusova acknowledged huge losses of the #Russian army "Yesterday the conscripts, who were forced to sign a contract or signed for them, were withdrawn from the war zone in #Ukraine. But from a company of a hundred men only four were left alive." https://t.co/2TLJ1U7VRK" / Twitter

 First: to emphasize how brave this woman is: Russia took Fawlty Towers “Don’t mention the war” to an extreme literal level. Anyone who mentions Russia’s aggression in the Ukraine as a “war” can be sent to prison for a long time now. The statement that she made in the video was made right after that new law was adopted.

In short: she mentions according to hospital documents that out of a company of 100 conscripts, only four survived. This provides a rare insight in true confirmed battlefield losses from the side of Russia. In case that’s just one company, then first of all Russia’s admitted battlefield losses of 500 deaths are simply bullocks. I’m even starting to believe that Ukraine’s report of 9.000 Russian deaths is an underestimate and for the following reasons:

A.      We have seen countless Russian corpses on the battlefield. Twitter won’t show them, but I have seen them on Telegram and the footage is horrible, I won’t share it here. Those are the bodies left on the battlefield.

B.      Out from Belarus there are reports and videos that Russian trucks bring back trucks full of bodies and the morgues are so full that bodies are even stored in kitchen fridges.

C.      Some soldiers will never even be found. I have seen footage of burned out tanks where only fingers were found and the whole body was burned inside of the tank. This is very well possible when tanks get hit by armored piercing HEAT rounds.

D.      Many bodies will never be found, because they are in the woods or in the mud, currently under the snow. On the Eastern front of the Second World war, millions of bodies of German and Russian soldiers were never found. A very interesting article can be found here

Remains of 602 World War II Soviet soldiers are re-buried | Daily Mail Online

The current fighting in some places in the East of Ukraine is as intense as the fighting on the East front in the Second World War (ironically the geographical area is around the same)

But it also tells a lot about the approach of the Russian army. Sending in conscripts for offensive war is usually the last thing you should do as a military. The only ethical use of conscripts in combat should be defense of the motherland (in Putin’s crazy mind that’s probably the case). Sending in conscripts for offensive warfare is usually an indication of weakness of your military and it would explain the poor performance of Russia a lot. Second of all, this is a great gamble on the side of Putin. If Lyudmila Narusova’s will reach greater audience in Russia, the Russian public and the poor mothers of the soldiers (most of them are just kids) will be outraged.

For me it might also be an explanation why for example the Southern front performs better. It’s well possible that Russian soldiers over there consist of contract soldiers (Kontraktniki). It’s also essential to understand that the life of a conscript in the Russian military is hell. Russia takes the slogan “The army will make a man out of you” to whole new levels. Russian conscripts have to undergo brutal hazing rituals and are at the mercy of their commanders. The following video makes that chillingly clear. Dozens of conscripts die each year because of these practices. As a result their morale is low and few will be eager to fight in a war.

World's Most Amazing Videos: Russian Military Hazing Rituals - YouTube

2.       Revelation two comes from Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s boring looking press secretary. Peskov proudly proclaimed that Putin played a “direct role in command decisions on particular operations in the war.”

Julia Davis on Twitter: "Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Friday that Putin has played a direct role in command decisions on particular operations in the war. [Perhaps that is why Russia is failing so badly]. https://t.co/HiXPPlNg5j" / Twitter

If I were Peskov I wouldn’t scream that loudly from the tower. One of the main reasons Hitler and Saddam Hussain were so good in losing battles and wars, is that they did exactly that. This is not something that a president should do and for me it’s another explanation why Russia is performing so bad. This is how it should work:

1.       Military planners do the assessment and present the findings to the Joint Chiefs of Staff

2.       The Joint Chiefs of Staff will usually work out multiple options. Those are all options that are accepted as a plan that the military can actually execute

3.       The Joint Chiefs of Staff will present the president with the options and the only thing the president should do, is to choose between the options.

It all goes wrong when the president starts to make plans on his own. There’s no way he can even absorb all the intelligence, it leads to tunnel vision and generals who don’t dare to say “no.”

Then there are some interesting perspectives with regards to the Russian air force. We are more than one week into the war and Russia still doesn’t have air superiority. Yesterday two SU-25 Close air support aircraft were shot down as well as one of the helicopters that went out searching for the pilot. On Sky News there was an analyst that stated that this is for the very simple reason that Russia is simply not able to perform a long term strategic air operations. Suddenly the coin fell in my head. There are actually two aspects that make this very clear.

1.       In every war that Russia fights, including this one, they first go to try to attack enemy airbases with the aim of occupying them. This is an absolute necessity for the Russian air force. They need to be close to the front, because they don’t have the means to execute long range missions. I will elaborate more on that in the next point. The fact that until now they have captured only three residual airports (no major airbases), makes the deployment of the Russian air force very problematic. This is also makes clear that also the Russian air force still follows the Soviet doctrine. After the Cold War, when the Soviet plans became public, it was also clear that any Soviet armored punch into Germany was heavily focused on getting the air bases. It also explains why the Russians didn’t crater the Ukrainian runways (the first thing the Americans usually do). The Russians simply need those Ukrainian airfields for their own. As a result the Ukrainian air force can still take the skies.

2.       I decided to make a comparison between the special mission aircraft in the United States Air Force and the Russian air force to make the lack of Russian capabilities clear.

United States
AWACS	Role	Amount
Boeing E-4	command and control	4
Boeing E-3	AWACS	31
Global Express	command and control / BACN	5
Electronic Warfare	Role	Amount
EC-130H Compass Call	radar jamming / PSYOP	8
EC-130 Commando Solo	radar jamming / PSYOP	7
Reconnaissance	Role	Amount
Falcon 20	SIGINT / ELINT	2
Lockheed U-2	high altitude reconnaissance	26
RC-26 Metro	SIGINT / surveillance	11
E-8 Joint STARS	AGS / ISTAR	17
CASA CN-235	SIGINT / ELINT	5
Boeing RC-135	ELINT / surveillance	22
Bombardier Dash 8	SIGINT / ELINT	8
Pilatus PC-12	ISR / SIGINT	23
Beechcraft MC-12	SIGINT / surveillance	40
Tanker	Role	Amount
Boeing KC-135	aerial refueling	394
KC-10 Extender	aerial refueling	51
KC-46 Pegasus	aerial refueling	48
Lockheed Martin KC-130	aerial refueling / transport	64
Russia
AWACS	Role	Amount
Beriev A-50	Command and control	15
Reconnaissance	Role	Amount
Antonov An-30	Patrol	15
Ilyushin Il-20	Patrol	3
Ilyushin Il-22	Command and control	22
Ilyushin Il-80	Command and control	3
Tupolev Tu-214	Command and control/ Reconnaissance	6
Tanker	Role	Amount
Ilyushin Il-78	Tanker	20

 What immediately comes to light, is that Russia is lagging behind on every point when it comes to special mission aircraft. When looking at the amount of AWACS and other Reconnaissance aircraft, you can see that the Russians simply lack the “eyes in the sky.” The difference in air refueling, an asset that you absolutely need to have to perform a sustained air campaign is absolutely staggering. Russia has only 20 aerial refueling tankers, as opposed the United States air force, who has a mindboggling 557 tankers.

Last topic for today is Belarus. A couple of days ago, the cockroach president (that’s how Belarussians call him) Lukashenko announced with much fanfare that Belarus would also join the war. Only yesterday the first Belarussian soldier was captured. It was a reconnaissance soldier from the airborne forces. He indicated that the generals in the Belarussian army have no intention to fight in Ukraine. They are actively obstructing Lukashenko and Putin by reporting logistical problems and problems with equipment to delay any advance into Ukraine for as long as possible. The Belarussians, both the army and the population, absolutely have no appetite for a war.

In the long run this will have serious consequences for Luka. The army didn’t intervene during the protests in 2020 on the condition that Luka could use the riot police to crack down, but wouldn’t start massively killing protesters. In case soldiers start dying in a foreign country and Luka will find himself on the losing side, things will turn very ugly for him.

As things are happening on many fronts, the intensity of my updates will likely increase.

Best regards and "Slava Ukraini!"

Niels